Posts tagged Cara
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It changes though…the weight of it, I guess. At some point it becomes bearable. It turns into something you can crawl out from under. And carry around-like a brick in your pocket. And you forget it every once in a while, but then you reach in for whatever reason and there it is: “Oh right. THAT.” Which can be awful. But not all the time. Sometimes it’s kinda…Not that you LIKE it exactly, but it’s what you have instead of your son, so you don’t wanna let go of it either. So you carry it around. And it doesn’t go away, which is…
What.
Fine…actually.
From David Lindsay-Abaire’s Rabbit Hole, a play (and movie) about Becca and Howie, two parents dealing with the loss of their four year old child. The advice above is from the Becca’s mother, who lost her own son (Becca’s brother).
A friend sent us this quote a few weeks after Cara died. We watched the movie a while back (I recommend it) and I find myself thinking about this metaphor again on what would have been Cara’s second birthday.
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From a Recent Episode of ‘This American Life’
Janel and I both noted the quote below, from a recent episode of This American Life. Ira Glass is describing an observation from Ed Hickling, a psychologist:
Drivers who have done nothing wrong in an accident are actually at greater risk of developing post-traumatic stress disorder about the accident than people who were really at fault for an accident. “Someone who falls asleep at the wheel knows what they can do to prevent future accidents. Innocent drivers, Hickling says, realize they’re at the mercy of the universe.”
The quote is from an article in Washingtonian Magazine, and another Hickling quote from the article also resonated with me. Despite the fact that our experience with Cara was very different from a car accident, there seem to be some similarities. “We want to believe that if we follow the rules, nobody should get hurt,” he says. But after an accident in which you are not to blame, “your ideas of safety and control are shattered.”
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Reflections on God, Nine Months After Cara’s Birth and Death
The world in which we live
Before tragedy struck home, many of the issues I’ve been wrestling with were intellectual problems that I could consider and then set aside again without answers. They’ve become much more visceral and harder to ignore. I find myself feeling other tragedies in a deeper way, and theodicy has become very personal.
The boundaries of involvement in the cosmos for a God who values free will are hard to draw or imagine, which is part of a standard defense of God. How can we blame God when we’re the ones who commit so much violence and make such poor choices regarding those around us? There’s truth to that line of thought. But violence and pain are built into this world in such a deep way that the age-old questions rise again: exactly how is God working in the midst of all of this, and how did a world like this come to be?
Earthquakes, floods and other so-called “acts of God”. Sickness, disease, death. Survival of the fittest in the natural world. Where is God? Granted, the free-will debate leaches into even these as we, by our choices, wreak havoc on the climate, pollute air and earth and water, or perpetuate poverty and unjust social conditions which can exacerbate many of these “natural” problems.
I think many Christians would agree that the cosmos is broken, that it is not now as it is intended to be. The fact that all of creation is groaning with us for the day when all things will be renewed does not make it any easier to live surrounded by brokenness. I’m not privy to the hows and whys of the rupture in creation. And while I find theorizing about it to be an interesting side project2, I am more interested in how God is working in the midst of it.
God’s way of working in the world
As I have thought about this over the last months, I’ve had to deal with some common ideas that come up repeatedly in conversations and the media. Much of my processing has been in relation to these phrases and to the underlying assumptions behind them. I’ll jot some of them below, followed by some questions that are raised in my mind by these concepts.
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“God is all powerful” followed closely by “God is all loving”
It’s difficult to square these two affirmations, taken at face value. If you are all powerful but don’t intervene when someone you love is being abused, are you all loving? If you’re all loving and want to intervene, why don’t you? And if God does intervene, why in some cases and not others? Selective intervention seems capricious. The traditional line seems to say “God has all the power but is not responsible for how God uses it.” To say “you need to take the long view” resonates on a certain level but also smacks of “pie in the sky when you die” and a devaluing of the here-and-now, which it seems to me God cares about very much. -
“God is in control” and “God must have had a reason for doing this” and we have to trust “God’s will” and it must be part of “God’s plan for your life”
Is God really a control freak? I wrote in our reflections during the days following Cara’s death that it didn’t seem to me that God “was sacrificing pawns in a cosmic chess game that was going perfectly according to plan.” Instrumentalizing an innocent person does not fit into my (admittedly incomplete) concept of God. This raises the question of whether God always gets God’s way. It seems to me that the answer is no. -
I am even less comfortable than before with language like “God told me” or even “God has really blessed me”
Speaking with certainty about what God is doing seems naïve,3 and the language of God’s blessing can unintentionally suggest that if God didn’t do the same for you, God has instead singled you out for cursing or for the withholding of blessings, giving you stones when you asked for bread.
These types of clichés leave me with a bad taste in my mouth, but they seem to have wide circulation. Many folks hold these beliefs sincerely but sometimes it seems people haven’t really thought about what they are saying. I’ve been trying to find another way of thinking about this that makes sense to me, and have identified a few concepts that have been somewhat helpful.
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God suffers with us.
This was the strong sense we had during our experience with Cara and it still rings true. Rather than a God who is without emotion, detached from our existence, I sensed a God who is intimately involved with us and who suffers with us. -
There are various types of power and control, and God works in surprising ways.
God’s power in our world seems to be primarily through weakness — an unpredictable, slow-moving, “underneath” power that turns traditional power against itself, gently pushing tendrils of life up in the midst of death, as opposed to an external force exerting itself to bend everything to fit into an intractable plan4. God seems to be in the business of a bottom-up control which is a few steps removed from the end result. Rather than dictating specific actions or events, God’s power is nourishing and sustaining life from below; allowing, inviting, and encouraging good to result from the things that happen despite themselves (and despite the fact that they may not be a part of “God’s will”).I don’t say that it’s easy or even possible to imagine what God is up to, but these metaphors provide me with the hope that God’s work in the world continues and the act of believing in redemption despite the evidence of this moment can be a radical protest against the darkness.
I was talking to one of my brothers recently and he mentioned the concepts of “right-handed power” and “left-handed power”, which were explored in a book he is reading by Robert Farrar Capon. Capon describes right-handed power as the kind of power we expect, the kind of power we think of as the very definition of power, forcing itself in some way into a bad situation to straighten it out by might. Left-handed power, on the other hand, is “power that looks for all the world like weakness, intervention that seems indistinguishable from nonintervention.”5 Weakness and nonintervention describes quite well my experience of God in the midst of Cara’s life and death.
I am reminded that Jesus’ disciples were expecting their Messiah to swoop in, gather an army and usher in a new kingdom by the sword. But Jesus’ method of overthrowing empire involved the empire having its way with him, torturing him, killing him. I find myself frustrated that God hasn’t swooped in and set things right, or surprised that the brokenness is allowed to have its way with us, forgetting that this radical vulnerability and weakness is exactly the kind of power Jesus exhibits. Not only do we worship a God we can beat up, we worship a God we do beat up and one who allows us to get beat up, too.
Conclusion: Ubi caritas
While it makes sense in a certain way that God would use “left-handed power” in situations in which people are making decisions, it is harder to swallow in situations in which human decisions don’t seem to be at play. Why no right-handed power to protect innocent lives in the midst of earthquakes and lightning strikes? Would it be so bad to impose some force to protect children from cancer and disease and random accidents? But as near as I can tell, God’s power consistently shows up as weakness, whether humans appear to be the root cause of the problem or not. We’re planted here among the tares, the cancers, the diseases that were sown among us by an enemy, and apparently we’re too enmeshed with each other to come apart cleanly. Somehow pulling them up would uproot us as well.
I don’t claim that the “answers” I have been pondering are fully satisfying, and much remains outside of my grasp. But I do know that my experience has stripped a lot of periphery from the way I see the world, and given me a new appreciation for the mystery of God and of God’s way of working in the world. With so many unknowns and unanswerables, I can only throw myself and the world on God’s mercy and let the chips fall as they may. In the meantime, I will continue trying to live into the coming kingdom knowing I’m going to continue to fail. It isn’t easy trying to live as though God’s kingdom is here now when it is so clearly is not.
I think Janel and I each felt betrayed and abandoned by God in many ways, but we still loved Cara deeply, which was an indicator to me that God was still profoundly present. That tension between God’s presence and God’s absence continues for me, but the phrase that Cara’s name was taken from (and which I’ve since had tattooed on my arm) has become a mantra of sorts: Ubi Caritas, Deus Ibi Est.
Where love exists, God is present. It seems a strange learning to take from a tragedy and the heartbreaking loss of a daughter, but for all the questions that have been raised in me, the one thing I am more confident of than ever is that love is the core of our calling. If we want to participate in whatever the hell God is up to, love has to be our guide. Or, to put it another way, if it doesn’t involve love, religion is worthless.
References
1“The only significant difference between the aesthetic idol and the conceptual idol lies in the fact that the former reduces God to a physical object while the latter reduces God to an intellectual object.” (Peter Rollins, How (not) to speak of God, p. 12)
2Examples of theories to this effect include:
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The fall into sin caused a rupture within creation and now God is trying to restore us and all things.
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Evolution is cosmic warfare; there is a battle going on in creation itself. (Greg Boyd has explored this idea.)
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God had to “pull back” God’s self to allow room for creation, causing a rift, which God now seeks to heal.
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God’s creation was more of an organization of chaos rather than a creation ‘ex nihilo.’ (e.g. See John Caputo’s recent short piece in Tikkun: “God is not a warranty for a well-run world, but the name of a promise, an unkept promise, where every promise is also a risk, a flicker of hope on a suffering planet.”)
3Quoting Frederick Buechner, Philip Yancy writes,“Some [evangelical Christians], he told me, reminded him of American tourists in Europe who, not knowing the language of their listeners, simply raise their voices. Such Christians spoke confidently about matters Buechner thought veiled in mystery, and their certitude both fascinated and alarmed him. ‘I was astonished to hear students shift casually from small talk about the weather and movies to a discussion of what God was doing in their lives. They spoke of ‘prayer diaries’ and used phrases like ‘God told me…’ If anybody said anything like that in my part of the world, the ceiling would fall in, the house would catch fire, and people’s eyes would roll up in their heads.’” (Soul Survivor, p.251)
4Peter Rollins describes something similar when he claims that “…the message of Jesus introduces us to a different way of approaching God—not as a violent power imposed from above, but rather as a powerless presence entering our world from below. This powerless God still instigates a revolution against the powers of this world. However, this revolution is not won through brute strength, but through weakness.” (Orthodox Heretic, p. 141)
5Capon continues, “More than that, it is guaranteed to stop no determined evildoers whatsoever. It might, of course, touch and soften their hearts. But then again, it might not. It certainly didn’t for Jesus; and if you decide to use it, you should be quite clear that it probably won’t for you either.” (Kingdom, Grace, Judgment: Paradox, Outrage and Vindication in the Parables, pg. 19)
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Reflections on the life and death of Caritas Anne, our daughter
Our daughter, Caritas, was diagnosed with a brain tumor and resultant hydrocephalus at 21 weeks in utero. She was born prematurely at 29 weeks on October 16 and she died a day and a half later. We shared some of our reflections at the memorial service on Thursday, October 22. After the service, a number of people asked us to share those reflections more broadly. Although they are deeply personal, we were encouraged to share them in the hopes that others may find them helpful as they process their own unique losses. They are pasted below.
Laryn:
Thank you for being present with us today. We don’t pretend to have a lot of answers and our processing of these recent events in our lives is far from complete. We expect that we will be dealing with anger and grief for some time to come. Even so, we wanted to honor Caritas and share some of the things that we’ve been meditating on recently as well as some of the things that Caritas showed us in our brief time with her.
Our journey to this place began two long months ago on the morning of August 18th when we were told that the life of our tiny daughter was gravely threatened. Since the initial and subsequent diagnoses, we have become familiar with pain, confusion, doubt and uncertainty. Our community of family and friends and even complete strangers have risen up to care for us, hurt with us, and pray alongside us. At times, it felt as though all of our prayers were falling on deaf ears. The disconcerting fact is that those who seek God’s healing are not always physically healed. We pressed on with varying degrees of faith that God can and does work wonders in our world and in our time, well aware that it was next to impossible to distinguish between faith and the stage of grief known as denial. Our hope that God would intervene as Cara’s health and life were under attack wavered regularly and was often non-existent as we tried to keep our spirits up without clinging to a false optimism. Of the three that remain, for us only love was a constant, although it often took the form of heartbreak.
We found that everything around us was reinterpreted through a new lens. We knew that even if, by miracle of miracles, Cara was healed or blessed to live and function in our lives, we would still be profoundly changed people because of our journey into the valley of the shadow of death. Words and phrases from the Biblical narrative took on new dimensions. We trudged alongside Abraham on his long journey toward Moriah, and cried out with Hagar in the desert: “We cannot watch our child die!” We mourned with Martha, saying “Lord, if you had been here, our daughter would not have died.” As we continued on our journey, we began to detect a common observation in our meditations: when we suffer, God suffers. It was and is tempting to blame God for this situation for all the usual reasons. But these continual reminders of God’s intimate involvement in our pain seemed eventually to change the focus. A friend sent a note early on, reminding us that we “are in God’s heart, which is not always a safe place…filled with promises of shared suffering and joy.” It meant infinitely more to read through our own tears that Jesus wept, himself a man of suffering, familiar with infirmity. The night Cara died, Janel had a spell of uncontrollable shaking, cold flashes and sobbing while I sat on the hospital bed beside her with my own tears and helplessness. Afterward, she commented that a window had been opened in her image of God responding to the death of Jesus; I visualized the earth shaking and darkness descending as the veil of the temple was torn. It became clearer from this perspective that God is not “out there” choreographing disaster or sacrificing pawns in a cosmic chess game that is going perfectly according to plan. God is “in here” absorbing pain, suffering with us, embracing brokenness to heal it and disarm it, working to create that world where God’s will is done on earth as it is in heaven. Jurgen Moltmann says that “God not only participates in our suffering, but also makes our suffering into his own and takes death into his life.” I have experienced more deeply than ever before the groaning of all creation, yearning for redemption and healing and renewal, and at the same time caught a glimpse of a suffering God, groaning with us in ways that words cannot express.
Janel:
When I went to the hospital a week ago because of signs of early labor, our pastor, Del Glick, joined us for prayer and reflection during what we thought would be a brief stay at the hospital for hormone injections to strengthen Cara’s lungs and magnesium treatment to stop contractions. Del asked us, “Where is God in all of this?” I replied that besides my sense that God was present to us through the support of family and friends, I often felt that we had been abandoned by God in the wilderness. Our situation seemed to become more and more bewildering as Cara’s prognosis worsened and my pregnancy became more complicated. We didn’t know whether we should seek aggressive treatment or let nature take its course. We had no idea how to plan for the future or even envision it. Would we be spending the rest of our lives in and out of hospitals, caring for a severely disabled child? Or would we return from the hospital with empty hands and empty hearts? When the obstetrician came in to prepare us for a month of bed rest, we joked with Del that we needed a word from the Lord. Should we continue down this path of invasive medical intervention despite Cara’s extremely poor prognosis? Should we listen to the voices shouting, “Choose life, no matter what!” or the ones whispering, “sometimes love means letting go”?
After Del left that night and I went into active labor, several phrases flooded my mind in between contractions and delirium which, to my surprise, really did seem to be words from the Lord, words that colored our experience over the next few days. I found myself pondering Julian of Norwich’s phrase, “all will be well, all will be well, and all manner of things will be well,” and I knew that no matter what happened, we would all ultimately be okay because in the end God would make all things well. I also ruminated on a line from Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his.” I prayed that we would play Christ to Cara, but I also sensed that Cara would play Christ to us.
Laryn:
Throughout the weekend, we found Christ playing in places we wouldn’t have expected him. As Janel’s body was cut open to remove Cara, I saw blood and water spilling from Christ’s side as he gave himself on the cross. When Nanna and Poppa first entered the NICU with stricken faces, or gently cradled Cara in their arms as they later held her, love overflowed from them — I thought of Christ as he welcomed the little children. As Janel held Cara’s broken body in her arms, she looked at the IV marks on Cara’s hands and feet and the bruise on her side, seeing Christ’s battered body; I looked at both of them and saw the Pieta.
Janel:
We named our daughter Caritas soon after we received the diagnosis of her brain tumor because we loved her and knew that we would need to be reminded continually of the ancient Christian truth that where love exists, God is present. Ubi caritas, Deus ibi est. If our earth was moved and our mountains fell into the sea but we still loved Caritas, then we would know that God continued to be among us whether visible to us or not. During Caritas’ short life, however, her name took on new meaning to us. We chose Caritas’ name to reflect our desire to love her selflessly. But what we discovered during her birth, life, and death, was that it was God’s self-giving love to which her name paid tribute more than anything originating with us. Cara was God’s gift to us, a reflection of the unmeasurable and unending love of God. We chose her middle name, Anne, for its meaning, “grace.” Shortly before Cara’s baptism, pastor Norm Steen mentioned that Anne meant “gift.” While we hadn’t previously considered this connotation, it struck me that a gift was exactly what she was.
Laryn:
We were thankful that Cara was able to be baptized. The context caused us to see the sacrament in a deeper way, from an alternate perspective. As we celebrated the fact that God had claimed this child as God’s own, the water imagery from the liturgy blended with Cara’s story. I couldn’t help but think of the extra amniotic fluid that had swelled Janel’s belly or the extra spinal fluid that was trapped in Cara’s head, causing it to grow too large too quickly and causing damage in her brain. I imagined God’s Spirit hovering over the chaos of the waters during creation and was comforted to think that God was also hovering over the fluid in Cara’s head, preparing for a re-creation. During the liturgy, we heard of the destructive water of the flood and remembered God’s promise. In the night of trouble, God led Israel through the sea; surely God would lead us through, as well. The baptismal font was a small ceramic dove that had been a gift when Alleia was born. We had used it at Alleia’s baptism, but it had fallen and broken some time after that and sat on a shelf in two pieces. A week or two before Cara’s birth we had repaired it without much discussion or forethought — Janel happened to buy the glue we needed and I happened to see it on the counter and pick it up. The dove’s two pieces fit back together perfectly and the seam is barely visible, which seemed to us that day like a metaphor about brokenness being made whole again.
Janel:
Throughout our journey from Cara’s diagnosis to her death, wise decision-making was extremely important to me. I prayed for clarity and peace more than anything. I was afraid of prolonging her suffering and I was afraid of not doing everything I could to protect her life out of my own selfishness. As I expressed these fears to Curt Thompson, a family friend, about a week before Cara was born, he reminded me that God’s relationship with our daughter is infinitely bigger than ours is with her as her parents. God’s love is the ultimate reality in the midst of human striving to be “right.” The afternoon before Cara’s life support was removed, Curt again encouraged me to remember that God is extremely pleased with us—not because we were doing the right thing, but because we are God’s beloved children. As the decision to withdraw Cara’s life support became clear to us as that which love would do, I was grateful that God had again showed up in the midst of our pain and uncertainty. And I realized that what we did or did not do in this situation was ultimately of little consequence. Our daughter, broken and bruised, was loved by God. And so are all of us.
In his Love Poems from God, the poet Rumi writes, “If God said, ‘Rumi, pay homage to everything that has helped you enter my arms,’ there would not be one experience of my life, not one thought, not one feeling, not any act, I would not bow to.” Cara’s short life and death are still bewildering in many ways. There is no satisfactory explanation for her sickness and suffering. Her death leaves a void. Things are not the way they are supposed to be. Still, our journey with Caritas has helped both her and us to enter the arms of a God who weeps with us, who is at work redeeming the brokenness of our world.
