Posts tagged babylost

From Lament for a Son by Nicholas Wolterstorff:

“Put your hand into my wounds,” said the risen Jesus to Thomas, “and you will know who I am.” The wounds of Christ are his identity. They tell us who he is. He did not lose them. They went down into the grave with him and they came up with him — visible, tangible, palpable. Rising did not remove them. He who broke the bonds of death kept his wounds.

To believe in Christ’s rising from the grave is to accept it as a sign of our own rising from our graves…Slowly I begin to see that there is something more as well. To believe in Christ’s rising and death’s dying is also to live with the power and the challenge to rise up now from all our dark graves of suffering love. If sympathy for the world’s wounds is not enlarged by our anguish, if love for those around us is not expanded, if gratitude for what is good does not flame up, if insight is not deepened, if commitment to what is important is not strengthened, if aching for a new day is not intensified, if hope is weakened and faith diminished, if from the experience of death comes nothing good, then death has won. Then death, be proud.

So I shall struggle to live the reality of Christ’s rising and death’s dying. In my living, my son’s dying will not be the last word. But as I rise up, I bear the wounds of his death. My rising does not remove them. They mark me. If you want to know who I am, put your hands in.”

Buy it used at Abebooks or Amazon.

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.”

A copy of my recent reflections was posted on the Emergent Village website and people have posted some interesting comments. This quote was recently added (from A Scanner Darkly, based on the novel by Philip K. Dick):

“I believe God’s m.o. is to transmute evil into good and if he’s active here, he’s doing that now although our eyes can’t perceive it. The whole process is hidden beneath the surface of our reality, will only be revealed later.”

The scene that this quote comes from is embedded here (including the somewhat more depressing end of this quote; quote starts at about 1:50). Spoiler alert, however — this is the end of the movie.

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.

• “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.

• 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.

An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination (Elizabeth McCracken) and Waiting With Gabriel (Amy Kuebelbeck) were part of the reading that I did after Cara’s death and they would be useful for anyone who wanted to do some reading specifically about infant loss, keeping in mind that everyone’s story and everyone’s pain is unique.

An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination

Replica deals with two children: the first stillborn and the second born healthy. (McCracken front-loads the book this way: “A child dies in this book: a baby. A baby is stillborn. You don’t have to tell me how sad that is: it happened to me and my husband, our baby, a son…A baby is born in this book, too. That is to say, a healthy baby, our second child.”) This is the more literary of the two and is well-written, although after reading it Janel turned to me and said, “Well, that’s a good reminder not to get too self-absorbed.”

Waiting with Gabriel

Waiting with Gabriel details a journey with more immediate similarities to ours — a child is given a life-threatening diagnosis and the parents have to wait it out, welcome the child, and watch their child die. Perhaps because it dealt with a situation more closely resembling ours, we found that it hit on more of the themes that we experienced.

Kuebelbeck links a number of news items from her site, which are also helpful:

• MSNBC: When a baby is destined to die
  “…But the paradox of modern medicine is that knowing doesn’t always mean the outcome will be better. Sometimes you can just see death coming from a long way off…”
• New York Times: A Place to Turn When a Newborn Is Fated to Die
  “…Traditionally, doctors and nurses dealt with babies born with fatal anomalies by whisking them away from their mothers to die. But in the 1970s, a perinatal bereavement movement began offering parents another way to deal with the death of a child at birth, by acknowledging the grief they feel and by creating family and religious rituals around a stillbirth or early death…
  
  “I tell them this will shake up their relationships with their family and friends, it will shake what they believe about the world and their faith,” said the Rev. Peter Lund, a United Church of Christ minister and chaplain of the hospice program at Children’s Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota in Minneapolis.
  
  The questions the experience unearths are the most essential people face, he added. “How does your inner life fare, your relationship with God, as this progresses? How do you deal with everything that comes up? And how does that echo inside you?””

Find Waiting With Gabriel on Abebooks.
Find An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination on Abebooks.

Related:

• Reflections on the life and death of Caritas Anne, our daughter
• Birthing a Dying Child

by Janel Kragt Bakker
This article was originally published in Catapult Magazine
and later featured on the Glow in the Woods blog.

Immediately after a woman has birthed her baby, writes midwife Jan Verhaeghe,

Every cell in her body knows and shows her strength. At the end of hours of pain and emotions felt more intensely than at any other time in life, she is exultant. To know the exhilaration, euphoria, and power that comes with the exhaustion and pain of giving birth is truly empowering. After giving birth, a woman knows she can do anything, accomplish any goal.

Verhaughe is certainly not alone is her assessment of the birthing experience. Giving birth has long been associated with creativity and conquest. And among many contemporaries, especially proponents of “natural birth,” the experience of giving birth is perceived as the zenith of women’s empowerment. I do not share this perception. On October 16, 2009, I gave birth to a dying child. The experience was one of absolute helplessness.

Twenty-nine weeks into my pregnancy and two months after receiving the devastating news that Caritas Anne, our daughter in utero, suffered from a massive and likely fatal brain tumor, my body went into labor. Due to pregnancy complications caused by Cara’s condition, my labor could not be stopped. All night my uterus contracted and my cervix dilated. At the appropriate time, I began pushing. Cara’s head, swelled beyond the size of that of a full-term infant by spinal fluid and lesion, would not descend through the birth canal. After I was quickly wheeled into an operating room for a cesarean section, I stared at a partition while a team of health professionals wrested my ailing daughter from my body. She did not cry; she barely breathed. And there was nothing I could do to make things right. I couldn’t even touch my child. While another team of doctors worked to intubate and stabilize my daughter, I did what she could not do and the only thing I could do; I wailed.

As expectant parents dream up their their ideal “birth plans,” young mothers describe their birthing experiences around water coolers or playground equipment, and well-wishers congratulate new parents on Facebook walls, the birthing experience is often closely linked to merit. The fewer the interventions, the longer the unmedicated labor, the more (or less) dramatic the coping with labor pain, the bigger the baby, the higher the Apgar scores, and so on, the more heroic the birthing woman. Anyone who believes machismo is a strictly male phenomenon should listen to newly minted mothers swap their birthing stories. The natural birth movement in particular and the contemporary North American culture of parenthood in general deemphasize the unavoidable fact that no matter how much a woman takes care of her body, knows her body and trusts her body, the birthing experience may go horribly wrong.

As Kate Inglis, another mother of a baby who died, writes,

People anoint bodies in hospital beds with words like “fighter” and “miracle” and “goddess” because of the cultural urge to wrap up formative life events with neat little bows. But in doing so, they silently demote everyone else who dies. Or who screams for an epidural, or who falls apart at the incubator of a one-pound child.

We do not exist or fail to exist — or birth and “fail” to birth — because some are stamped with a rubber imprint of GOOD or STRONG or WORTHY and some are not.

The fact is that giving birth, like so many life experiences, is largely outside of our control. Giving birth is a powerful event, but the power is witnessed rather than manufactured by the mother, father, child or anyone else in the room. To give birth is to encounter beauty, mystery and transcendence, but to give birth is also to meet grave danger and to be laid bare before cosmic forces that we cannot control any more than we can understand.

Receptivity is a central motif in Mariology across Christian traditions. “Here I am, the servant of the Lord,” says Mary in the first chapter of the Gospel of Luke as the birth of Jesus is foretold. “Let it be with me according to your word.” Mary’s openness to the mysterious movement of God is her chief virtue and ours. But opening ourselves to that which is beyond ourselves is dangerous business. The possibility of parenthood is no exception. When a couple open themselves to reproduction, they also open themselves to the relentless pain of being unable to conceive, unable to give birth. A pregnant woman opens herself to being cruelly betrayed by her own body, to standing by helplessly while her child is betrayed by his or her own body. Opening oneself to giving birth is opening oneself to suffering and death-to managing debilitating handicaps, to burying one’s child, to being overcome with sadness at the mere sight of another parent doting on a healthy newborn. Opening oneself to giving birth is opening oneself to hell.

Of course, opening oneself to giving birth is also opening oneself to beauty and transcendence. When I gave birth to our firstborn daughter two years ago, it was indeed an experience of elation and wonder. My husband and I were brought into the presence of God in a unique and profound way as we marveled at the miracle of new life. The veil was also somehow lifted, though in a different way, as I gave birth to Cara. We encountered a God who knows what it is like to watch one’s own child die. And we strongly sensed that God suffered with us and with our daughter.

Some Old Testament scholars define “lament” as the reaction to a belief-shattering experience. Even though I knew better, before I carried and birthed my daughter Cara I believed that if I did what was right, I could expect positive outcomes. This is my lament. Metaphysically speaking, I do not know why bad things happen. I do not know whether God wills them, merely allows them, cannot stop them or something else entirely. What I do know is that I am not fully the master of my own destiny and that one day I will again witness the birth of something beautiful.

References:

• Inglis, Kate. “The Passing-through of Necessary Spaces.” Glow in the Woods (weblog).
• Verhaeghe, Jan. “The Empowerment of Birth.” New Life Journal. December 2003.

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.

(by Thomas Dorsey. Favorite hymn of Martin Luther King, Jr. “Dorsey penned Precious Lord in response to his inconsolable bereavement at the death of his wife, Nettie Harper, in childbirth, and his infant son in August 1932.” -Wikipedia) 

Precious Lord, take my hand,
Lead me on, help me stand,
I am tired, I am weak, I am worn,
Through the storm, through the night,
Lead me on to the light,
Take my hand, precious Lord,
Lead me home,

When my ways grow drear,
Precious Lord linger near,
When my life is almost gone,
Hear my cry, hear my call,
Lead me on lest I fall,
Take my hand, precious Lord,
Lead me home.

When the darkness appears and
the night draws near
And the day is past and gone
At the river I stand
Guide my feet, hold my hand
Take my hand precious Lord,
lead me home

Precious Lord, take my hand
Lead me on, let me stand
I’m tired, I’m weak, I’m lone
Through the storm, through the night
Lead me on to the light Take my hand
precious Lord,