Loss, Lessons And Life

In the aftermath of the Virginia Tech tragedy, a small congregation of mothers and fathers will have joined the select chorus and community that have buried their own children.

That club is an exclusive club. It seeks no new members. The club prays fervently that it die off, though in the heart of hearts of each member, they know better. With each new member, old wounds are reopened, and the heart ache that never really goes away, overwhelms again.

Every parent that has ever had to bury a child has looked heavenward and cried out, ‘Why has Thou abandoned me?

Beautiful words, poetic words and religious words cannot convey the very real despair the loss of a child entails. We look for and seek shelter in those beautiful words, poetic words and religious words, because we cannot bear to hear the cold, bitter and anguished voice of a childless mother. Dymphna’s words, written in the voice of a whisper, are thunderous. They thrust a dagger into the deepest recesses of our hearts.

When a husband or wife dies, we call the surviving partner the widow or widower. Why do you think it is that there is no one word to describe our condition…? Mother-of-a-dead-child is the best we can do? The lack of a name gives you some inkling how much our culture avoids the knowledge of this sorrow. If we named it we’d have some power over it. But the condition you and I share is unnamed because since time immemorial parents have dreaded this loss. It is the worst. There is nothing else that can be done to us. A motherless child is a pitiful creature and carries a life-long emptiness he or she tries to fill with other grown-ups. A childless mother is a crazy person and nothing can fill the hole, not if she had a baby a year for the rest of her life.

Do you have other children? I have three. And when people ask me, pleasantly, “how many children do you have?” I look at them blankly. It is all I can do to not to run screaming from the room.

No one can read those words and not be moved to tears or feelings of despair.

As we read about or think of parents like Dymphna and The Baron, each of us says, ‘there but for the Grace of God go I.‘ That is true of course, but that truth isn’t a cause for joy, because the loss of a child- anyones child- takes it’s toll on each of us. The difference is that who have lost a child never again experience real sunlight. Their world is dimmer place.

As time goes on, we shake our fists in anger, rage and exhaustion. We want to know ‘why’? We need to be able to make sense out of the chaos. There is that part of us that needs to look into the mind of the God that allowed this to happen. There is a part of us that does not want to forgive Him until He can justify to our satisfaction, the profound loss.

God never answers us directly.

Some of the answers we seek come in small measure. There is a message to be learned from the Holocaust survivor that held the doors the shut so that his students might escape- and live.

The professor that lived- who had every right to live- died doing what he could not do in the terrible times through which he lived. He saved the lives of children.

The last moments on this earth of the man who survived the Holocaust, and carried the burden for decades of unspoken horrors and loss, were spent saving children. That was his reflexive reaction. He would not bear witness to any more deaths. He had seen enough of that. He was to leave this world as someone who gave life.

There are many lessons to be learned here, some obvious, some more sublime. For each of us, the lessons are uniquely our own, lessons that only each of us can relate to, in our heart of hearts.

The losses and lessons do not lesson the tragedies, nor do they make us more spiritual. The struggle to find meaning in the chaos is only highlighted and made more acute. We wrote

God treasures our spiritual achievements. He treasures our failures along the way even more, because in facing and overcoming our failures, we have shown that we are indeed worthy of the humanity he has bestowed upon us. We are not meant to be perfect in our struggle and search for meaning and faith- we are meant to overcome the limitations, imperfections and obstacles along the way.

Today and for many days to come, many of us will feel lost and alone. We will be enraged and angry. ‘In the course of time and long after we are gone, others will withstand and suffer the same agonies.’ Our lives and the lives of those who have suffered the loss we cannot even imagine, will bear witness to the lessons we have learned. We can pass on what we have learned or we can retreat into ourselves.

We wrote,

There are no atheists in a foxhole, the saying goes.

Of course, there are all kinds of foxholes in life. One needn’t be a soldier to seek out a place where we can retreat into and hope (and pray!) for all the comforts and security we desperately seek when things start going awry.

It is also true that when we are most vulnerable, we are also most aware of the sufferings of others. Every singular tragedy is another link in the chain of almost unbearable pain and senseless loss from which each and every one of us will experience. There is no escape from that truth and there is no avoiding those realities.

Every single moment of every single day, somewhere in this world, many are enduring the most profound pain, sense of loss or feeling of hopelessness. How do respond to that suffering? How can we make sense of the suffering of those forgotten souls of the past?

Why do bad things happen to good people? That question is forever repeated because it is a timeless question. When faced with the tragedies we all must endure, for a few moments we share a collective memory of loss, of the pain of loss from all deaths, from the onset of time. First, we think back to grandparents, great grandparents and all the forgotten generations that preceded them. Then we realize, in our own humility, the devastations that loss and tragedy have had on all mankind.

It is usually at that point that we cry out to God. We ask that He show Himself. We ask that He comfort us and we ask that He not abandon us.

Of course, we never make those requests when things are going well. Often, we regard our most fulfilling awareness and ‘intimate’ exchanges with God as a result of seeing great beauty and natural wonder. That of course, makes ’seeing’ God a very easy proposition.

The Old Testament story of Moses and the burning bush is instructive.

Moses does not see God in natural setting of beauty or glory, but rather, in a little scrub brush- hardly inspiring. Scripture notes that Moses ‘hid his face’ from God. Moses saw God’s glory in the lowly burning bush and was aware of His Majesty. God does not hide His presence.

God says to Moses,

“I have indeed seen the suffering of My people…I have heard how they cry out”

God’s exchange with Moses takes place in a burning thorn-bush because God heard and knew the suffering of His people. God did not appear to Moses in a lush forest or other place of natural beauty, because God wanted Moses to understand that He not only knew the suffering, but heard, felt and shared that suffering as well.

It is easy to see the beauty of our spouses, children and loved ones when they are healthy, charming and well dressed. It is not always so easy to see their beauty and uniqueness when that is not the case.

It is also true that sometimes, a person’s real inner beauty and strength are revealed when they face adversity. There are mothers and fathers that marvel at a child’s strength through a debilitating illness. What parent has not secretly proposed to God that they, and not their child, be stricken or afflicted? What parent has not agonized over the trials and tribulations that each child must endure at each and every stage of their lives?

There are husbands who see their wives in a way they had not understood, as those women fight cancers that are unique to their gender and impact how they see themselves as women. Those men come to see a beauty and dignity they had never known and marvel in a stricken spouse’s concern for them and their family. There are wives who have heard grown men, weakened by pain and despair, often in inarticulate and fumbling words that are nothing less than the sweetest poetry, profess their love and appreciation for the wives and family that have nurtured them.

It is at those times we see the real beauty of those who we love and those who love us. It is at those times that we come to understand the kind of love that is real commitment and loyalty.

God no more abandons us in our pain anymore than we abandon our loved ones in their pain and suffering.

Pain, fear and suffering are all a part of what it means to be a part of God’s creation.

First, we learn the easy lessons. To find God in nature, and beauty and music requires only minimal insight. As we progress through life, we learn to see God in the challenges and heartbreak that we all experience. That requires a more sophisticated set of skills. Finally, we learn to see God through loss and pain and suffering. That requires yet another set of skills- and that also requires the kind of humility learned from lessons of life.

In our times of pain, suffering and loss, God is not abandoning us. In fact, He is closer to us than ever, because pain and loss are the other side of the Creation coin. In the same way God oversaw Creation, He oversees loss.

We cannot claim to know God until we have experienced real fear, pain, loss and suffering. We cannot claim to be secure in our faith until the strength of that faith is tested and reaffirmed. We cannot claim to know God until we are comfortable in knowing that we are not all knowing.

We do not need to cry out to God when we are in pain or when we are suffering. God is already there, wanting us to grow into our fullest potential as Creation intended. In the same way that marriage, children and family expand our definitions and understanding of love, so too does pain, suffering and loss expand our definitions and understanding of life, meaning and purpose.

It also true that expanding our definitions and understanding of life does not mean we will fully come to understand God. We are human, with limitations. We are not always meant to understand the Godly ‘why’s ‘ of all pain, suffering, tragedies and even great loss. Sometimes we are meant only to cry, to hurt and suffer despair. Sometimes, those are the lessons that we must learn- and how to make the most of life for ourselves and to be an example to others. While we were ‘Created in God’s Image,’ we were never meant to be equal to God. That is why Moses ‘hid his face’- there were other, more important lessons in his exchange with God. He had to be that Moses, the human being, that God wanted him to be. It was the humility of Moses at the burning bush that became evident later on- ‘I am the servant of God, not the equal of God.’ It never occurred to Moses to be anything but the servant.

Each of us, at one time or another, is faced with our own ‘burning bush,’ that place not of profound beauty, but rather that place and time where fear, pain, suffering and the promise of God’s enduring love and commitment to us, converge. It is also true that to cry out to God is to cry out for peace, meaning and purpose.

Lord, hear our prayer.

For more thought’s on the tragedy, see Laurie Kendrick’s excellent About Virginia Tech.

See also Why There Are Piles Of Dead Bodies At Virginia Tech.