Tag: grief

Reservoir 13

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Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor is set in an unnamed village in Derbyshire’s Peak District. On the surface this is a story about what happens to a village community when tragedy strikes. Buried deep is the question of how a community can sustain a compassionate interest in the aftermath of tragedy.

Reservoir 13 opens with a search for a missing girl, Rebecca Shaw. It happened at least thirteen years ago. It’s a common enough tragedy, as evidenced by Jon McGregor’s careful punctuation of the story with reports of similar events on the television news. There are thirteen chapters – one for each of the years since the girl’s disappearance. Each chapter begins with the same words: “At midnight when the year turned there were fireworks” (including arson) and each chapter follows the same chronological formula. There are no paragraphs, just long lists of observations of events and relationships.

Life does go on. Weather happens, birds carry on nesting, children grow, relationships change, cleaning has to be done, bridges need mending, the reservoirs need maintaining and the cricket team keeps losing. People come and go.

Life goes on. Is that cliche, or is that proverb – wisdom hard won in the teeth of bitter experience? The author is omniscient. He sees it all. There is no moral judgement – except in his poetic retelling of this village life in details which are compellingly compassionate.

This is a book which focuses on what doesn’t happen, rather than what does. A girl goes missing. What are you supposed to do after the search party? This is a story where a girl goes missing twice: when she is on holiday with her parents and when she goes missing from the story.

I remember a similar search where I was living in the Manor estate in Sheffield. A boy had gone missing. Local residents wore themselves out for weeks, joining in search parties, day and night. I can’t remember what happened. I can’t remember whether the boy was found, whether he was dead or alive. I can’t remember his name. Is that to my shame, or is that what happens? Life goes on.

A boy or girl goes missing, but it is only those closest to them who will miss them. We barely remember. That is how we re-cover.

Reservoir13 was winner of the 2017 Costa Novel Award and was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize 2017. It was published by Fourth Estate in 2018.

Breath – my chosen poem of the month

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Breath by Adrian Rice was Carol Rumen’s Poem of the Week on Saturday and was Mark Oakley’s #APoemADay on Tuesday. It is stunningly beautiful and was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. It is my poem of the month.

What is death
but a letting go
of breath?

One of the last
things he did
was to blow up

the children’s balloons
for the birthday party,
joking and mock cursing

as he struggled
to tie all
those fluttery teats.

Then he flicked them
into the air
for the children

to fight over.
Some of them
survived the party,

and were still there
after the funeral,
in every room of the house,

bobbing around
mockingly
in the last draft.

She thought about
murdering them
with her sharpest knife,

each loud pop
an angry bullet
from her heart.

Instead, in the quietness
that followed her
children’s sleep,

she patiently gathered
them all up,
slowly undoing

each raggedy nipple,
and, one by one, she took his
last breath into her mouth.

What is life
but a drawing in
of breath?

These short lines breathe love, speaking of life (teats, nipples and birthdays) and death, love and grief. I worry that the balloons took his last breath, and took a father away from his children and their mother. Did he die in that moment when there should have been celebration and fun? I’m pleased that the balloons remained for the funeral, and that they were there to be murdered with her sharpest knife (who might have been murdered otherwise?) and thankfully reprieved to become new life and consolation.

This is a drama well chosen for Easter. The rooms seem many, as in “my Father’s house” and there is a breath of Johannine Pentecost (and being born again) from the balloons’ nipples.  There is comedy in the tragedy. “One of the last things he did was to blow up.” And how simple the answers to the questions that open and close the poem. “What is life?” What is life but a letting go of breath? What is life but a drawing in of breath?

The Negative Spaces We Forget

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I didn’t know what “negative space” was until I joined an art class and discovered just how important negative space is. Negative space is the space that surrounds an object in an image. Negative space helps to define the boundaries of positive space and brings balance to a composition.

We highlight what we do. In conversations we talk about what we do, showing some things, hiding others. In our work meetings we report on what we are doing. But what is going on in the negative spaces? Do we get asked to share what we are conscious of not doing? What are the things that lie in the shadow of those things we highlight? What about those things we don’t have time for, or can’t find time for? What happens when we scrutinise the composition of our negative space?

When I think of my own negative space I am conscious of the thinking, the theology, the sharing I could be doing but can’t because of a mixture of my laziness and my preoccupation with other things. I also become conscious of the people I have forgotten and who have receded into the shadows, the neighbours I should know, the circumstances I should understand and empathise with.

It is not a pretty picture. Like many in pastoral ministry I am sure that I failed to take account of negative space. It was the people in front of me who got my attention – those who could talk, those who could demand a hearing. It was the people who were privileged enough, well enough to walk the same streets as me. The assumption was made that if you didn’t see someone they were OK. So we judged how well bereaved were coping from what we saw – the evidence before our eyes, sometimes forgetting that the very reason we don’t see some people is because they are hiding (or being hidden), because they are not well enough to be “out”, because they don’t want to be a burden or because they are shamed by a society that only seems to know positive space.

We forget that positive space is a privileged space, a space for those who are able to stand proud. Negative space, on the other hand, is a much larger space – a pit of not knowing, ignored and forgotten by those who don’t occupy such space. In the dazzle of positive space it is easy to forget God’s light shines in darkness. It is easy to forget that there is much love in that negative space.

The image of The Bomb, is by Israeli artist Noma Bar

Head, Heart – a poem when life hurts

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There’s been so much pain over the last few weeks. I’m conscious of the temptation to steal the victims’ thunder – I wouldn’t want to do that. Stealing their thunder is like making them victims all over again. But all of us are touched by what has happened in London and Manchester (and other trauma beneath the media radar).

This is a poem by American poet Lydia Davis forged by inconsolable grief. It’s a cry for help from heart to head, particularly appropriate for times like these. The amazing resilience of those who lose so much, the bravery of those first responders prepared to run into troubles and the wishes and prayers of those who want to respond show head and heart work well together, but the heart must always call out “MORE”.

The poem, written in 2007, is called Head, Heart.

Heart weeps.
Head tries to help heart.
Head tells heart how it is, again.
You will lose the ones you love. They will all go. But even the earth will go someday.
Heart feels better, then.
But the words of head do not remain long in the ears of the heart.
Heart is so new to this.
I want them back, says heart.
Head is all heart has.
Help, head. Help heart.

PS Here’s a linked post I did in the wake of the Grenfell Tower fire

A New Frame of Mind – some sermon notes for Easter 5A

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Keep calm 2

Sermon notes for Easter 5A for St Thomas’ Ellesmere Port & St Lawrence Stoak

We often hear the angels say “do not be afraid”. Jesus takes up their heavenly strain. He says “Do not let your hearts be troubled”. It’s as if the whole heavenly host are trying to strengthen us and encourage us.

“Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my father’s house are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?”

The many dwelling places are places made ready for us to live in, places for us to dwell, abiding places, where we may be where Jesus is.

It is such a well known passage that some of us might know it by heart (it’s certainly good that we should take it to heart). It’s a passage which is often used at funerals – and that has had the effect that apply the passage to our post-mortem state. But what if this isn’t about when we die but is more about where we live?

Jesus is on the way to Jerusalem, on the way to crucifixion and resurrection. That is the preparation of a place for us – and it’s a place which is opened up for us in life, not just in our death.

Suddenly we are given a choice. Jesus is saying to us “your place or mine?” – the choice is between the place in which our hearts are troubled, and the place opened up for us by Jesus where we can be where he is. There is another space, another place for us to live.

Have any of you seen the sculptures by Anthony Gormley at Crosby? It’s called Another Place. It is interesting how the mood of the sculptures changes with different circumstances. Here is the calm – a warm day, just right for a paddle. There are other days, when the tide is high, when the sea is stormy, when these sculptures look like they are drowning, clinging to life.

Put a fence in front of them and the mood becomes very sinister, particularly as the fence divides us from them. They look like prisoners. Are they enemies? Is there a reason we need to be kept safe from them?

My point here is that we have another place – a dwelling place which Jesus has prepared for us where we may be also, day to day in which our hearts would otherwise be troubled.

This has come home to me only recently. I was asked to do a funeral. The person who had died had a really difficult life in which he had suffered from severe mental illness from an early age but had hidden it from everyone except his closest family. His children had to keep the secret. Neither parent could work. They were too proud to claim their rightful benefits …. You can perhaps imagine the very mixed emotions of the family when he died.

They chose the passage we have read this morning for the funeral, presumably for the hope they had for their father. But what if Jesus hasn’t just prepared a place for those who have died, but also for those who grieve? And not just as a consolation in terms of “there is a place in heaven” but in the sense that a new space is opened for us to move into in which we find a more compassionate understanding, a kinder understanding, a gentler understanding, a place generous and forgiving in which we can see our troubles in a new light.

This is a space prepared for those whose hearts are troubled. Those not knowing how to make ends meet. Those who don’t know where to turn. Those who are overwhelmed. Those who know their need of God and a world of his making.

We have a choice. We can let our hearts be troubled, or we can accept Jesus’ invitation and the Spirit’s urging to that other space – the space prepared for us.

This is a space we move into in prayer, or retreat, or moments that just open up for us in which we experience the strengthening and encouragement of God. Prayer and discipleship is how we inhabit the space Jesus has prepared for us.

Our reading from Acts (Acts 7:55-60) describes the stoning of Stephen, the first Christian martyr.

StephenThe Tiffany window showing the Stoning of Stephen focuses on Stephen’s appearance. His face is shining. That is what those looking at Stephen noticed. “They saw that his face was like the face of an angel.” (Acts 6:15)

I would like us to take this in for a moment. This is what happens when we move away from the space that brings trouble to our hearts into that space where we see our troubles in a new light. One of our prayers this week was (the Collect for Julian of Norwich)

Most holy God, the ground of our beseeching, grant that as we are created in your nature and restored by your grace, our wills may be so made one with yours that we may come to see you face to face and gaze on you for ever.  Amen.

A person who survived Auschwitz, Viktor Frankl, has this to say:

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

He remembers: “We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread”. 

They made their choice in that misery, to not let their hearts become selfish, but to live charitably, even to their last piece of bread.

We also have a choice for the time being. We can choose one place or another. We can choose the place prepared for us by Jesus, or the place that is so troubling. It is the same life.  We don’t escape the troubles. After all, Stephen was stoned to death and Jesus suffered on the cross.

But there is a space that is opened for us to live with a different frame of mind, a different choice of attitude, that chooses to trust the one who doesn’t want our hearts to be troubled. It is on that that we need to dwell.

PS If you’ve read so far (thank you) you might be interested in this Blessing of Many Rooms by Jan Richardson

In the beginning you weep

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In the beginning you weep. The starting point for many things is grief, at the place where endings seem so absolute. One would think it should be otherwise but the pain … Is antecedent to every new opening in our lives.

Belden Lane in The Solace of Fierce Landscapes

David Runcorn uses this quote to introduce the “unexpected starting place” of leadership in 1 and 2 Samuel in Fear and Trust. There patriarchy, represented by Hannah’s husband Elkanah and Eli, the priest at Shiloh. Patriarchal leadership had produced a very barren spiritual landscape. The unexpected starting place is a childless woman who Eli thought was a drunk.

Days of Awe

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Day 272 - Chag Sameach!

We can learn so much from the liturgies of other faith traditions. These are the  10 Days of Awe, Yamim Noraim in the Jewish calendar. They begin with Rosh Hashanah, New Year’s day celebrating the day the world was born, and end in Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.

Rabbi Melissa Weintraub draws attention to the Days of Awe in an article in the Huffington Post. She calls the Yamim Noraim “a kind of high speed enactment of our life’s journey from birth to death”. She says “our liturgy brings us to the edge of the precipice between life and death in order to create the emotional conditions for urgent expression”

She recalls seeing her “schmaltzy” father leaning over his walker crying his heart out. He said, “I never got to say goodbye. Everyone – my mother, sisters, and brothers – all died without knowing how much I loved them.” She suggests that the Yamim Noraim summon us to rehearse the end of our lives – “to lean over our walkers in advance. To say what we need to say before it is too late.”

She illustrates her point by sharing a moving account of Steve Martin’s final meeting with his father, with whom he had had a difficult relationship.

I walked into the house they had lived in for 35 years, and my weeping sister said, “He’s saying goodbye to everyone.” A hospice nurse said to me, “This is when it all happens.” I didn’t know what she meant, but I soon would..

I walked into the bedroom where he lay, his mind alert but his body failing. He said, almost buoyantly, “I’m ready now.” I understood that his intensifying rage of the last few years had been against death and now his resistance was abating. I stood at the end of the bed, and we looked into each other’s eyes for a long, unbroken time. At last he said,”You did everything I wanted to do.”

I said, “I did it because of you.” It was the truth.

I sat on the edge of the bed. Another silence fell over us. Then he said, “I wish I could cry, I wish I could cry.”

At first I took this as a comment on his plight, but I am forever thankful that I pushed on. “What do you want to cry about?” I finally said.

“For all the love I received and couldn’t return.”

He had kept his secret, his desire to love his family, from me and my mother his whole life. It was as though an early misstep had kept us forever out of stride. Now, two days from his death, our pace was aligning, and we were able to speak.

I sometimes think of our relationship graphically, as a bell curve. In my infancy, we were perfectly close. Then the gap widened to accommodate our differences and indifference. In the final days of his life, we again became perfectly close.

There is a physicality to the introspection of the Days of Awe. Rabbi Melissa shows us some of the scope of atonement. I am grateful for her insights from a tradition that prepares such care-full celebrations of the grace of new life and atonement.

L’Shana Tovah. Happy New Year.

Thank you to slgckgc for the photo of the shofar blowing.

Get me crying again

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Crying Giant

The Old Testament book of Deuteronomy reminds us, “Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbour in your land”. The reading community is told “If there is anyone of you in need, a member of your community in any of your towns within the land that the Lord your God is giving you, do not be hard-hearted or tight-fisted towards your needy neighbour. You should rather open your hand, willingly lending enough to meet the need, whatever it may be.”

This remarkable passage (Deut 15:1-11) adds a further twist implying that it’s worth keeping on the right side of your neighbour in case “your neighbour might cry to the Lord against you.” I may not have noticed this had I not read Psalm 56 alongside the Deuteronomy passage. There the Psalmist says “”You have counted up my groaning; put my tears into your bottle.” Tears count for God and he favours the one who cries.

David Runcorn reminded a group of us this week that tears count, and that they should be regarded as a spiritual gift. For Orthodox Christians they are a gift as important as the ability to speak in tongues. Bishop Kallistos Ware, in a chapter in Holy Tears: Weeping in the Religious Imagination, refers to Abba Makarios beginning an address with “Brethren, let us weep”. For Bishop Kallistos, it is only tears that count at the Last Judgement. (We can weep inwardly).

Dominus Flevit Church

Hezekiah, king of Judah, prayed with tears. God prompts Isaiah to respond to Hezekiah’s prayer. He says, “I have heard your prayer, I have seen your tears; I will heal you”. Jesus wept over Lazarus and Jerusalem, and one of Jerusalem’s sacred sites, the church of Dominus flevit (Jesus wept) treasures that moment. There is a time to cry, and that is this time. The Psalmist says “those who sow in tears will reap with songs of joy” (Ps 126:5) and it is only in the fullness of time that God will wipe every tear from every eye (only those who are crying?), and “there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain.” (Rev. 21:4)

My own concern is my own increasing difficulty to cry. I am not easily enough moved to tears. Have my tears stopped because I have been used to managing grief and to managing lament and complaint? Have I preferred a quiet life? Have I changed sides? Do I side with the oppressor? And, as a society, have we put our fingers in our ears against the cries of the poor? Have we justified our tight-fistedness by austerity measures? The counting of tears doesn’t seem to be part of the economic measures we adopt, in stark contrast to the measures outlined in Deuteronomy, the Psalms and throughout scripture. Sadly, in our culture, crying is a shame.

I think I am ready, for the moment at least, to pray. “O Lord, hear our prayer, and let our cry come to you.”

PS. The photo of the church of Dominus Flevit is by Gashwin and shows clearly the tear bottles on the corners of the building used for measuring and treasuring tears. The photo of the Crying Giant is by Chris Murphy.

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Bonnie Combe is a woman who lost her husband in a plane crash in Alaska. During her journey through grief, a friend asked her, “Did your husband enrich your life?” “Why, of course,” she answered. The friend came back to her with something that changed her life, “Well then — what are you going to do with those riches?” That statement became the ground of her recovery. [Told on ABC Nightline, 7/21/99 during a discussion of the John F. Kennedy Jr. plane crash]