A Sword of Joy, A Sword of Sorrow

How can I do justice to this week? How can it come together in any coherency?

On Tuesday, we learned that our friends and colleague in Wyoming had lost two of their three little daughters in a car accident on the icy road between Lander and Riverton; on Saturday we celebrated the wedding of my cousin's daughter.

Tuesday I spent in shock and grief. My thought was that there is no middle ground when something like this happens--either there is deep meaning, an eternal meaning, or the world would be better off bombed. The death of a child, a child of parents who were and are deeply generous, loving, faithful friends, followers of the Lord, seems inexplicable...and thus the shock. Your world is rocked, shaken to pieces, if you allow yourself to think about it, and you must look at another way to pick up the pieces because there is nothing in you that can do it yourself. You know that; you feel your helplessness in the face of this sorrow.

What hurts one member of the Body of Christ hurts all the members...if we are family, if we love each other with the supernatural, eternal love of God, then we are all connected in deeper ways than we understand and can grasp.

It was the same with the wedding: In seeing the joy of this young couple as they stepped out in hope, we shared more deeply than just like watching a movie; we became, by witnessing it, by supporting them, part of their life, their success or failure in living up to the impossible. When another couple has been shattered by death of the new life they helped bring to the family of God, we become part of their journey back towards healing.

I have felt this supernatural yoking so many times, especially when one night my beloved friends came over to rescue me from my despair, my weakness unwinding me after months of sickness. They came and they sat on my bed (I looked like hell) and they had no solutions--but they were the solution. They exhorted me to fortitude, to courage, to understand the deep anxiety that was exacerbating the physical problems. They became family then; they sat in the Red Tent with me (a place where women in ancient times would meet to rest, so to speak) for hours and cried with me and smacked me with charity in turn, as I needed it. They are now an integral part of my journey, even if I never see them in this life again. Never seeing them again in this life doesn't matter, really, if one is looking from eternity. The bond has been made because it was made in God's charity.

So I sat in the Pittwater Uniting Church (why not "united"? Are they perpetually in the process of getting together?) and watched Hannah come down the aisle with her father, and she looked like an angel, like St. Elizabeth the princess who loved the poor. I saw the parents give a 'blessing of release' on their adult children, a blessing to become the root of a new tree. I could see the deep love of these parents who had to, in another way, say goodbye to their children.

I felt conflicted, and sad, as I grieved with my friends, and yet rejoiced to see the courage of this couple to take on a life which always, in this world, carries the possibility, the likelihood, of great pain. But these two pledged to put God first before all others, before each other, so I have great hope of the strength of their marriage, for, as Fulton Sheen spoke of, a marriage made as a strand of three--husband, wife, God--is a strong rope that can weather much. And if one strand is the living God who does not, can not, break vows?

I know too much, too, about my extended family, to have complete and unadulterated joy. I know enough about myself to have this. I know too much now about human nature. There is hypocrisy and suffering and sin even in a place filled with flowers and ceremony and pure and good promises. We live always under threat of rain. 

I thought, though, as I sat later at the Collaroy Retreat Center overlooking the ocean, that suffering does indeed pull our life down around us--our own sin, the sin of others, injustice, tragedy. We tend to build fortresses around ourselves, fortresses that contain a universe of meaning that we can deal with, for some of us, that excuse our failings. I have been there, in a fortress of my own making that became a real prison. It seemed the easier route, to rationalize things, to say it was all for love or this or that, but it became a prison and a place of fear. I was afraid to lose the chimera because I had idols.

So sometimes the walls come crashing down and it feels like destruction; but it is also a chance to look at things anew, to search for reality, for Truth.

Sometimes, the walls come down "from no fault of his own or his parents" but because God has some greater good in mind, because He believes in someone so much that He grants them a special road of suffering, the precursor to a greater crown, the chance to walk the road He walked, the road His mother walked out to Golgotha. Sometimes the sword pierces the heart of the best of us, just like it did the Theotokos, the Mother of God. It pierced her because part of her 'fiat' was to be a part of the redemption of the world, that suffering that saves the world, what St. Paul calls "making up what is lacking in the suffering of Christ."

But even with my 45 years (which counts for a little now), I tread where angels fear.

I just know now that those, myself included, who break promises or run from suffering, or think that happiness consists of feeling good or being fulfilled in this life, are missing the greater good; they have traded gold for candy rocks. Happiness is being good; freedom is being free to orient towards and live the Good, the Truth. Happiness, the deep and solemn joy that C.S. Lewis tried to put words around comes through suffering--and joy--and the courage to bring fragile relationships and children and life to the foot of the Cross, in hope of eternity, a new heaven and earth, where "He will wipe every tear from their eyes and there will be no more death' or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away."