grief

Recent Reads

/ abby hummel / 4 Comments

We’ve had our first rhubarb harvest, every other dinner’s salad is fresh from the garden, and last night’s bike ride included nine bunny sightings. It’s not that warm yet, but summer has definitely started! One of the best parts of summer is… Well, who can pick just one? I like it all! But right now I’m excited about summer reading. I just finished a great Bible Study program that ran through the school year, so my regular book reading diminished drastically since September. This summer my work load is decreased a bit, and while I hope to maintain consistent study of scripture, I’m excited about extra time for real books, too. So I can’t say I’ve been reading two books a month like I did last year, but I’m going to blog about the past year’s worth of literary edification now in case you want to pick anything up for your own summer reading list. My natural bent is towards devotional, historical, nerdy, or “self-help”-ish books, but I have been richly rewarded by some intentional fiction reading, so I’m hoping to be more balanced with reading stories and “real life” in the future.
(These are listed here alphabetically by author.)

Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry
I’ve had Wendell Berry on the radar for years. In college I frequently babysat for the children of a Berry scholar (as in, wrote a real book about it), and sometimes I thumbed through the books on their shelf. But I didn’t get anything read start-to-finish until now, and I am kicking myself for taking half a decade to get around to it. This author is gently profound, and his prose beautifully marries an understanding of God’s dual revelation (in scripture and nature) with an uncanny knack for describing the human condition. Berry “gets” God, and he “gets” man. I will say that I found it especially intriguing that a confessing Baptist would write a story where the main character spends much of his life in confusion about faith and veers sharply off the path of orthodox Christian belief at the end, but I would still highly recommend this book as a story about loss, grief, growth and redemption.

“This grief had something in it of generosity, some nearness to joy. In a strange way, it added to me what I had lost. I saw that, for me, this country would always be populated with presences and absences, presences of absences, the living and the dead. The world as it is would always be a reminder of the world that was, and of the world that is to come. … I am a pilgrim, but my pilgrimage has been wandering and unmarked. Often what has looked like a straight line to me has been a circle or a doubling back. …The names of many snares and dangers have been made known to me, but I have seen them only in looking back. Often I have not known where I was going until I was already there. I have had my share of desires and goals, but life has come to me or I have gone to it mainly by way of mistakes and surprises. Often I have received better than I have deserved. Often my fairest hopes have rested on bad mistakes. I am an ignorant pilgrim, crossing a dark valley. And yet for a long time, looking back, I have been unable to shake off the feeling that I have been led — make of that what you will.” -Jayber Crow, by Wendell Berry.

***
When God Talks Back by  T.M. Luhrmann.
This is a huge volume based on an anthropologist’s report of spending years in two different Vineyard churches throughout the country. I feel like I’m cheating because I actually returned this to the library before I finished it, but I would like to finish it sometime, and I still recommend this to anyone who is intrigued by anthropology or curious about the psychological study of prayer. Which would be… probably no one. I’m okay with being a little nerdy here: I thought it was really interesting. And I truly appreciated that a non-believing author managed to write a book about evangelical prayer without an overwhelming air of cynicism. Though I don’t necessarily agree with some of her conclusions, I appreciated that she took people seriously and wanted to figure out how the human side of prayer works. My biggest beef with what I’ve read so far is that Luhrmann keeps using the word “evangelical,” while most evangelicals probably wouldn’t call the churches she visited mainstream. But, whatever. The evangelical Christian movement is almost impossible to narrowly define, even in a book that’s 300+ pages like this one.

***
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
Gilead is a beautiful story, told in letters from an elderly minister near death to his seven-year-old miracle son. (While every child is a miracle, one who is seven when his father dies of old age is more likely to be referenced as such, I suppose.) The San Francisco Chronicle said Gilead “explores big ideas while telling a good story,” and I would recommend this for anyone who has thought about God’s will, singleness, marriage, childlessness, parenting, grief, disappointment, ministry, or the meaning of life. Which means, everyone. I liked this so much that I listened to the audio CD a few weeks after reading the book, and I was so excited to share this novel with some friends that I recommended it to several people right away. Then I found out most of them had read it already. So I feel like I was late to the party, but you should read it now, because this is one of those things that isn’t worth missing!

“I don’t know exactly what covetise is, but in my experience it is not so much desiring someone else’s virtue or happiness as rejecting it, taking offense at the beauty of it.” -Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson.

***
Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis by Lauren F. Winner
I have loved several of Lauren Winner’s other books, especially her conversion memoir “Girl Meets God,” so I was very curious about “Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis.” Written out of the spiritual torment she faced grieving her mother’s death and doubting her faith in a difficult marriage resulting in an (admittedly) unjustifiable divorce, Winner tells her raw story of doubt and faith. Many times, it seemed that her “journal-entryish” writing (like CS Lewis’ “A Grief Observed,” but a bit more organized) left me feeling emotionally brutalized along with her – doubt is a painful thing, and it hurt to read about, too. In both knowing personally that Christian marriage is not all picnics and rainbows, and walking alongside a dear friend in the aftermath of marital dissolution, I have a hard time feeling sympathy for the trauma Winner faced after leaving her husband. I don’t know the whole story behind that, but I do know she reflected on those grave choices with honesty and renewed faith. It’s not as though she can go back and change it, and I am grateful God meets us where we are instead of where we should be. In many ways, this book reminds us that life is tough and God, though sometimes hard to understand, is good. Winner writes with a haunting narrative voice and her words are thought-provoking in some ways I didn’t expect. For that reason I think it deserves mention here.

“The enthusiasms of my conversion have worn off. For whole stretches since the dream, since the baptism, my belief has faltered, my sense of God’s closeness has grown strained, my efforts at living in accord with what I take to be the call of the gospel have come undone. …And yet in those same moments of strained belief, of not knowing where or if God is, it has also seemed that the Christian story keeps explaining who and where I am, better than any other story I know. … I doubt; I am uncertain; I am restless, prone to wander. And yet glimmers of holy keep interrupting my gaze.” (‘Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.’ John 6:68, esv.) – Still, by Lauren F. WInner.

I have a few things on my summer reading list already (Eric Metatexas’ Bonhoeffer biography is in progress, Return of the King by Tolkien, the Huger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins, In This House of Brede by Rumer Godden, and Great Expectations by Dickens), but I’d love to hear more suggestions if you have any to offer!

A Cruel Month

/ abby hummel / 5 Comments

April is the cruelest month, breeding
lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
memory and desire, stirring
dull roots with spring rain…
– TS Eliot, The Wasteland (“Part 1- The Burial of the Dead”)

I’ve never really understood much of the TS Eliot poem “The Wasteland,” to the point where I’m usually not sure the author even had a logical meaning that anyone was supposed to comprehend. This is totally sour grapes on my part, of course. He just means something I have not yet grasped. So I get lost in every attempt, but I keep coming back to these words because some of the imagery and the opening line, “April is the cruelest month,” resonates so clearly with me.

I have had many good Aprils, particularly 1986, when I was born, and the month is not always bad to me. But rain falls on the just and the unjust alike, so I have seen some cruel Aprils. The worst of them were five and six years ago, when Aaron and I were dating. During the first April there was much weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth, since I was dreading his departure for a deployment to Iraq. (In addition to the cruel April business, Eliot’s poem also says “I will show you fear in a handful of dust,” and confronting the dust-to-dust nature of this all was, indeed, terrifying.) When his pre-deployment training began I didn’t know we would have a brief summer reunion and thought we had kissed goodbye for the year. The day after he left I threw myself into a heap on my bed, surrounded by some girlfriends, and declared “I am being ripped in two!”

"kissing the war good-bye" was above my dorm dresser. also pictured: valentine's flowers.

the "birthday jar" I sent Aaron for his 22nd birthday. I was sick so my mom snapped this while I was in bed.

The second cruel April was a year later, and I was tiredly, anxiously, wearily, fearfully awaiting his imminent return home. It was an awful year in so many ways, and some days it seemed like every breath was a reminder of how fragile we all are. There were funerals, injuries, battles, sickness, nightmares, care packages, letters, emails, and lots of crying (on my part). The experience was more harrowing for Aaron than for me, of course, which appalls me a little to this day.  It has been said that “the darkest hour is just before dawn,” and those words were remarkably true for me that year. Sometime in February, I broke down with a friend while we were leaving the music building. I had been counting down to a rough estimate of Aaron’s homecoming date, and I remember sobbing “There are 73 more days! I can’t do it! This is impossible!” Then it felt like everything was downhill from there, and the last few weeks of deployment were full of insomnia and grotesque nightmares whenever I could get some sleep. I knew after all the difficulty of that year we were not home free yet. Nearly every day I heard people saying “You must be getting so excited!” and I just wanted to scream that he was still in danger and something could still happen to him and there is nothing exciting about someone you love being in a war zone, ever, even if they are scheduled to come home soon.

Then (At last! Finally!), five years ago today, the cruelty of that April came to an end and he was returning home. At that point, I almost wished my insomnia would have stayed a little longer since I was studying, writing, and practicing like crazy at the end of the semester, trying to work ahead as much as possible. Several professors graciously adjusted my scheduled finals so I could celebrate this homecoming – one even handed me an exam, winked, and told me to bring it back before graduation. Grace upon grace.

waiting!

Aside from the homecoming, which I have written about earlier, my favorite memory of this time came a few days later. Aaron was safely home, and the family sat on the couch praying for his upcoming TV interview. His mom asked that God would give him words to speak to the reporter, and his brother interjected, “English words!”

at last!

at last!

It’s interesting to unpack important lessons after trials like this. A few weeks into that summer, I sat with a family friend and watched Aaron perform important ushering duties at his sister’s wedding. (It was on a beach, and I remember him saying, “oh… sand…”) Someone remarked to me that Aaron’s presence here was proof of God’s faithfulness to us, and springing out of the growth and learning of the past year I had to correct them. Yes, God is faithful and gracious, and we received our loved one back from war… but a terrible outcome for that year would not have changed God’s character. I am so thankful that divine faithful character was expressed in this way, but I can’t pretend God “owed” us this safe homecoming. Things could have taken a tragic turn and that April would have been crueler than all the rest, and we could been weeping through a “the Lord gives and the Lord takes away” sort of lesson in it all. But for whatever reason, that was not the case, and we now reflect on this with humility and gratefulness:

 “Who has ever given to God, that God should repay him?” – Romans 11, niv.

“The LORD has dealt bountifully with you. ” – Psalm 116, esv.

Some of these Aprils have been cruel, but I am grateful for what has sprung out from that.
Welcome home, five years ago today.

holy week and the death of dreams

/ abby hummel / 11 Comments

A few weeks ago, I was really starting to feel like I had it made in life. Not that things are perfect or how I would plan them! You know, I had to work for years in a job I didn’t like, but I was delightfully strategizing about increasing my teaching load, coordinating to tutor homeschoolers in the fall, and preparing for more ministry endeavors with my flexible schedule. While I’m not particularly happy about turning another year older without any accompanying littler birthdays to celebrate, I have a deep appreciation for many things I can do now that would be nearly impossible if we had children to care for. And we’re managing on a very tight budget, but we love our little house and someday Aaron will graduate, and even now we have a lot more than most people around the world. I want you to know that my gracious acceptance and good attitude here was not easily won. It took a lot of work to get there! But for a short, short time I was able to rest in the comfortable beauty of surrender and acceptance. And then, it crashed down when I got one of those heart-stopping calls that you never expect to get, the kind that makes you look at the phone afterwards and say “Did that just happen? Really?”

I suppose the story starts, quite innocently, the week before the phone call when Aaron mentioned he had a special one-on-one meeting with his advisor. He wasn’t particularly worried, but noted that this seemed very unusual. There were hours of conversation while we were tiling the kitchen, otherwise he probably wouldn’t have said anything in the first place. I forgot about this until he said something before leaving on Monday morning, and I wasn’t very alert because I’d barely slept from excitement about the kitchen progress and Aaron’s recent “75% commitment” to redoing the bathroom this fall. So I said a quick prayer and forgot about it until I got a text message later. While I would love to pretend we are a syrupy couple who constantly express our mutual undying affection in 160-character snippets, Aaron does not text me during the day. So even seeing that was a little unsettling, and then I read “…wanna move to Ithaca NY?” Um, what? I was confused and asked him to call me, and he did. Aaron also does not call me during the day. And I knew the news was big because he called and then he unfolded the story of his professor moving their lab across the country, telling me we were invited but not required to come, that he would get a raise and potentially an Ivy-league doctoral degree if we left…and I can’t even remember what else he said, but I knew we were thinking very seriously about moving right away. (When I prayed that I wouldn’t have to keep the deer head in my living room, I meant that the deer head should move, not the living room.) The next few weeks of our life became a massive blur of questions about selling our house, sacrificing all the music and job stuff I have worked for, and figuring out what else we should consider to make a decision about the whole thing. And because this move would mean we’d want our house sold by August, we gave ourselves a deadline of less than two weeks to make a final decision.

It would be far too laborious to go over all the aspects of this huge decision-making process here, but I will say that, miraculously, we concluded that it is best to stay where we are for now. We made the choice pretty quickly and it seems like the answer is the “easy” one, but this was not a “snap” decision. I’m grateful that this was a very short trial, but it was a time when it seemed like everything we worked for in the past few years might be given up quickly and the future looked like one big, giant, and possibly scary mess.

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit” –yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. (James 4, esv)

Yes, in the chastening lesson of this all we must remember we are a mist, we are vapor, we are dust. And if we who have eternal souls can be compared to dust and ashes, how much more transient are the products of our striving – our dreams, our plans, our business, …our tiled floors? I find profound connections here to ponder this week when we Christians especially contemplate the mystery of Jesus’ passion. It is overly dramatic to say this, I admit, but in the midst of that confusion and anxiety I really felt like I had grabbed onto a bit of what massive heartache the first “Holy Week” must have been – the political and religious landscape was in uproar, Jesus had to dread the cross before him, and for the disciples it looked like their hopes and dreams were destroyed. We miss a lot of the compassion and beauty in the Resurrection if we forget that emotional turmoil.

And I know this sounds crazy, but in deciding to stay we also had to give up the new dream of the life we would have after moving. We planned on becoming kayak bums in beautiful upstate New York and spending a few years exploring the East coast. It’s hard to lay that dream aside, even when I know there is no way to have both things I want. In articulating the confession, this reminds me of the time I was watching a friend’s baby who had a pacifier in her mouth and found another one on the floor. At a certain point, she was hanging on to the second pacifier and realized she would have to take out the first one if she wanted to suck on the second from her hand. She found the dilemma so distressing that she cried too hard to have either one in her mouth at all. And I don’t want to spend my whole life like that, but I’m sure that’s what I must look like to God right now.

(I think our awesome patio is my favorite part about living in this house, so I am consoling myself by focusing on how much I like it out here. And if the background is blurry, I can forget  how much work there is left to do in the yard.)

acquainted with grief

/ abby hummel / 2 Comments

What a full summer for us! There are plenty of exciting pictures of long-awaited kitchen progress to share soon (I’m cooking on the new stove already and we have the bar counter top ready to install!), and I’m very pleased with some other home projects we have accomplished as well, like making over the brick fireplace and relaying some stone pathways outside before reseeding all the grass. This has been a good season, and we are grateful for the chances to improve our home and see so many beloved friends and family. …And then at the end of this excellent summer, I find myself thrown into situations where grief is all around, both for myself and those I hold dear.  This is truly a heavy thing to think on and discuss.

The Thinker

Someone who isn’t in the midst of this can pull all sorts of cliche comments out of thin air, trying to explain gut-wrenching heartache by saying things like,  “Everything happens for a reason,” or “Things will get better; your good time will come soon,” but those are shallow answers to one who is devastated by sadness. A trite comment cannot explain away the painfully simple truth: grief is hard, dark and lonely. Whether you are witness to the deep soul-groaning of the bereaved or experiencing it yourself, the weight of difficulty seems unbearable and cruel. It is true comfort for a Christian to cling to Jesus, the man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, in these times.

He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces, he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned—every one—to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.  (Isaiah 53, esv)

If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? …Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? …No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8, esv)