On October 30, dear friends of mine gave birth to a beautiful, full term little boy with no heartbeat. Gideon Lucas had been a perfect, healthy pregnancy until moments before the emergency C-section. They still don't know what suddenly went wrong.
I have been thinking and praying about this event and wanting to write a blog on this, but wanted to say something meaningful, and my heart was too broken and my thoughts too scattered to do that until now. (My friends, on the other hand, started their own blog with some wonderfully thoughtful and faithful insights on the event, in hopes of processing it themselves and helping others going through something similar. I commend it to you, here.)
The journey of my own processing of this tragedy starts the day before, when I was leading worship at the candidacy committee meeting. Gideon's mom, Becca, is on the candidacy committee, but wasn't there because she was, of course, expecting to give birth any moment. I led the committee in a reflection on the Beatitudes (you can read it here), and then invited them to write their own Beatitudes, which we then read aloud for the prayers. One of the ones that I offered was, "Blessed are those awaiting childbirth, for they shall know more deeply the love of God." I offered this with an excited smile, imagining my dear friend, having just endured one of the most exhausting and rewarding experiences a woman can have, being handed a squirming, screaming baby. I imagined tears of joy and grins from ear to ear, and I imagined Will and Becca's hearts cracking open, suddenly able to love in a way they never had before - as that of our God who gives his children life. Oh, what a gift!
As I read Will's tragic Facebook post on our layover on our way to Houston to visit my infant niece, my heart broke. I could not imagine anything worse. I cried all the way to Houston. I put myself in the place of everyone even remotely involved, and my heart broke again with each one. I finally settled on thinking about my parents, who lost a son at 24 weeks, just 14 months before I was born. I suddenly realized how remarkable it was that I was born at all - I couldn't imagine losing a baby this way and then getting pregnant again, especially so soon. I thought about how my mom said my grandma sang Children of the Heavenly Father at baby Michael's grave when they buried him, and about how often my parents sang this same beautiful hymn to my brother and me at bedtime, and I gave thanks for their courage and strength to be able to do this. I started to sing the hymn to myself on the airplane - the only prayer I could think to offer. "Neither life nor death shall ever From the Lord His children sever..."
And then I thought about those words I had offered the day before. "Blessed are those awaiting childbirth, for they shall know more deeply the love of God." I kicked myself for offering those words. How stupid and naively hopeful they now sounded in the face of tragedy. How angry they made me.
Until I thought about them some more. Until I realized they were just as true, just not as I had imagined them at the time. Will and Becca did more deeply understand the love of God - the love of a God who lost a son, who loved the world so much that in fact he gave his only son so that we would not perish but have eternal life. Could it be that my friends now understood more deeply the heart of a God who watched his son die? At once that made perfect sense, and only made me more angry. I thought about my professor's words, "Be careful with intercessory prayer, because you might just get what you pray for." God is always answering prayers in ways we didn't imagine or really even want.
As I sat a week later, waiting for Gideon's funeral to begin, I found myself feeling very frustrated. I wanted so badly to understand, to be there for my friends in a way that was more than a butt in a seat, more than a card, more than a gentle, post-C-section hug. I wanted them not to be alone in their pain, in their struggle, in their brokenness. And to my surprise, I thought, "If only I could lose a child too, so I could understand." Immediately I took it back. Of course I didn't want that. Of course no one would wish that on me. Of course I never want this to happen to us. But that is how much I wanted to understand.
I had, in my mind, called this a moment of irrational empathy. But when I explained it to my spiritual director, she said, "Sounds to me like the incarnation." And it suddenly became very clear: my Beatitudes prayer, all the broken hearts, a desire to understand that led to such an irrational thought as to want to experience the same pain... This is why JESUS. This feeling of wanting so much to understand the plight of my loved ones, of wanting it so much that I would desire to experience the pain myself - this is why God came to earth as a feeble, human baby, born to peasants, in danger from his very conception, wandering homeless with no place to lay his head, enduring ridicule and pain and flogging and finally death. It was indeed because God so loved the world that God wanted to experience the pain and brokenness of humanity himself.
Well, God, that is ridiculous. What a completely irrational idea.
And also, thank you for being here.
Reading this and crying. Irrational, indeed! Thank you.
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