Lore Ferguson Wilbert in The Understory writes about the grief of losing friends because of politics, a relative abused people in the church, and the old, deep sorrow of her brother’s sudden death. She braids the understory of a forest into the narrative seamlessly. If you’re grieving, this is a good book.
She says we should sit and feel the pain. “I’m learning to befriend my pain and hurt. I am learning to have the courage to look straight at it and ask, ‘Why are you here? What do you want to teach me?’ I am learning not to run from it or to try and cut it out but to sit with it and see what might happen when its invasiveness and limitations are simply allowed to be” (91).
But I’m not sure grief has much lesson to it, except that it’s a long ass-tired walk. What’s the lesson? My friend doesn’t want to be my friend anymore? Does that mean I have to fix whatever it is that offended them? Even if I know what it is, am I even able to change? I can apologize for offensive behavior, but I have found these rejections have come more that I don’t suit them. Is the lesson my parents and brother have died and are not here to share those old family stories built around remember when? (I did have the sense their deaths were not the last word.)
It might be wise to sit with grief. But a person has to be careful of the pit, where the sides cave in, and the wide blue sky turns black with dirt. Yes Wilbert talks about the richness of decay, how dirt is made by trees dying, and giving themselves to the life of the forest. But the pit I’m talking about is loneliness so black, you can’t find your way to the sunlight. It’s thick and suffocating as water sweeping overhead. And no fruit comes of it except pain until the Lord grabs your arm and pulls you out like he yanked Peter out of the churning water. (Check out Jesus on the Water.)
Grief itself has mercy in it because it rolls with whatever emotion—sorrow, anger, fear—and then eases and a person can be startled by how joyous they feel.
I’m pushing against this beautifully written book about grief, because I see a trend in evangelical circles that decries comfort, that seems to make a virtue of suffering. Echoes of feeling guilty for being content and happy still haunt me. Should I slide into my grave exhausted as one old evangelical saying urged? Or do I live the life I’ve been given, right here, right now? That’s not necessarily full of extravagant service to the Lord. That is quiet and happy. That doesn’t have much to say when a person asks how was your week? If life is quiet, what is there to talk about?
I have felt the impulse to suffer because I want to be one of the gang. I’ve been startled by normal test results because I don’t have those stories to swap with my peers whose health isn’t so great. And this is a deep shame.
But isn’t it a deeper shame not to be grateful for His good gifts? Didn’t Saint Paul says, “Godliness with contentment is great gain” (I Tim. 6:6)? Didn’t he say “…I’ve learned in whatever situation I am to be content…I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need” (Phil 4: 11b, 12b, ESV)? So why this pressure to suffer? Right now I can walk down the road, Omalola walking companionably next to me. Bruce can repair the porch. We can drive Morgen without her bolting. The cats sleep nearby. Walking around Woodman’s grocery store with so many choices. Without a cane. Seeing people’s faces, sometimes smiling. Why not give thanks?
I have felt the impulse to suffer because Jesus suffered, to show him I love him. Bible teachers say, Jesus’ throne, his glory is the cross. But I want his glory to be the light thrown across the land at sunrise and sunset. We are called to take up the cross, to follow Jesus. But he says my yoke is easy, my burden is light. How can the crossbeam being walked to Golgotha be easy or light? Maybe because he carried it?
When does the Kingdom come for us? I know about the not yet part, but Jesus also said it’s at hand. It’s supposed to be here now. What about that new creation? If anyone is in Christ he is a new creation. When do we live into the fact we are ascended with him, that the same power that raised him from the dead lives in us. Right here. Right now.
Wilbert quotes Madeleine L’Engle, “As I look back on fifty years of this work, I am forced to accept that my best work has been born from pain. I am forced to see that my own continuing development involves pain. It is pain and weakness and constant failures that which keep me from pain and help me to grow. The power of God is to be found in weakness but it is God’s power” (85).
With all due respect to L’Engle, I’m not sure the best writing just comes from pain. That we only grow from pain and weakness. In this quote she seems to have bought into the story you have to suffer to produce good art. In graduate school our poetry teachers rejected that myth and were careful with the stories of Plath and Sexton and how they made acute suffering into an art form. My work hasn’t just been born of pain. Joy does a pretty good job of putting words on the page.
The other day I was bumping my way through Isaiah and found this: “Does he who plows for sowing plow continually? Does he continually open and harrow his ground?” (Isa 28: 24 – 26, ESV). Every spring we watch farmers plow the fields, but that comes to a stop. They might apply fertilizer and weed killer, (our neighborhood can smell like a garden shop) but then they plant their seeds. They don’t keep working the soil. Yet the message I hear from evangelicals is to ditch comfort because being comfortable is not authentic Christianity. Yes we grieve like Wilbert talks about. Yes horrible things happen. But good things also happen, we can dump into quiet. Our wounds do get bandaged.
Wilbert repeats herself, “Here is sorrow. Here is hurt. Here is pain and grief and loss and the unexpected. Now sit with it and stay. Refuse to look away. Befriend it” (92).This might be wise to a point. But grief itself has its own wisdom where it rolls over you and then subsides. Joy might even rise. Then it rolls. It doesn’t always show up in tears either. But like the old story that warns against feeding the black wolf, so she grows stronger and meaner, it might not be wise to gaze too long or too hard on that grief.
As I read this book, I thought about some things Andrew Solomon says in his essay, “After Great Pain” an essay written soon after 911. He talks about how survivors of trauma did worse when therapists asked them to go back and relive their suffering. He notes that asking survivors of the Rwandan genocide to relive their experiences made them commit suicide. An aid worker recounted, “Looking at what had happened was the worst possible way to make yourself live afterward.” Solomon says, “We’ve now moved beyond the old therapy idea that emotional repression is unhealthy and that you have to work through what’s happened by delving deeply into all your feelings. If your feelings are too awful, it’s best to keep them as much as possible at bay.”
I’ve learned that just because I’m angry or sad I don’t have to go to those places. I used to journal all my feelings because I was boring people and I realized it was too much work to go there, so I didn’t.
In Consider Trauma Pure Joy, Jason Jonker says, “One of the toughest things about my job was trying to convince the team that my client would be better off going to his little league games than meeting with me—especially if the child was adamant about not wanting to talk about his trauma.”
I’m not sure this mucking around in suffering is what took the martyrs to their excruciating deaths. I’m not sure but that it was joy, and a looking to “the sufferings of this present life are nothing compared to the glory that will be revealed” that brought them courage when faced with death.
A few months ago I was browsing Facebook and came across a post by Kissing Fish Book. The writer noted a book by Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker who penned a remarkable book called: Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire.
“It’s a book that unpacks the unhealthy history of ‘Atonement Theology.’ But it does so by suggesting that early Christians were NOT obsessed with the bloody body of Jesus. In fact, these two women went on an extended field trip. They searched Christian sanctuaries all across the ancient world — Turkey, Ancient Greece and Rome, Egypt— and time and again, they FAILED to find bloody crucifixes in Christian Churches and Christian Art. They didn’t find a bloody Jesus for the first one thousand years of Christian history.
“Instead, they found images of earthy and heavenly paradise. It was clear that early Christians both embraced the story of the crucifixion and resurrection…but they were much more drawn to the story of NEW LIFE, not the story of a bloody death.”
Jesus was only on the cross for a few hours and harrowing hell for a few days. Previous to this he walked this earth, and afterwards was raised from the dead and ascended into heaven. What about all that other time he spends. Isn’t his birth to ascension all good news?
Yes when sorrow comes, we should grieve. “The Lord is near to the broken hearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit” (Ps 34: 18) . “Weeping may last for the night, joy comes in the morning” (Ps. 30:5). And perhaps we need to open our eyes to that morning and receive that joy. Perhaps it starts with simply saying thank you as we walk into our day.
And if grief returns, as it surely will, perhaps pick up a copy of The Understory and lose yourself in a beautiful read that shows the fecund understory that comes with grief holds promise.
Works Cited
Andraski, Katie. “Jesus on the Water.” Jesus on the Water – by Katie Andraski, Katie’s Ground, 12 Apr. 2023, open.substack.com/pub/katieandraski/p/jesus-on-the-water?r=2jx39&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web.
Book, Kissing Fish. “Kissing Fish Book.” Facebook, www.facebook.com/100064330823767/posts/800290118792008/?mibextid=CTbP7E&rdid=gWUgzgADw4nu2PBQ. Accessed 16 June 2024.
Holy Bible English Standard Version. Crossway, 2016.
Jonker, Jason. “Consider Trauma Pure Joy.” Consider Trauma Pure Joy – by Jason Jonker, Jason’s Substack, 13 June 2024, jasonjonker.substack.com/p/consider-trauma-pure-joy.
Solomon, Andrew. “After Great Pain.” Andrew Solomon, andrewsolomon.com/articles/after-great-pain/. Accessed 2024.
Wilbert, Lore Ferguson. The Under Story. Brazos, 2024.
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