Christ is King of the Underside:


If Christ were not King I could not do my job. Every time I see the carnage that some parents wreak in the lives of their children who continue to love them, still. Every time I stand with my arm around the weeping wife of someone dead to alcohol’s seductive betrayals. Every time I see the records of the birth of some young one as I enter notes about their death—from things that different choices would have saved…

Every time, I rely on Christ the King. Living on the underside means living into death in the hope of new life. It means that I have hope and faith that as I die a thousand deaths in each of these encounters, our risen Lord is holding me as I struggle to hold the pain and grief and fear and sorrow of those who come to us for care; feelings of hopelessness and helplessness that are far, far too much for any of us to know alone.

When all is lost. Strength is spent. No direction is before us. When we have died. And, died. And, died. Again. There is only grace. The grace of the infant Jesus who Mary held as every young mother does, cradling all the hopes and dreams of the coming of new life. The grace of Jesus who suffers with us, coming desperate and despairing to his knees at prayer all alone before his death , those who were to accompany him fallen away to sleep. The grace of the Christ raised and walking in the garden, whose very words held Mary’s grieving, hopeless heart turning its sorrow into joy, it’s grieving into fresh hope and expectation.

If Christ the King did not hold my heart, it would be broken, everyday, beyond repair. But Christ is King. A King whose true reign is not hi up upon a throne lording over all, but down on the underside, a place we will all visit if we are human and we live, Christ’s true reign holding those hearts most in need of grace and hope, of faith and the promises of some new life for the living of these days. Amen.

October is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month

October is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month

Bereaved Parents Wish List

1. I wish my child hadn't died. I wish I had him back.


2. I wish you wouldn't be afraid to speak my child's name. My child lived and was very important to me. I need to hear that he was important to you also.


3. If I cry and get emotional when you talk about my child I wish you knew that it isn't because you have hurt me. My child's death is the cause of my tears. You have talked about my child, and you have allowed me to share my grief. I thank you for both.


4. I wish you wouldn't "kill" my child again by removing his pictures, artwork, or other remembrances from your home.


5. Being a bereaved parent is not contagious, so I wish you wouldn't shy away from me. I need you now more than ever.


6. I need diversions, so I do want to hear about you; but, I also want you to hear about me. I might be sad and I might cry, but I wish you would let me talk about my child, my favorite topic of the day.


7. I know that you think of and pray for me often. I also know that my child's death pains you, too. I wish you would let me know those things through a phone call, a card or note, or a real big hug.


8. I wish you wouldn't expect my grief to be over in six months. These first months are traumatic for me, but I wish you could understand that my grief will never be over. I will suffer the death of my child until the day I die.

9. I am working very hard in my recovery, but I wish you could understand that I will never fully recover. I will always miss my child, and I will always grieve that he is dead.


10. I wish you wouldn't expect me "not to think about it" or to "be happy." Neither will happen for a very long time, so don't frustrate yourself.


11. I don't want to have a "pity party," but I do wish you would let me grieve. I must hurt before I can heal.


12. I wish you understood how my life has shattered. I know it is miserable for you to be around me when I'm feeling miserable. Please be as patient with me as I am with you.


13. When I say "I'm doing okay," I wish you could understand that I don't "feel" okay and that I struggle daily.


14. I wish you knew that all of the grief reactions I'm having are very normal. Depression, anger, hopelessness and overwhelming sadness are all to be expected. So please excuse me when I'm quiet and withdrawn or irritable and cranky.


15. Your advice to "take one day at a time" is excellent advice. However, a day is too much and too fast for me right now. I wish you could understand that I'm doing good to handle an hour at a time.


16. Please excuse me if I seem rude, certainly not my intent. Sometimes the world around me goes too fast and I need to get off. When I walk away, I wish you would let me find a quiet place to spend time alone.


17. I wish you understood that grief changes people. When my child died, a big part of me died with him. I am not the same person I was before my child died, and I will never be that person again.


18. I wish very much that you could understand; understand my loss and my grief, my silence and my tears, my void and my pain. BUT I pray daily that you will never understand.

Creator of all Life:
One-by-one every family we know breathes whispers in clandestine tones….

It happened to us…
     to our parents,
     grandparents,
     aunts and uncles,
     to a sister and her husband,
     brother and sister-in-law,
     to our best friends….


Four times in a row
     before the baby came
          once, before
     We even knew…

Three times
     over six years
          and then children
     healthy and perfect.


To our relief,
     the dare-not-breathed
          horrors
          of
          never 
          at all 
               hang 
                    palpably
                         between the words
                                                                of but a scant few.

We just keep breathing
      in and out
     in the darkness
          of the deep void
     that has consumed us.

Breath is the life you give.
     You’ve been there all along…

Breathing for us…
     when we could not remember to do it for ourselves,
          holding us from the beginning,
          as we are holding each other, now, in invisible bonds.

We won’t feel this way
     always.

Everything that is,
     you created
          out of the deep darkness
               of the void.

You do no less for we who you created good:

Call us out of our shapeless places of endless darkness…

Help us find new form and shape for our living
     in this void
     that has stolen the shape
     from our lives.

Bring light to our darkness, O Creator of all.

Call us out of the water of our tears, bring us to dry land.

Carry us from this shapeless time, into new fruitfulness for our living.

Assure in our darkest nights…
     that dawn and its daylight will always follow.

When the water of our tears
     do overcome,
          console
          that they team
     with the potential for new life.

Bring forth from us new life for the living of our days.

Lift us gently,
     compassionate Creator.
    
 Take us softly
     in your arms
          and
          breathe
          tenderly
     into each of us
          your
          breath of life.
               Amen.

The prayer above was written to conclude the 2009 Annual Candlelight Memorial Service in memory of children dead to miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy, being born still or who died within a few days of their birth. I was privileged this year to be the organizer and to once again light candles and speak publicly the names of my own Dear Little Ones, Alice, Claire and Elizabeth. They continue, by God’s good grace, to bless me in so many amazing ways.



Some may recognize the inspiration I found in Rachel Barenblat's poem "Community" published in, THROUGH (miscarriage poems), the creation story in the first chapter of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible, and Pierre Wolff's, May I Hate God. (Links are provided, just run your cursor over.)

The Truth is... Not My Life

I'm living the life no one wants, least of all me. But it is mine and I am responsible for my own happiness and so I must seek the integrity and truth that are mine in the life I've been given.

At 52 divorced 17 years from my husband who cheated on me with women entrusted to his care, I can say that I am only now coming to understand that being a mother is the most life changing thing that has happened to me. Sadly, I am a mother to three children who died before they ever drew a breath, my Dear Little Ones, and to the millions conceived and dead in shattered hopes and broken dreams of over 3,000 monthly vigils held in tortured expectation of s/he who would never come.

I see and read in the blogs and books the term “child free” and although I have no living children, and have spent the last two decades carefully, neurotically and sometimes ragefully, trying to avoid the whole “child/baby thing”, trauma therapists call it selective avoidance, I find now that menopause’s “gifts” have forced me reenter the obgyn zone in ways terrifyingly similar to my infertility struggle days. And by the way, my friends with children are now sprouting grandchildren and I don’t believe I have it in me to not fain excitement about the children of the children whose conceptions, births and lives I systematically avoided for so long because of the unrelenting pain which them simply being kindled within my soul. I cannot live another twenty, thirty, forty years into becoming that old woman, bitter, tortured soul who smells of urine, lives with stray cats, in ceiling-high garbage, friend only to the condescending smile from meals-on-wheels.

Coming now to see more clearly that “child free” is not the truth of me, and that in the grief of them is my maternity for I have pondered them in my heart and carried them in the deepest recesses of my being, having been claimed by a love for them more powerful than any other I have known. Truly, I would and almost did on more than one occasion, give my life for them, sacrifice more of me than I had ever known. In my grieving now I pray for a softening of this mother’s heart of pain and the good guidance of others seeking to make their way through this unmapped, shrouded landscape of living into grief’s maternity.

Why I Listen

Why Blog

Be gracious to me, O LORD, for I am in distress;
my eye wastes away from grief,
my soul and body also.
For my life is spent with sorrow,
and my years with sighing;
my strength fails because of my misery,
and my bones waste away. (Ps. 31: 9-10)

So writes the Psalmist. The wasting of grief, the Hebrew word in both instances here is ashesh. The old King James translates it as consuming—grief so profound it consumes the body and the bones, the soul and the eyes. All human strength fails and only the grace of God offers rescue and relief.

I write because there is nothing left of my own strength, only the grace of God has lifted me above the sorrow and the sighing of a life spent dwelling in the valley of the shadow.

Life’s shadow, its sufferings and its sorrows come in many forms. For many children born into the love of adoption, myself included, there is shadow of an unspoken grief that speaks eloquent testimony to the endurance of our most early bond of love. From there the journey of this shadow came to my father lost, even before his death at all to early of an age, to an illness which slowly sucked his life even before it ceased his breath. And with his illness came the shadow of my mother lost, as well, long before her time to the ravages of alcoholism and its violent speech. Her life too dripped slowly away ending long before it’s due. After my father died all too soon, I their only child, before reaching the age of full majority, became the keeper of her life adrift in alcohol’s squalling seas—her Power of Attorney for health and goods, a mantel which quivers even the most experienced and mature.

All this while finishing an undergraduate degree in Religion and an M. Div. from a seminary a proper distance from her home.

In my marriage our three children die before they even drew a breath. In carrying the second I almost bled to my death upon the bathroom floor and at that same fate nodded with the conception of the third. All my living in those days contained the shadow of this threat as long as we tried to conceive.

I know now, but knew only then in the most hidden parts of me from myself, that for many years my husband carried on serial affairs with women trusted to his care as pastor of their congregations. When finally that knowing came to light one Sunday afternoon as I entered the empty church approaching his office door, there was nothing left to do but save myself, from the dark shadow of our lives and face the even deeper fear, Kierkegaard’s defiant despair at willing not to be myself, alone and suffering all hope of future finally dead. No parents or siblings to comfort me or ease this dark transition into the shadow world of the living of my days in grief of ever sharing heart and breath and life and hope with the child for whom I had so long longed and risked my life for the loving of one as yet untimely born.

In the desperation of my despairing heart, I turned to the pastor of my own church for comfort and support, for hope and help in the living of those dark days. His advice to me was to join another church where I would find more single people. In the dishevelment of my pain, believing I misunderstood his intent, I persisted over many months in pursuit of what I would, in time, come to know was not within him to impart. Unknowingly, I turned for compassion and support trusting my life in some of its deepest and darkest hours to a man whose office door was closed on a darkness which paralleled my own. Clergy sexual misconduct is a vile and evil thing which seeps its tentacles of betrayal and suffering, of abandonment and grief into every nook and cranny of every longing heart it touches.

Though my pastor did not violate my by body, with the help of our denomination’s local officials who knew of the affair he was having during the time I was seeing him for pastoral care and helped him keep our entire congregation in his darkness, his ignoble counsel, and my local denominational leaders violations as fiduciaries of my spiritual and emotional safety and wellbeing within the church, broke within me so many things I could not count the cost.

In the wreckage of this deep despair I journey even further into deaths shadows still and lost so many other things which were dear to me that nothing but my God could save me from the wasting of its consuming grief. And so I write of the grace which finds me on these dark shadows paths and leads into green pastures offering me rest beside still waters. In this blessedness of God my soul finds restore and the journey now within my heart prays seeking always God’s rod and staff, protection and guidance, for the living of my days. So I listen for grace wherever it is spoke. Amen.

Seek Others Seeking Faith

I am so very sorry that your dear son is gone from you and that he is not here to share the joys of this life with you and big his sister. And, gosh, how very sorry I am that, when you most needed the compassion and love that are at the core of Christ’s ministry, you ran across a Christian Vicar who so painfully, obviously has missed the point of Christ’s teachings and the faith.

There are a lot of boring (unless you like that kind of stuff) theological and biblical reasons why many Christians have strong reactions to the idea of Reincarnation; most of them having to do the soul going heaven to live with Jesus after death. I am also aware however, that there are many doctrines surrounding Reincarnation offered by Hinduism, Buddhism and other ancient Eastern and more contemporary spiritualities. And too, there are many ways that Christians understand both Reincarnation and the teaching of their own Christian traditions about life after death. The short answer is: no one really knows what happens after we are dead.

Though I am the kind of person that likes this boring kind of stuff, I find that on this grief journey of mine I am placing greater importance not on the thought that I will one day be reunited with Elizabeth, Claire and Alice, though I certainly hope and look forward to that, but on how I allow my grief of them to gentle into greater compassion and love as I seek and pray for healing. As I face the sorrow and pain of the loss of my Dear Little Ones, how I survive these griefs which seem unbearable reminds me that somewhere in the universe is a power greater and more powerful than they and that I survive only by its mercy and any growth I obtain is by its grace.

For me that power is the love and compassion of my crucified and risen Lord, but as I understand Buddhism--poorly perhaps, it could also be in my meditation, especially in my grief, on the Dharma or compassion of creation for myself and all living things. As I understand Hinduism--again I am sure quite poorly, I might be seeking, in my meditation on my grief, to know the truths my higher self might want me to know about this life on my grief journey.

I personally encourage you to seek out others who share your faith and who seek, as do you in its meaning, a gentling of life’s deep pains and sorrows.

My reading of Christian scripture and my knowing of Christ in prayer is of someone who would offer you compassion in your grieving, mercy a mid your pain and an offer of rest and comfort to you, no matter what you believed, in the name of the One he called by the Aramaic equivalent of Daddy.

Wishing you days of compassion, mercy, rest and comfort.

Nurse's Lament Psalm

The child lay dead—
yellow cervical collar stained with blood.

The plastic tube that once sustained, the breath of life
stands sad and lonely sentry over heroic efforts,
shifted now toward preparing sacred space
to contain a family’s grief.

This little one’s nurse attends
the small lifeless body, in all gentleness and compassion,
crying eyes which shed no tears.

Prayer offered, in earnest compassion, in the midst of unimaginable horror—
the washing of the blood from the mother’s dead child
gentle placing of clean gauze and sheets over sheer horror
gaping wounds which took this young life.

The Nurse’s Lament Psalm,
a holy offering of preparation
a place of gentle holding for a family’s unimaginable grief.
Amen.

Meeting God in Your Suffering

Your pain and anger seem so palpable, your sense that everything you ever believed in is gone from you, not just your babies, but also your faith—for which you so deeply long.

I honestly do not believe that God is gone from you. I believe that every time we turn to God, even in anguish or anger, in longing or in fear, it is God at work in us. We cannot turn to him unless he turns our hearts.

I think that if you believe that God has spoken to you in the past, that he still speaks in your life and that God wants you to continue to listen for him. In my experience, God speaks in many ways to many people and in different ways at different times in our lives.

Yes, your story is different from the ones to which you are comparing yourself, but I know your story is not so very different from the multitude of stories of women and men throughout the history of our faith who have been called by God to a deeper and more authentic faith through horrible struggles with pain and suffering.

I do not believe that God causes our suffering, I could never believe in a God who would take my three children, leave me childless and alone and have taken my parents lives while they were so young. I do believe that the God of the cross is a God who meets in our deepest suffering and shows us the way out. Paul called it the faith of fools and folly, yet he knew in the depth of his being. It is easy to have faith in a God who rushes in to save the day. It is a deeper and more profoundly faithful heart that continues to seek and listen for God when all seems lost.

I wonder what encouragement you might find if you asked God to speak to you in the silence. I wonder what hope you might find in asking God to meet you in your fear and offer you there his hand so that you might be led, in the living of your days to a kind of happiness and fulfillment which is never proclaimed by the prosperity preachers, portrayed in TV movies, written about in feel good books. The kind of happiness and fulfillment which comes to those who are willing to do the deep and tender work of bringing their suffering to God-of-suffering-and-the-conquering-of-suffering and pray for hope and faith, and trust that that God will bring your living to a new and better place than any you can imagine.

I Believe in the Deep Mystery of Creation

I believe in the Deep Mystery of creation. Every time egg and sperm meet they defy the odds—the Mystery shows itself. Every time implantation occurs and cells begin to develop and divide, the Deep Mystery takes form and shape.

If these were purely biology we could repeat the process over and over in the lab with consistent, predictable results. Even with all our hi-tech fertility procedures, we cannot. All we can do is set up optimum situations for the Mystery to make itself known.

My three Dear Little Ones, even though they never drew a breath, connected me to this Mystery in ways which continue to reveal themselves in blessing and by grace, as I live out my days in live and grief of them.

Over the years I've sat with so may people praying for a miracle. So very few get the answer they were looking for. I’ve only known one family, in all these years, whose prayers for their child were answered in the way most people define a miracle. A three year old child who, for all of medical knowledge, had only the smallest fraction of hope to live a severely limited existence, if at all, recovered completely. Today this child is a healthy grade-schooler, on the honor role and continues to hit all of his developmental milestones. His parents got their miracle. The Mystery revealed full of grace and blessing. Sadly, these seven years later these parents are divorced and in enmity with one another. Their miracle child is very beautiful, and very confused by all that’s going on in the family.

I mention this because it is teaching me that the miracle is not the point, as deeply as we long for it. The point really is to live with depth and compassion into all our important relationships, most especially when we are in pain, with ourselves. For me, it is in continuing to struggle with this living in which the Deep Mystery makes itself known, especially when I feel deep sorrow for the losses I must survive.

I must force myself to remember that for reasons that I cannot understand and actually hate, yes, hate, that death, the death of my children and of my parents when I was so young is a part of that Mystery. I must trust that, in time, the Mystery will make graces and blessings known as I continue to struggle the living of these days in the depth of life and compassion.