sans birds

When Meaning Breaks

I’ve switched out this month’s scheduled Substack for a letter to acknowledge the heart rending tragedy in Texas.

But what words could meet it? When I sat down in my cedar office to write, what came to mind was simply space --- the gap between paragraphs getting wider and wider. Two-dimensional silence.

When disaster strikes, I think sans birds. It refers to my sister’s painful reflection that the cards she received in the mail when she was dying with pictures of birds on them were particularly unhelpful. She so wished she could fly away. But she could not. The card she actually stuck on her fridge said: If you’re going through hell, keep going.

Words do not work very well for this kind of terror. My kids were taught by a top teacher at their very fine New York City high school that every single word in their essays ‘has to hold water’. But this is precisely what words cannot do now. They cannot hold: cannot hold down, cannot hold up, cannot hold on.

The only words that feel apt, like they could stand in, are words about the space itself --- the sudden, spinning nothing.

I pulled Lament for a Son off my book shelf this past week, a gorgeous witness of grief by Nicholas Wolterstorff, Yale theologian and philosopher, whose son, Eric, died tragically at twenty-five while mountain climbing in Europe. I read it in my own season of grief, but when I started to flip back through it, I realized I had no memory of what appeared to be its deliberately punctuated layout.

Space. So much negative space – half and three-quarters of pages appeared to just be missing. Tears started rolling before I re-read a single sentence.

It’s oft repeated by Christians that the Spirit groans on our behalf, when, in deep grief, words won’t come. But for some reason, all these years, I’ve been reading that piece of scripture wrong. It didn’t occur to me until this past week that Paul does not say we’ll groan because we have no words. What he says is that in our wild, obliterative state, even our groan will have to be provided. Given. We will have nothing of ourselves. Not even that.

The following sentence is the whole of page 41 from Lament for Son:

What does it mean, Eric dead, removed from our presence, covered with earth, inert? Or is such a shattering of love beyond meaning for us, the breaking of meaning ----mystery, terrible mystery.

Earlier in the book Wolterstorff returns to the library where his son was completing his master’s thesis; it, like he, would be left unfinished:

I stand before the library, where he spent so many days of his last months. He’s walking up these steps, through those doors, to the desk, asking for a book, receiving it, sitting down at a table ---- which one? ---- copying out these notes I have.

No, I see nothing; no form at all, not even a trace. All bone and muscle gone, the steps swept clear --- no smile, no sturdy step, no bright intelligence, no silhouette…Where he should be, I stare straight through.

Turn it back. Stop the clock and turn it back, back to that last Friday, that last Saturday. Let him do it over: get up late this time, too late to climb, read a book, wait for his brother. Let him do it right this time. Let us all do it right.

The cresting of his lament continues: It won’t stop; it keeps going, unforgiving, unrelenting. The gears and breaks are gone…Is there no one who can slow it down, make it stop, turn it back?

Is there no one? I don’t like that question. But it’s a fair one. As Christians we ask it and wrestle. This is where the pat answers and bad theology might come rolling out on squeaky wheels dressed in cheap linen. Here are the birds.

Sans birds I say. Silence is better. Horror more honest. The mystery too very terrible.

What stopped me at the library scene though was strangely the question he asks about the table, his son’s choosing: …which one? Yes. Which one? Which table? Where will he sit down to work? Where will he study? And write? And finish?

And then my mind turns back to Camp Mystic and keeps going: Which bunk? Which bed? Which girl? Which pillow and blanket from home? Which hand to hold? When will she awake then? With the sun? Where will she want to go?

Lord, God, we pray you would be with the crushed in spirit and those directly loving and serving them. Amen, Amen, Amen.

We’ll continue storytelling next time. Until then and beyond. Xo k