Why Read? Why Write?

Wait? You, too?

After a while, we just get worn away by our own stories.

Nick Cave

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“We read to know we are not alone.”

C.S. Lewis

Dear Friend,

Thank you for your question - the one about, “What is this whole thing about, anyway?” And by this whole thing, I think you were asking, “Why does this newsletter exist in the first place?”

It’s complicated. Or maybe it’s not at all complicated. Maybe it’s always been so that I might introduce you to some new and dear friends. Yes, I think it might be that simple.

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It’s very early in the morning. Still hours away from daybreak, and as is usually the case, my filters are the last parts to rub the sleep from their eyes. I think I might be able to rock them back to sleep just a few minutes longer, and if I can, I will tell you the Truth. And perhaps not just my own truth. Perhaps it’s yours and perhaps it might even be universal.

Until relatively recently, I believed I played the role of a misfit, that I was the comedic relief in some grand drama - you know, the jester who is always a few lines behind the rest of the cast, and sprinting, breathlessly, to keep up, but rarely succeeding and generally looking foolish in the effort. I recall the first time I mentioned this to my spiritual director - this feeling that I was out of step with just about everybody, and that maybe I was never completely in on the real game that everybody else seemed to understand intuitively.

She didn’t flinch. Didn’t affirm. Didn’t do anything other than nod her head gently, as if she already knew this feeling deep in her very own soul. I wondered if she was recalling that feeling in herself from some distant memory. It’s entirely possible I am imagining her recognition of this feeling, but I don’t think so. Perhaps you, too, recognize it. Maybe from long ago, but maybe - and more likely from not so very long ago - like maybe even from this morning before you stirred from your bed.

It’s stunning to me how often I hear people say similar things these days. Some of my best friends are increasingly leaning into their “mis-fitness,” which is probably why I love them as I do.

And this is why I write. Because there have been many before me who not only felt these feels and wondered the same wonders that wake me in the early morning, but also many who dared to speak them out loud, and because they did, I knew, at last, I am not alone. I want-hope to believe there might be someone who reads these words, and if only once in a while, smiles, and wonders to him/herself:

“Wait? You, too, Chris?”

That suggests a far more selfless motive than I can claim, because being with, like Love, never flows in one direction. When you say to me, “Yes, I do remember, and it feels good to know that I am not alone.” Aren’t you offering me the exact same thing?

You are, of course, and I gratefully accept.I cherish your being-withness to me.

So this is not a substack about Glioblastoma multiforme at all. Nor is this intended to be a journal about the terminal disease, or even about walking through the valley of the shadow - just as each of us will someday walk.

No. Those are the very parts of my story that are wearing me away. Rather, it’s intended to be about being human and about recognizing that we are, each of us, longing for with-ness, because we were made that way, and I hope it offers a hint of the promise of the grand with-ness that I believe is available to each of us. Not someday but here and now.

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The saints have been hard at work this week. They are leaving so much grain that I am hardly able to keep up with their offerings or gather them up effectively. This week, my son, unexpectedly sent me a link to this podcast, which I cannot recommend highly enough, and which moved me more deeply than he could have known it would, and eventually led me to the essay I quoted above. But keeping up with so many saint offerings is not a difficult burden to bear. Keeping up is not the goal, nor is collecting every shaft of wheat that they have left behind. Following at a comfortable pace is the goal. And if I don’t get to everything they leave for me, I think it’s fine. There will be others to walk this path after me, and perhaps it is good to leave something for them to glean, not only from me, but from those who preceded us - who preceded each of us.

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One of the things that I struggled with in the beginning of this journey was letting go of the pain of my loved ones who will outlive me. It seems a common theme for the people I meet on this section of the trail. Everyone is worried about those they will leave behind. Nick Cave is good at naming this sort of thing:

And, of course, if you have been fortunate enough to have been truly loved, in this world, you will also cause extraordinary pain to others when you leave it. That’s the covenant of life and death, and the terrible beauty of grief.

Nick Cave

The suffering of those we love might be the last fear-wall to fall to hope. I’m finding that I am growing less fearful of the inevitable and (perhaps) extra ordinary pain to others that my death might cause, and turning toward to the hope that being broken apart might bring - the hope which is the paradox of the terrible beauty of grief.

A few months back I wrote about what I hoped for Kathryn and my boys, and you after I am gone, and it was this: That you might find and accept the grace and the courage to let the pain open you to the grandeur and God’s extravagant Love for you - and the deep, deep joy of Life, itself.

I hesitate to type those words, sounding as they might, like pap or platitudes or uncomfortably cliché.

(But the filters are still napping quietly, so let’s keep going.)

I feel qualified enough to recognize the unbearable-undeniable truth of the terrible beauty of grief, and to hope that those who might feel deep sorrow might also embrace the beauty that dares to accompany it, almost always hand-in-hand.

Grief offered me no choice. Losing Abi, just three weeks before her twenty-eighth birthday shattered the illusion that I might ever make real sense of the world in which I lived, or the world that I might whimsically believe myself capable of controlling. Grief demanded that I accept my own impotence. Yet Grief and her sister, Sorrow were patient companions as I considered whether or not to surrender to my impotence, or to continue to fight for the illusion of my control. For me, there was no real choice. Grief and Sorrow waited patiently - and maybe even lovingly - for my surrender.

There was such a vulnerability and potential in accepting impotence.

Potential as powerlessness, ironically. Not the potential to do something, but the potential not to do something.

Nick Cave

I now feel an ineffable freedom that came with surrender to the bright abyss of my being, in recognizing and embracing the empty that made me human, the empty that God had planted in the beginning that allowed me, finally to recognize I was missing something critically important, and that I was not the jester I believed I was, but that I was being awoken to who I was always intended to be. After unconditional surrender, it was but a tiny step into consenting to being love by God - contenting to being loved by God - without imposing conditions or striving to be lovable enough was my only hope of survival. It was consent to God, who is love, or oblivion, or annihilation. This is one of those rare places where there was no middle ground.

There was nothing logical in the “yes” that had lain dormant for years, but which finally and gracefully germinated in a season where only Grace would do, and I do believe it was grace and grief that cracked the hardened seed coat.

Richard Rohr, says it this way:

…there are only two major paths by which the human soul comes to God: the path of great love, and the one of great suffering. Both finally come down to great suffering—because if we love anything greatly, we will eventually suffer for it. When we’re young, God hides this from us. We think it won’t have to be true for us. But to love anything in depth and over the long term, we eventually must suffer.

Richard Rohr

In his essay, The Cross and the Machine, Paul Kingsnorth writes of a novel by John Moreiarty, which still sits unopened on my desk:

For years, John Moriarty wrote, he had been engaged in “a genuine search for the truth, not merely a speakable truth, but a truth he would surrender to.” Now he realized, with a terrible inevitability, that there was only one story that could hold what he had seen, only “one prayer that was big enough.” He had, he wrote, been “shattered into seeing.” Whether he liked it or not, he had become a Christian.”

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Later Kingsnorth writes about himself:

In the end, though, I didn’t become a Christian because I could argue myself into it. I became a Christian because I knew, suddenly, that it was true. The Angelus that was chiming in the abyss is silent now, for the abyss is gone. Someone else inhabits me.

Paul Kingsnorth

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Wait, you, too, John?

Wait, you, too, Paul?

Wait, you, too, Friend?

If I go back to the last post, it feels important to say that I have no hope in grief or sorrow, but I have complete faith in what we find who finds us when we have the courage to go through it with integrity and honesty.

Oremus,

Ç

Father,

It’s hard for me to thank you for the abyss of sorrow and grief, yet I thank you.

For how else might we know that we have run from you?

How else might we know that You are hunting us so gently and patiently?

Not to consume us, but to be with us and in us, as only You can be. Because You are, I am.

How else the grace to be still enough not to flinch at the steady, unrelenting approach of You - whom we so earnestly desire both to meet and not to meet.