In the age of computers, still nearly twenty years ago now, I had a typewriter.
It’s okay. At that time, I didn’t want the garish IBM laptop that my previous employer had supplied me, with phone and brand-new car (so they could have access to my entire life). The typewriter did not come with obligations; it did what I wanted it to do. With diligent percussion obedience it struck ink onto a single sheet of paper with the precise purpose that my emotional fingers conveyed. So many times that typewriter subserviently acted as the mediator in my grief.
Having become a recently separated father, I’d lost my wife, my home, and worst, everyday access to my daughters. I was a broken man and there was nothing I or anyone else could do about it. I had to grieve, to pick up the pieces, to work hard at what I could.
Yet it’s only as I look back now at those sheets of sorrowful testimony that I see just what I often overlooked back then. I would so often be frustrated by my lack of ability to appease my grief — little did I realise I could not escape what I could not run from, for grief and love coalesce anachronistically in events we cannot control.
The sharper the pangs of grief,
the more love impresses itself on the heart
for the loss that craves that love
more poignantly than ever.
Grief contains those in their lament,
and if we’re not broken, love shines forth.
Yet, grief reinforces the tragic irony
that this ‘state’ cannot be fixed.
Such a realisation makes grief a hundred times worse in a moment. And yet, out of these courses, stronger we somehow emerge. Eventually. Years later. At times when the worst realities of all are realer than we could have ever imagined, somehow, we are given a supernatural portion of weakness to survive the tyranny.
There is truth in the idea that, for us to grow,
something must just about kill us.
In the bitter throes of lonely reflection, alone enough to come face-to-face with my inescapable lack before God, I would sob and type, type and sob. Even as I would sob, more emotion would come, and that would bring words that chiselled themselves onto the page. Many of those pages were tear-stained relics of a time when grief threatened weekly to rip me apart. I’d previously never contemplated that I had that many tears to shed.
Grief awakens us to unheard of realities.
Loss spills forth into stark bastions of aching numbness.
Looking out the window I’d wonder what had become of my life, which, until a short time earlier, had seemed so easy. And yet this wasteland that had arrived on my doorstep, that insisted on residing in my life with me, was in the final analysis a friendly witness to what God was doing deep inside me.
Some of the newest minutes and seconds were utterly foreign and the hours were often from the pit of hell — hours that were entire days in and of themselves. One hour could undo a day. And some days were straight from hell itself. But I had to find a way of expressing how I felt. And that deep wish became a miracle manifest in the words that stay with me today.
There were literally a hundred or more heavy days, where my fullest expression seemed never to help, yet, by faith, I continued to engage in the truth of my losses. I had no choice other than to do what I felt was the only thing that helped. And realistically, I for one had no choice other than to engage in the grief because denial was not an option for me.
Then I found the truth in this:
Immersed in adversity, faith paddles tenaciously,
and, in the pool of ambiguity,
faith swims upstream toward the unseen origin of hope.
~
Rarely, if ever, does sorrow find adequate expression in words, but on the papers I have kept, I see now how those journals did help.
Although sorrow is the hardest thing to capture in words, we must attempt to engage, to make meaning, to traverse the chasm between grief and healing.
When we are suffering, especially when we are suffering, that is the time to engage, to commit to the earnestness of the journey and not flinch in one or more of many manifestations of denial.
I found for me, even as I peer back to those times nearly 20-years ago, there were many ways that I was provided for and protected even though I didn’t always see it at the time.
Faith in the time of trial can deliver us into the clutches of life itself. We don’t see it at the time. We see it later. The key is to keep striding if not stumbling forward.
Times of trial we may discern something giving us power or peace to carry on, and we don’t know why. Rather than interrogate the feeling it is best to simply be thankful. Gratitude does coalesce with suffering, as the time of trial delivers us to humility.
That faithful typewriter delivered me upon a miracle; precious words to that meant much.
No comments:
Post a Comment