Everywhere an altar

I recently haunted a local memorial garden for bereaved families who have lost a child. I had been there before the loss of our oldest, while hiking with our three children, and found it meaningful. Now, I’m part of the place–a lovely, thoughtful spot overshadowed by trees, connected to a sunny wildflower meadow. Around a whimsical bronze statue of children playing leapfrog are laid bricks engraved in memory of lost children. Among them are six stones bearing quotations selected to comfort the grieving, and possibly to remind all parents of the brevity of childhood. Some of these quotes used to bother me, before I ever dreamed I’d lose a child. They still do. While I may be treading on the solemn ground of others’ tears and treasured beliefs, I try to move with care–to understand the intention, even as I wrestle with the words.

“Children are the most precious natural resource,” reads the first stone. I admire the sense of priority, but wince at the expediency suggested by the word “resource.” When people are thought of as resources to be appropriated, something is lost…even when it is “for the greater good.” I was once a public school teacher, laboring under the expedient rhetoric of preparing children for a 21st century workforce. It seemed to me that our American obsession with usefulness sometimes blinds us to what it means to be human.  Even worse is my own tendency to treat my kids as a means to satisfy my desire for meaning.

“Blessed indeed are the people who hear gentle voices call them Father or Mother,” says another carved brick. Yes. And yet there is a death in the blessing of being reborn into parenthood. Many parents lose themselves along the way, and when one’s identity lies only in being Mom or Dad, we become less effective at the role, paradoxically. How to mature–which would be more like resurrection than the walking dead–as we die daily to the people we were before we had children? And how might those who do not raise children mature differently?

“Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go on walking outside your body.” Here, I stop. I have quoted this many times. This is what motherhood feels like. 

I remember my earliest rhetorical event dealing with this visceral subject. I was not yet a mother, but was sitting in my 10th grade English class, reading the Genesis account of Abraham sacrificing Isaac. “Rosie,” Mr. Rosendale, a teacher whom I adored, had chosen and introduced the text with an impish gleam in his eye. I knew better than to be threatened by the chasm that seemed to divide our worldviews at the time. I was not under attack, and neither was my faith. Rosie was an honest seeker of truth, and he wanted us to be, too. I had several friends and many acquaintances in the class. Yet the room had gone hostile, for just a moment. With a dry throat, I raised my hand to respond to my classmate’s incredulous question: “What kind of God would ask a father to sacrifice His son?!”

The context of this story, I explained, was the culture of Canaanite religions. Many surrounding fertility cults engaged in child and infant sacrifice and as a way of appeasing deities such as Ba’al and Molech, to ensure a fruitful harvest and make a difficult life more bearable. In the ancient mind it was intuitive: to right the wrongs in a world full of tragedy, one must petition the gods with something precious. Innocent blood must be shed. (I often wonder that God, who does not need blood to purge anything, seems to understand that the human mind does, and makes allowance for this while steering people away from the human sacrifice and ritual bloodletting prevalent in the ancient world.) Yet in this story, Abraham’s God demonstrates that no sacrifice will ever be enough, human or otherwise: God Himself will have to provide what’s needed to right the world’s wrongs. Far from requiring child sacrifice, God abolishes it, and provides a ram for sacrifice that foreshadows the death of His son Jesus, on a cross outside Jerusalem, I finished. I do not claim to have won anyone over that day, but at least the air came back into the room.

More than a decade later, I contended with this same classmate while I was deployed to Afghanistan. We had fallen out of touch, but she took issue with an article by Federica Matthews-Greene, which I shared on Facebook. Getting past our initial shock at reconnecting for the first time since graduation over this divisive issue, we each fell back on the mutual trust and respect we had built in our 10th grade English class. We quickly found our limits for collegial discussion in that forum, so we moved our conversation to a private chat. We recovered our sense of goodwill toward each other, in spite of deep differences. (Within a few years, I would leave Facebook altogether on a Lenten experiment. Though I occasionally miss the ability to reconnect with old classmates and acquaintances, I never miss the routine invective.)

The question of ritual sacrifice–whether human, animal, or aught else–is bound to boil anyone’s blood. “I desire mercy, and not sacrifice,” says Abraham’s God, and yet the psychology of the moment when this father risks losing his son is beautifully whole. It is, spiritually speaking, what every parent must do daily: offer up our dreams for children’s futures with gratitude and trust, relinquish our illusion of control over them. The patriarch is transformed by this act of entrusting his finest hopes and wishes for the future–in the form of his son–to the higher power. The concept of a noble and worthy sacrifice is also what many women invoke when faced with an unwanted pregnancy. I have known some of these women personally, and sat with them as they pondered the quality of life for their families and children… and a new baby, if born at the wrong time. Sometimes, tragically, they’d concluded that no life was better than a life that was too hard…which turns out to be the same calculus going on in ancient Canaan, rather than merely modern one. 

That same winter in Kandahar after reconnecting with my high school classmate, I picked up the book “How to be a Woman,” by Journalist and author Caitlin Moran, from the care package table. In it, Moran details her own experience with abortion, and her sadness at the knowledge that she was ending a fantastic, tap-dancing little life… a life that she believed could not be, for the sake of her children and herself. She was simply stretched too thin, and that part of her life was over, she reasoned, and she did not mince words. Perhaps not unlike a ancient pagan, she knew that she was taking a life, but felt that it was a brave and necessary sacrifice on her part. Reading her words, I was a wife and mother at war, familiar with the honor codes that can be associated with socially sanctioned forms of violence. I could not celebrate her choice, but I could understand her bewilderment at the hypocrisy of what Pope John Paul II called the “culture of death” at work in our world: 

“I cannot understand anti-abortion arguments that centre on the sanctity of life. As a species we’ve fairly comprehensively demonstrated that we don’t believe in the sanctity of life. The shrugging acceptance of war, famine, epidemic, pain and life-long poverty shows us that, whatever we tell ourselves, we’ve made only the most feeble of efforts to really treat human life as sacred.”

Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman (2011)

The sacred is, by definition, worthy of sacrifice… even when we are tempted to talk ourselves out of it. I have a love-hate relationship with sacrifice. At times, I play the martyr, avoiding the action I ought to take in defense of the sacred. I can also die to the wrong things, as Geri Scazzero explains in “The Emotionally Healthy Woman.” (2013) As my husband and I continue to grieve the loss of our oldest daughter, Gwyn, and parent our two surviving daughters, our relationship with sacrifice becomes even more nuanced. I recently shared how the work of mourning has both challenged and comforted us during this year of bereavement, reframing her loss at the age of 11 to brain cancer as a kind of meaningful sacrifice. 

When Gwyn’s terminal cancer journey began, I told God, “I will not play tug of war with you over this child. But do not make me join those women who prepared your body for burial. You cannot ask me to do it, because I am not strong enough to be in their company.” By the time I prepared her body for burial with my own hands, it was not because I was strong enough, but because I was in good company–the community of the Cross. Every act of service–dressing, bathing, massage, chauffeuring, packing, traveling, doling out medicine, sitting quietly together, reading, comforting–was an act of rehearsal for that awful moment, so that it became quite serene. It is what St. Paul described as a “fellowship of suffering,” with Christ himself.

It is exquisitely painful to outlive one’s child, whatever the cause of death, and no matter the quality of life before and after. An untimely death also reifies the little sacrifices that belong to us, the survivors. Here is a short list of routine moments I now dignify as sacrifices, however small:

• getting out of bed against the weight of despair.
• re-teaching the teary-eyed five year old how to make toast before the comfort of coffee.
• helping the urgent 9-year-old with the sewing project that has shattered one’s focus.
• giving up the illusion of progress as the laundry remains half-folded, for a good cry.
• feeling unaccomplished, leaving the messages unsent, to come to bed with one’s spouse.
• the soreness that comes from weeding and tending new plants in the memorial garden.
• feeling one’s vitality drain away as conversations inevitably tend toward the mundane. (It is difficult to dwell on the minutiae of “normal” parent fears, which can seem silly by comparison during bereavement. Even legitimate concerns can provoke irritation. One swallows the urge to grab others by the shoulders and scream, “At least you have your child to worry yourself about– RELAX!!!” I confess that I am only just beginning to explore better ways to navigate this, rather than stuffing my frustration, and learning from other bereaved parents.)

Bearing these little deaths in mind, I approach the next stone in the garden. 

“Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.” With this admonishment, we enter the mystery of the Trinity: Father and Son, breathing between them the loving Spirit that powers the whole Creation. This is the eternal dance, the perichoresis, which we also experience as relational creatures. The freedom to love and be loved, without possessiveness or fear, is what we are after, and what we too often miss.

This reminds me of another stone in the children’s memorial garden, which reads, “There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One is roots, the other is wings.” Clearly, one does not need to visit Mt. Moriah, like Abraham, to go on the pilgrimage of giving up one’s child. Or, for that matter, to give up one’s work, one’s leisure, one’s time or treasure… We are always in the act of either hoarding or offering up our finest dreams and resources. There are little altars everywhere: one only needs to sit still enough to sense where the nearest one may be. 

An altar is, after all, a special table. And a table is for gathering, for talking, for practicing and preparing, for sharing and dividing, for mixing and distributing, for slicing, scraping, tenderizing, serving, washing, pouring, folding, scraping, kneading, tenderizing, testing, savoring, adventuring and experimenting… Everything we can do at a table comes from the surrounding life which brings us to the table, and is potentially an act of deliberate self-offering to others, a sacrifice.

“All things come of thee, O Lord, and of thine own have we given unto thee.”

Offering prayer from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, 1928

The most enigmatic stone is last. It reads: “Bitter are the tears of a child. Sweeten them. Deep are the thoughts of a child. Quiet them. Sharp is the grief of a child. Take it from him. Soft is the heart of a child. Do not harden it.”

I can affirm the first and last sentiments here, but the middle is a problem, for me. A child’s deep thoughts, to be truly quieted, must be allowed to be spoken, without minimizing them. How many times, in the name of comforting a child, do adults tell outright lies? “Everything will be okay,” when it will not. “I’ll always be with you,” when we cannot guarantee this, in the way they mean. 

The child is not fooled by these attempts to smooth over the horrors of life. Better to dignify their fears as valid, and encourage them to be brave, together: “That is a difficult thing to be thinking about. It’s something many people wonder about, at times.” Rather than quieting deep thoughts, we can invite them. When a child knows that she is safe to wonder aloud, even when the sought-after answers don’t come, this dignifies her. That’s how it was with our Gwyn, as she struggled with the mystery of healing sought, but not realized, the loss of brain and body function, the way that cancer compromised her enjoyment of life and her relationship to others, and especially her understanding of her nearness to death. Even while bedridden, she embodied courage as simply fear, walking.

A child’s sharpest grief ought not to be taken from her, either. Her psyche will do what’s needed to survive: fight or flight, freeze, distract, forget, or numb until the day she is big enough to begin to face it, if it’s just too big. But the notion that an adult can (or should) take a child’s sadness away is an illusion. It also implies that grief is somehow out of place in the human experience. Mr. Rogers was fond of saying that “anything human is mentionable, and anything mentionable is manageable.” Grief is deeply human, and so it is both mentionable and manageable, especially with children. There is treasure waiting in its shadowy places, teaching us that beauty and connection are both fragile and fleeting. Grief orients us toward what we love most in life.

Clearly, what I have needed to say won’t fit easily on a brick: I’ve ended up with this lengthy blog post. But if I could rewrite that last quote, framing it in the context of appropriate, parental self-sacrifice, I would say instead:

“Abandon the natural desire to keep your child from ever suffering. There is powerful blessing in a skinned knee, brilliant wisdom in disturbing thoughts, and deep love in the most sorrowful tears. This child came, in part, to prevent your heart from becoming hardened. And you can return the favor.”