“It’s just, you know, whenever I think about those seven bullets…I….“
“I wish I didn’t feel this so much”
So I repeat, in my weekly therapy session, looking away from the camera and to the floor of my study – holding back tears (just about) as I recount, but actually fail to articulate, the pain and shock I feel as I contemplate my friends murder. A death which, I still struggle to accept, as each time I contemplate the words:
“seven bullets to the chest and abdomen”
“shot at home”
“collapsed in the street”
“pronounced dead at hospital”
“October 2nd 2023”
a litany all of its own, of words I can’t quite believe relate to someone I know (knew?) loved and have lost…to this day, I have no idea of what has happened to Josh’s murderer, or even the latest on the case because, I simply cannot bear to read what emerges each time I have googled his name. This might seem weird, but it’s where I am.
2023 was a year of death, and it started in death, taking the worst of 2022 with it. A year which, at its end, carried its own losses. As I said to my therapist “so many people just slipped out of the room that year” as I recount the sudden death of three friends over 2023, and the sudden death of my grandmother on Christmas Eve. Liturgy might be an odd place to go with all this violence, all this death – but liturgy has been the place where all this seems to, for me, unfold.
“and how is your prayer life?” asks my potential new spiritual director.
“well…” I say, and then ensues a long, honest, account of its near impossibility.
“I’m surprised I survived 2023 really. That’s partly what the emotion’s about…”
In the vein of Rabbi Heschel, I do today what I can do. Faithfulness is sometimes being faithful to the moments when we remember we had faith…
Suddenly it dawns on me, that talking in the past tense about a year which has ended according to the calendar, but not according to my body was both naive and hilarious.
Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So, a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.
Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.
Pray for us now. Grade 1 piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child’s name as though they named their loss.
Darkness outside. Inside, the radio’s prayer –
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.
(Carol Ann Duffy)
Human nature would like all things to make sense, to be linear – for the passing of time to equate to the making of sense, the healing of wounds, the lightening of sorrow – but liturgical time reminds us that life with God, doesn’t operate quite like that. Here, in liturgical time – tomorrow is today, yesterday is tomorrow, today is yesterday and we, all of us, are both what we are and what we are not yet.
“I wish I didn’t feel this so much”
My repeated refrain as I articulate: confusion, irritation, even maybe guilt (?) at the way the previous years grief still weighs on me in a way which I perhaps, foolishly assumed a move from one place to the other might help me process, or if I am honest, leave behind. But no, the distant chanting of the train persists – I must grieve and live, mourn and love, laugh and weep, despair and hope, be both moving and totally still.
But the tears come. Mostly when I can hide them. Late at night, randomly in the day, as I shovel chicken shit, or make tea, or call on God at the altar – that one place where, held by the faithful, prayer is possible. In fact it is here, always, that they come – most profoundly in the middle of the liturgy or towards the end of a sermon. And perhaps it is here, in the words I use which are not mine but wrought in the moment or from some ancient past, that I find myself tripping up emotionally as I find myself attended to by the one so many of us assume demands our attention…attention. That form of generosity, that form of, as Simone Weil says, love.
‘The highest intimacy with God is expressed in words that we do not invent but that invent us, in that they find us and discover us where we were without knowing it.’
– Jean-Louis Chretién (The Ark of Speech)
I have always shed tears in the presence of God, but not so frequently as now. I’ve always said, and my closest friends know, that I don’t cry frequently but I do cry easily. Those are not the same thing. And it should be some small comfort to me to be reminded, as I was the other day by a spiritual intimate, of the fact that Saint John Henry Newman cried almost always when he preached, and that he too, hated it. Isn’t this what the maniple is for? Perhaps he too, was weighed down at times by the world’s grief – or overcome, as I so often am, by something other than pain – by a crushed but revived joy. It is the awareness that this (what we proclaim in the liturgy and what we hear in the Gospels) isn’t for my comfort or yours, but is ridiculously, actually true. It is the kind of thing that induces an annihilating awe which is the very opposite of an opiate that brings to birth that bloody lump in my throat that stops my speech in its tracks when I realise that Thomas’s doubt was really healed by what he saw, and that Christ’s words “peace be with you” to his fearful friends are words the risen christ speaks to me, and to my own soul, in the room in which I have fled from him and his power and his truth. Lord, how did you get in here?!
What I am discovering in the school of prayer, in a world of genocide and lies and so much death – is what Father Henri Nouwen once spoke of so beautifully:“I am beginning to see that much of praying is grieving. This grief is so deep not just because the human sin is so great, but also – and more so – because the divine love is so boundless. To become like the Father whose only authority is compassion, I have to shed countless tears and so prepare my heart to receive anyone, whatever their journey has been, and forgive them from that heart”
And liturgy, the work of the people for God’s glory, has always been this type of place – a school, a ‘laboratory of the Spirit’, a place of encounter with God, with eachother, with the deeper most true parts of us….and any sense of desiring comfort from prayer has to be handed over…God will do something in me that I cannot control or anticipate – and that is frightening but if I could hide here, from God, he would not be God…and so it has ridden me of any false refuge I once took in liturgical sentimentality. I realise now that more and more I detest uncomplicated piety and the aesthetics of holiness because they allow me to continue to come to the presence of God defended. But the thing about carrying so much loss is that one really realises life is too short. God, the great un-masker knows me well enough to know that the ground in me in which some good can be sown is dug up, turned over, ready for sowing now, and only now.
“seven bullets to the chest and abdomen”
“shot at home”
“collapsed in the street”
“pronounced dead at hospital”
“October 2nd 2023”
Give me the faith wrought in the momentary disbelief and despair that feels as though it will be here for ever, and one day, against our will, just fades – over a desire to be in control in the presence of God. Perhaps this is the truest type of idolatry. God’s grace is awful. It’s terrifying. God’s love both cradles us and grinds us to dust – and the ground upon which I stand could today be Bethlehem, or Calvary, or Eden – and I do not get to choose which or when or how. To be in exile with tears for consolation is, perhaps, the work. Can a blessing be made out of this, I wonder? I don’t need to know, but maybe.
‘…even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our own despair,
against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.‘
– Aeschylus 5th c BC
I shouldn’t be surprised that the liturgy refuses to allow me to resist God. Gregory of Nazianzus knew this…that: ‘through the irregularity and fluctuation of our experience, God leads us to what is stable and enduring, and beckons us to seek him alone and to be illumined by the beams of light that come from him. Through the irregularity of things that are seen and shift back and forth, God directs us to those things that are stable and enduring.’ (Gregory Nazianzen, Oration 17.4) in other words God uses the liturgy to bring us into the truth – causes us to stand alongside him and to look on reality in his light as the end of all things is brought to us, God uses the liturgy not just to sanctify time, but to burn away our refusal to look upon things as they truly are. As Maximus the Confessor says: ‘since our Lord Jesus Christ is the beginning, middle, and end of all the ages, past and future, the end of the ages – specifically that end which will actually come about by grace for the deification of those who are worthy – has come upon us in potency through faith.’ (Maximus, Ad Thalassium 22). So heaven, the heaven which is my friends habitation – is made real in Adamsdown, in our mass, in our worship, in my hell whenever it descends on me, in me – against my constant cry that an epiclesis might descend on the rubble that I am…the light which streams through the window and makes the incense and stained glass seem like the beatific vision, isn’t chance – heaven has come down to earth and earth taken up into heaven. I am not where I think I am, nor desire to be. If eternity is eternal it can have no beginning or end. I do not have to be dead to see it.
“I wish I didn’t feel this so much”
But the tears are not a mark of sadness. They are mark of a soul which has touched mystery and is overcome by it. “We live in and by our senses, which are conditioned in and by our deaths when some singular aspect of reality: an object, a person, even a duration of time seems to acquire a life in excess of itself what we feel is more complicated than joy. This is because that excess is at once some inexplicable ongoing-ness of a thing and the loss of a thing as it is – at once eternity and oblivion, and this is why poetry is so powerful…and so integral to any unified spiritual life, it preserves both aspects of the spiritual experience because to name is to praise and lose in one instant…” writes Christian Wiman.
The liturgy reminds me that it is not just God whom I love and long for, but my friends and family – those whose voices are hushed in the sound of death. It is this longing that perhaps makes liturgy somewhat unbearable…one has to attend to the eternal, the now and not yet. And it is the absence of this level of meaning that makes so much of religion unbearable. Who hasn’t been in the midst of a liturgy and wished it over? Yet, if we can summon the will to attend to it we are so often brought back to life. As the (God-willilng) soon to be canonised Sister Thea Bowman once challenged us: “Don’t ask what can the liturgy do for me, but what can I do for the liturgy?”. Bring our whole, messy, complicated selves might not be a bad answer.
Here, as we gather in this ark of salvation with an unseen captain at the helm, we do not get to dictate our destination…and in that sense again, I feel, the liturgy mimics the very same rupture in language and meaning and speech that trauma works in us. I fall silent here, before the mystery that I am and the mystery that God is – feeling neither understanding nor wholly understood. But unlike in the rest of life, just held.
~ //Here, wounded by the infinite, my speech, my story – my grief – offers itself to the Lord. Paul Celan spoke of this in his 1958 Bremen Prize speech: ‘Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss. But it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech. It went through. It gave me no words for what was happening, but went through it. Went through it and could resurface, ‘enriched’ by it all.’ Yes, “it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Hebrews. 10.31)// ~
Liturgical time is perhaps the only place for this, where the dead do such great things. Like the grief and woundedness we carry, and like the healing we so desperately seek – nothing is linear. So much of praying is grieving…
mercy and grace and gratitude and surrender and sorrow and joy and…
Standing at the altar, with Christ’s body and blood in my hands and on my lips – the tragedy of life is taken into me as my wounds are touched by the wounds of God and the pain – the cruciform pain – at the centre of all things finds its meaning in God’s body:
‘Great is the mystery of faith’
Life in death. Triumph in surrender. Beauty in brokenness.
“Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.”
“seven bullets to the chest and abdomen”
“shot at home”
“collapsed in the street”
“pronounced dead at hospital”
and still, here, today…. ‘Go in the peace of Christ. Alleluia!’ ‘Thanks be to God. Alleluia!’
And then, when all appears to be almost said and done, the blessing and dismissal given, the angelus sung, our alleluia’s fading into silence – then heaven and earth are forced once more to collide…
“The Lord be with you,
And also with you.
Let us bless the Lord,
Thanks be to God.
May the souls of the faithful departed through the mercy of God, rest in peace…”
~ ~ ~ ~
‘And may the God of peace sanctify you, completely, and keep you whole – body, soul and spirit….until Christ comes again’ – 1 Thess. 5.23
Lost in Wonder, Love, and Praise 