My father passed away on Christmas Day.
Even though he was 89, the hospital call informing us that he was “letting go” was a sad surprise: it wasn’t his long struggles with COPD and atrial fibrillation or even the suspected prostate cancer worrying him that ultimately caused his death. A stone lurking invisibly in his gallbladder set off the downward spiral that ended his life within a week after its removal.
In these bittersweet months of gratitude and grief, I’ve thought about how often, over the years, my dad would repeat a line from the song in the old mountain man movie Jeremiah Johnson, reminding us that “a story doesn’t always go the way you had in mind.”
When you think about it, it hardly ever does. Disrupted plans and sorrow seem inevitable in this broken world.
But my dad didn’t think this stubborn truth rendered his life meaningless. He was already a widower of several years when he lost Andy, his robust second son, to COVID 19. That same month Dad himself was sent to a rehabilitation facility to recover alone from his own bout with COVID.
“Bring me my Bible,” he said when I called him. “I need to read the book of Job.”
That story of a righteous man’s sorrow and degradation contained solace for my preacher father, who (with the possible exception of Andy) had for the longest time seemed the strongest man in the world to me.
Job, too, had a story that didn’t go the way he had in mind.
Don’t we all? But why on earth would anybody find comfort in the story of Job, who lost all his children, his health, and even the respect of his wife and friends?
“What’s the alternative?” Dad would sometimes ask when you pushed him in this line of thinking. Fair question.
After railing at God for failing to give Job the answer to why he was suffering, God gave him something bigger: a vision of a cosmos far, far beyond the grasp of human understanding. That majestic glimpse silenced all Job’s questions. “I had heard of you with the hearing of the ear,” he said, “but now my eyes have seen you.” And he was, finally, at peace.
Our finite nature isn’t big enough to always understand why, but apparently if we could break out of our self-enclosed egos and contemplate the overwhelming grandeur at play in the universe, the personal God and loving Source of all being would overtake those stubborn whys and replace them with awe.
What’s the alternative?
I challenged many things in my father’s worldview over the decades we had together. But we ultimately agreed on the one thing that made all the difference in both our lives: The viable alternatives always come down to two: faith or nihilism, and we choose faith in the Man of Sorrows, who told us to expect trouble in this world while assuring us that he had overcome it.
That paradox becomes more solid for me when I read the gritty stories of southern Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor. She painted that choice in the most stark and violent terms, revealing that true conversion heals, but not before it hurts. For her, the doubts of those who want to believe cause the greatest suffering.
I sense truth in her “thorny wisdom.” I have friends who, upon reading what I’ve just written would spitefully respond, “Well lucky for you that you have your faith. I don’t have that luxury.”
To call faith a “luxury” is to misunderstand. Faith is deep engagement with the mystery of reality, the willingness to let God speak, even in the moments when we most want to run away.
O’Connor suffered the loss of her father to lupus when she was fifteen. When she was in her twenties, the same disease began to cripple her. She lost her hopes for love and a lively writing career among intellectuals when she was forced to move back to her provincial hometown and allow her mother to care for her. Yet O’Connor saw suffering as “the process by which faith is deepened.”
“A faith that just accepts is a child’s faith and all right for children,” she wrote in a letter to a friend, “but eventually you have to grow religiously as every other way, though some never do:
What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross. It is much harder to believe than not to believe.
In times of suffering we face a choice: to allow faith to be “deepened” or to shrink away from it. A pious shrug or plastic smile will not do. We wrestle with God, and like Jacob in the Old Testament, sometimes we walk away with deeper faith, but also with a limp.
My father was a preacher’s kid who once had a child’s faith that “accepts everything.” Gradually he saw that the fundamentalism of his parents’ version of Christianity lacked a sound foundation. It depended on blind acceptance and a rigid following of rules, and that wasn’t enough for him as he engaged the struggles of his life.
Dad earned two advanced degrees in religious studies, one from a secular university and one from a liberal seminary. He was looking, he said, for the best case the agnostics and liberal theologians could make. “I was wide open at that point,” he told me.
The alternatives his professors proposed were the sort that skirt the Cross and the Resurrection, offering sentimental relativism in their place. “Comforting nihilism,” David Bentley Hart calls it in his essay “Christ and Nothing.” My father found the biblical evidence for the historic Christ more compelling, despite the challenge of the Cross to which it ultimately leads.
A story doesn’t always go the way you had in mind.
That’s what the two on the road to Emmaus, as told in Luke’s gospel, thought as well. “Downcast,” walking away from Jerusalem after witnessing the crucifixion of the beloved rabbi, they murmured to an unidentified companion, “we had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel.”
It turned out they had been right about that redemption, not in the way they had hoped, but in a way far better than they could have imagined. The risen Christ himself was walking beside them. Reminiscent of the God who unveiled his mysteries to Job at the peak of his torment, Christ explained to his crestfallen admirers the larger plan at play.
Still, even the strongest believer must admit that most of the time we only see the underside of God’s embroidered tapestry. Its scattered knots and threads reveal a mysterious but yet unrealized pattern. We struggle against our stories when they refuse to go the way we had in mind.
“Bring me my Bible,” Dad said in that loneliest of his winters. “I need to read the book of Job.”
“I know that my redeemer lives,” Job declared in his darkness, “and that in the end he will stand on the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God.” It would be safe to say that this was the point of every sermon my dad ever preached.
And we who remain, as Lent lengthens into Holy Week, approach the mysterious Cross once more. Even though three of Christ’s disciples saw the Lord transfigured days before the Crucifixion, they fell away the night he died, though John returned and stood before His bloodied, dying body.
The moments of their doubt do not refute the story; they enhance its mysterious power. As Malcolm Guite put it so beautifully in his poem, “Transfiguration”:
Nor can this blackened sky, this darkened scar
Eclipse that glimpse of how things really are.
A glaring glimpse of reality, however mysterious, is preferable than the straws we grasp when we let doubt overtake our faith.
“Try believing the opposite,” Flannery advised her friend, “and you will find it too easy.”
The “darkling glass” will one day shatter for each of us, as it did for my beloved father on the Christmas morning we did not have in mind.
“Meanwhile,” as C.S. Lewis said in the Weight of Glory, “the cross comes before the crown, and tomorrow is a Monday morning.”
“In the Night” my hope lives on.
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You might also like “It Does Not Appear What We Shall Be”: Reflections on the Loss of a Brother and Gospel Historicity and Resurrection Hope.
Readers interested in Flannery O’Connor’s engagement with nihilism will find it richly explored in Fr. Damien Ference’s Understanding the Hillbilly Thomist”: The Philosophical Foundations of Flannery O’Connor’s Narrative Art. This very accessible book leads to a better understanding of Flannery, Thomism, nihilism and much more. It is a book for understanding the times we live in, or as Flannery put it, “the gas we breathe.” The quotes above are from The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor.
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash, Craft 24 on Istock, Humble Lamb and Lance Grandahl on Unsplash.
James Tissot, The Pilgrims of Emmaus on the Road (Brooklyn Museum) courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
As Christina Rosetti said, the journey is uphill all the way. Thanks for this, Peggy; inspiring and thought-provoking, as always.
I’ll have to remember that line; thank you! Really glad you shared with me.