Mourning by Bumps and Band-Aids

I was in a hurry. Bending forward to pick up a shoe, I banged my head on the corner of a shelf. A huge and bleeding bump -- my friend called it a “hematoma” -- immediately rose from my skull, bringing pain to me and horror to my children. No serious injury occurred, but the wound remained for days. I covered it with a band-aid, more to spare others its unsightliness than to protect my head. I soon discovered that the band-aid and the bump served a purpose I had not anticipated. They signaled the world that I was hurting, vulnerable and tender.

My mother died a week earlier, after a painful and progressive disability. Her death left me with a deep psychic wound. There was a rawness and immediacy about my pain. Sometimes I needed to talk about it, and at other times I couldn’t. The business of my life continued relentlessly, whether I was prepared or not prepared, whether I felt strong or weak. Healing had to be squeezed in between the carpool and the church meeting.

However, this band-aid stopped people. “What happened to you?” they asked. Sometimes I responded, “I bumped my head.” At other times I said, “My mother died.” I wanted the world to know of my loss but I didn’t always want to talk about it.

Every member of my family experienced injury or illness after my mother died. While most people would attribute this to “stress”, I suggest a different explanation. It may have been the psyche’s way of declaring its need for special consideration.

Grieving is neither well understood or accepted in our culture. Many thanatologists (death specialists) seek to tame its wildness by describing a predictable “process” with inevitable “stages”. We are told to “work through” our grief as we “let go” of our loved one. There is, it seems, a “right way” to grieve.

I long for the days when grieving was more mysterious, and when we who grieve were given time and (psychic) space to allow the inevitable transformations to grow within us. To burn a candle, to regather after a month (or forty days or a year), to ritually observe the loosening of the bonds -- these make more sense to me. They are public ways of honoring private grief, without dictating the form or content one’s healing should take. The black arm-bands or head coverings, the crepe hung over doors -- these were the bumps and band-aids of past generations. They discreetly informed the public that here were individuals in a special condition of vulnerability, who were adjusting to a world that had been made unacceptable by their loss. Here were individuals who carried within them a need for special care.

In our fast-paced modern world, crowded with commitments and obligations, crepe no longer hangs over our doors; neither do arm bands nor head coverings protect us. We are left to heal as best we can in the spaces we create. Bumps and band-aids will have to do. I thank God for friends who understand.

The Invitation

I still remember the smells of sweat and sawdust. In my West Virginia hometown the whole community came out when traveling evangelists brought their road shows to town. We worshiped in churches, at the park, or in tents outside of town. We worshiped with singing and shouting, with laughter and tears. No one watched the clock when we got together. No one could imagine a better place to be. What our religion lacked in sophistication we made up for with joyful exuberance.

But as I grew older this was not enough. I had too many questions, and my persistence in asking them made my elders uneasy. These 'revivals' were designed not to open my mind or expand my heart but to save my soul from the eternal fires of hell. I believe that my childhood religion was deeply rooted in a genuine faith, but it was too narrowly conceived to sustain the journey of a lifetime.

While I was quite young, and for reasons I still do not understand fully, I walked to a drugstore across town and purchased a recorded symphony. I could not even pronounce the composer’s name: Tchaikovsky. The symphony was his Pathetique. Closeted in my bedroom, I played it over and over on my sister's Decca phonograph. At first it made little sense to me, but soon I began to hear tunes, themes and particular instruments. The more intently I listened, the more the music revealed itself to me. It had come from another world, and it beckoned me beyond the boundaries of my life as I had known it until then.

This invitation to cross some unspecified boundary has become a frequent and welcomed visitor in the intervening years.  I heard it again in a loon’s call in northern Minnesota, in the plaintive horn of Louis Armstrong, and in the violent rush of spring waters down a New Hampshire mountainside. While walking alone amidst the ruins of Olympia, or preaching in an old Welsh chapel in Swansea, or walking with my children in the Badlands of South Dakota, I felt, like Jacob at Bethel, that “surely God is in this place.”

When dancers moved across the stage in a darkened Princeton theater, when an unknown woman played Brahms in a dimly lighted room in St. Galen, or when a single soprano heralded the Easter dawn in a crowed Siberian cathedral, I knew that I was part of a larger reality. Even in the dirty confines of a migrant laborers’ camp, or an NAACP-sponsored summer job corps office in Trenton, N. J., or by the bedside of a dying friend, I did not escape God’s presence. “Deep calls unto deep. At night, God’s song is with me.”

Much contemporary religion fails to do justice to the grandeur of God and the ambiguity of the human situation. Too often theology is reduced to clichés and mindless confessions. Religious communities are manipulated as mere political constituencies. A reverence for deeper things - what Aeschylus called “the monarchy of awe” - has disappeared nearly altogether. Yet awe veils a mystery, and from this mystery comes a summons. Humbling ourselves, we hear it.  Opening ourselves, we find answers to  questions we didn't know resided in our hearts.

(Badlands view from Norbeck Pass. NPS Photo by Shaina Niehans)