Revel

They say the sun is always rising somewhere, but what they don’t say is it’s always rising on someone who has lost a family member during the night. It happened here, in our part of town, a few mornings ago. We received the text at 2AM, and by 3AM we were in the house of my husband’s former neighbors, a house of tears. It was the cries of the 12-year-old that brought me to tears as well.

“Mommy, come and get me.”
“Mommy, don’t leave me.”
“Mommy I’m still here, I need you.”
“Mommy, Mommy, Mommy.”

The pain of the whole world was summed up in her wails. This is the third death I’ve been close to while living in S.P.M., and every time I’m a little caught off guard by how people mourn—like, truly express their grief, truly express their longings for the world to return to how it was, to how it should be, with the lost loved one in their house or in their arms.

In my experience in the USA, which is, granted, slightly limited, we don’t mourn much publicly. That is to say, we certainly do not wail at a funeral or memorial service. We do not let our hearts break open publicly. We shed tears, our shoulders shake, but we suppress the sobs. What is more, we often call memorial services “celebrations of life” in order to set the tone.

It’s a beautiful tone.

But I wonder if we expressed our longings through a more vibrant form of grief if our hearts wouldn’t reach a better equilibrium. If we plumbed the depths of darkness with our community, maybe, once our job was done, we would float better afterwards. I wonder, of the various gravesides at which I have stood, if I had echoed the laments of the Old Testament, expressed with my voice how much I longed to have him or her back again, what would have happened.

Perhaps nothing. But it’s a question worth asking when you see that in another culture the women grieve differently than you.

(So I’m not talking about “better,” just different.)

We give emotion to our longings in different proportions.

In response to what I see, I’ve been reminded to revel in my longings more, to draw them out, to feel them deeply, to, again, revel in them in the way my mom occasionally revels in a glass of Lemberger. The dark color, the tannins, and the Germanic bouquet that homeopathically hints of wild berries all bite back.

If there is wisdom in the house of mourning, perhaps there is wisdom in the longings that live there, even in longings in general. Instead of distracting ourselves from the longings, perchance we could discover something in them.

And come back stronger.

In consideration of my experience—should one care to know—much of the time through the years I longed for a life I’d never lost in reality, but felt like I had. When you are unmarried for so long (I apologize for calling marrying at 24 “so long” to those whose justified perspective is that that is short) eventually it’s easy to feel as if he did exist at one point, in your teenage dreams and post-19 hopes. But dreams fade and hope hits the hard wall of reality and suddenly you take a headcount and realize your lover is lost, dead. And you grieve a person who never was.

And you long for life.

Sometimes the longing was vague, and tired, like that deep despondency I felt driving I-95 North in the hours between midnight and 6 AM, awake in a sleeping world. Yet I was determined to carry on—probably more because I was 20 ounces deep into 32 ounces of Starbucks coffee, less because I was tapping into some inner source of tenacity.

Other times, it was a gentle ache, just a desire to share a beautiful moment: the view of the ocean from a high point in Sardinia, or the stars as I lay on my back in a soccer field, or pine needles on the trees in our woods that were hand-planted in lines 90 years ago.

Or still other times, in my bedroom, or walking home late from another shift of waiting tables, the longing was agony. I think at such instances the longings were several, compounded. Too many longings unfulfilled. It felt like my soul needed to be ripped out and replaced with one that had more faith.

In Scripture, pretty much every person who is heralded for their faith came from a dark, faithless place—or even, in the midst of great faith, suddenly failed miserably. It’s a little confusing that such normal people would be so celebrated, their mistakes overlooked. Okay, it’s super confusing. Like, Noah of the rainbow of faith was a drunkard in his old age, Abraham was a liar, Sarah laughed at the promises God made to her, and Elijah ran scared at the threats of one queen, even though like 5 minutes before he had called down fire from heaven, rallied against a group of infidels, and then prayed for and received rain to end a drought affecting an entire country.

The list of so-called heroes and their failures goes on and on, and so could I, mimicking all the other people who matter-of-factly expound on the Bible’s contradictions. But I’ll just touch on one more: that of the apostle Peter.

He denied knowing Jesus—his friend, and the man he believed was the Son of God—three times. There’s not much worse you can do than deny the truth.

Peter and Jesus were near enough in proximity during the denials that Jesus was able to make eye contact with Peter after the third “no, I don’t know him.” After that brief moment of connection, Peter ran out of the high priest’s house and, we are told, “wept bitterly.”

I think Peter was grieving the absence of what he longed for: faith. Faith to claim a relationship with the God-man who was his (almost) everything. Faith to let Jesus be his everything. Faith to believe that Jesus was still going to save the world, even though the power of darkness gripped the night, and, it appeared, the future too.

In his failure he grieved and longed, and out of his failure he, eventually, grew. He became more of a faith leader, more of a rock, than he ever was. (The Catholic Church even designates him as their first pope. Go figure. Talk about heroism.)

When we are told that without faith it’s impossible to please God, and that faith entails living a crazy life, drastically different from the norm, we still need to not lose sight of the forest for the trees, and live in the tension of the grace we are always being given, and the striving to which we are always being called.

If we don’t strive, we will be stuck in grief forever. But if we don’t luxuriate in grace as we learn from our griefs and longings—as we let them tell us what we really want—we won’t move forward rhythmically in faith.

Maybe our journeys from the valleys to the peaks are never as drastic as those of Elijah or Peter, but faith tends to come from dark places, from our longings that we search out as we grieve the absences in our lives.

And then, when the time is right, we rise again.

Or rise for the first time.

So if you are longing for life, or for faith, take hope, because they come to those who have none.