Of Bears and Penguins

For the purposes of our writing today, let’s rename grief as soul trauma, and let’s say that it occurs when that proverbial rug is yanked out from under your feet, it occurs when things of great sadness happen, and it seems the more I live I’m learning that great sadness is not confined to specific situations, like death.

Great sadness, soul trauma, as it were, can occur when all that one hoped for, planned for, worked for is suddenly gone, consumed in an unexpected wild fire that came more quickly than could be imagined.

Now here’s the thing. I’m not one for wearing my heart entirely on my sleeve. I choose silence a lot rather than a ramble of words describing, expressing and exploring what I experience. Though I know it currently in vogue to bare all, I choose not to engage in that.

I store things up in my heart, and it resembles something of a wine and cheese shop, cheery, but quiet enough that the things stored up in bottles, the cheeses being washed over as they age and ripen, are able to come into their fullest.

I store good things and terrible things that are difficult for me to understand, and sometimes the harvest comes up as beautiful, costly wine, sweeter because I know the difficulty of its harvest. But time has to have its way with those stored offerings to see what they may be.

We writers, we’ve got to tell the whole story don’t we. We can’t tell only the nice bits, we’ve got to the story to fullness. And what’s more we writers can’t act as though we live a hermetically sealed environment. Story telling is an act of community, from our earliest traditions when our story tellers didn’t write, but stored up in memory all of our stories – of heroes and villains, of years when crops failed and how the people survived. Telling stories so that we people could remember and learn, telling soul stories that all can ken to, so that when the truest story arrived we might recognize it.

To tell a story is to weave a tapestry, and the tapestry is the story of life, and it is so big that we writers throw the shuttle out over our loom, and we need someone who recognizes the thread from their own life to throw it back. And in this way, the fragile, gossamer threads of life weave into the great stories of the world. The people that look upon the stories can find familiar threads in their hearts, and recognition is made, and so we learn.

Soul trauma is one of those threads that may be recognized by all, without limitation of language, or culture. For all who live, breath, and risk love, will experience soul trauma at some point. That’s just life, and it’s a good life despite the painful things we must undergo.

Lately I’ve been writing only sparing of the great dark place in my life. I’ve been writing about the light that I can see far way right now, but there burning bright. And in doing so, I’ve not told the whole of it.

Soul trauma tells us in a lie that we are alone in what we experience, we need the storytellers to remind us that we are not alone, we need someone to toss us the matching thread in the tapestry so that we know that the soul trauma is part of our wider human story, not some cruel punishment meted out only to us as individuals.

Can you hear the sound of the shuttle racing from my loom? Toss it back if you please, we’ll share our stories as we go.

We’re in the dry months of Texas right now, when each rain is an experience for Thanksgiving. The clouds darken, the thunder rolls, and the sky flashes out of that brewing energy, but the rain does not fall in this time. The clouds pass, and the sun beats down and parches the ground, and the air is still, the animals are still, and the hope of rain throbs deep in us.

Occasionally, the clouds burst forth while the sun still shines brightly. These are quick rains, but sometimes they leave a rainbow, faint and difficult to see because of the blazing sun.

There are rainbows though, that I’ve seen, against the background of a dark cloud, and they are brilliant, those Roy G. Biv colors shining like jewels against a velvet backdrop.

There are more artful writers who could weave this better, but I must weave my own tapestry.
This dark, deep cloud is difficult to bear for me. Food tastes as dust to me. I wake up grateful to have slept through the night. There are times when bursts of tears come over me, and I sink to the floor, and I think about where I could get some sackcloth and ashes. Is there a store for that? And sometimes when I’m sitting there, I never want to get up again, I just want to sit there, sackcloth and ashes, for surely I don’t have any strength left with which to stand.

But just through the dust of the ashes, I can sense that brilliant rainbow, I can make it out against the dark cloud, so I get up, and my tears are dried, and I run a bit farther towards those colors.

I read gratefully in the story of Job that after the great soul trauma came upon him, he didn’t jump right up and move on to the next thing. He sat still. And his friends came and sat with him, and for a long time none of them spoke.

And I read too that those who sow in tears will reap in songs of joy.

Knowing those things makes that rainbow stand out so brilliantly against the cloud; it restores my soul.

This dark cloud is going to pass, not easily and probably not quickly, but pass it will.

So when I write about the healing balm on my soul, and when I write about waiting upon the Lord, and when I write about how Christ comes to redeem all this tumbling, jumbling, beautiful world, and my heart in it, I’m writing on the rainbow that’s spread across this dark cloud I’m standing under.

I know the dark, the depth, the sorrow of the storm. But I see the rainbow, and it’s the rainbow that outshines the dark, and that reminds me to keep heading towards the light out there on the horizon.

There’s a hymn that’s a favorite of mine called “O Love that Will Not Let Me Go”, and one of the verses says just that:

“O Joy that seekest me through pain,
I cannot close my heart to thee
I trace the rainbow through the rain
And feel the promise is not vain,
That morn shall tearless be.”

My great hope and my prayer.

And on that tearless morn, which I trust is coming, I shall take from the vintage of my heart, and I shall raise my cup in great gratitude.

Even as in the midst of the great soul trauma, I lift my face from where I sit on the ground, and give thanks for God’s love that follows me, and holds me dear, and safe, neither forgotten nor abandoned in this darkest of clouds.