The Things That Make For Peace

Thirty-some-odd years old, he sits on the back of a donkey, looking out at the gates of ancient Jerusalem. People throng the street before him, throwing their coats on the ground, waving palm branches, extolling him as Messiah and Lord. His closest friends dance alongside him as they lead the donkey ever closer to the towering entrance to the Holy City. Suddenly, overcome by some sentiment foreign to the jubilant hour, he begins to wail, his chest heaving as sorrow bubbles out of his throat.

The people stop cheering. The donkey halts its steps. The disciples grow silent.

Jesus weeps for his people: “Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that would make for peace!”

*****

What were those things? What was the cost of our peace with God? The temple cleansing, the prophecies of Jerusalem’s destruction, the plot to kill Jesus; the Last Supper, the Garden, the betrayal, the mockery of his trials; the beating, the Via Dolorosa, Golgotha, the thieves; finally, “It is finished” and the death of the Son of God.

While graphic, this clip from “The Passion of the Christ” reminds us that the death of Jesus wasn’t just an isolated event. It was the culmination of our rebellion against God and His unfathomable grace to redeem us from our own sin. The things that make for peace were set in motion long before we drew our breath, long before Jesus went to the cross, long before Adam and Eve fell. That knowledge should sober us, give us pause – and lead us into a time of prayerful silence, a time of gratitude that the God who made us, against Whom we’ve all rebelled, chose to make peace His will instead of giving us over to the death we deserved.

Surviving the Death of Your Child

I don’t normally post blogs based on what people are Googling, but the last three days I’ve seen an inordinate number of hits on one of my posts, When Your Baby Dies, and noted that a lot of people searched the word “stillborn” which led them to my site. And I’m not talking about a spike of 10-20 hits, I’m talking in the hundreds. Despite being plugged into the daily news and doing my best to stay current on global events, I can’t for the life of me think of any reason that people would be searching so frequently for that term, or landing so often on my post.

But in the interest of helping those folks out, I’d like to tell you how to survive the death of your child.

Please keep in mind, my daughter was a full-term stillborn, so my experience is radically different from someone who lost a child outside the womb. I can’t imagine losing one of my children (my wife and I now have two, a boy and a girl) and having to go through the process of burying them and the memories we made. I can’t imagine how it would feel to stand in Jon or Ella’s bedroom, knowing that they were never coming back. What it would be like to not feel my son’s arms wrapped around my neck again, or not have my daughter beg me to bounce her on the trampoline until she collapsed into my arms, laughing too hard to stand.

I think, honestly, I would die.

I know some of that pain, having experienced it with my stillborn daughter, but the grief is different when you mourn lost potential. Losing someone you’ve had for weeks or months or years…I don’t know. But I do know this: there is a connection between all of us who have ever lost a child. We know the deep sorrow of seeing a future wiped out before it could be fulfilled. We know the intense horror of having to ask “Why?” and “What could have happened differently?” without ever getting a satisfactory answer. We know what it feels like to willingly offer our own life for the life of our child, begging for the chance that they might live and we might die instead.

And we know the futility of such begging.

If you’ve ever picked out your child’s clothes, knowing that it would be the last thing they’d ever wear, you know that sometimes simply breathing is like being pierced with a knife.

If you’ve ever had a doctor look at you, eyes full of fear and mouth devoid of words, you know that the universe itself can seem small and cruel.

These are the pains of losing a child. They are not easy. They are not short-lived. They are not understood by many, save those who have drank from the same cup. They are, however, not permanent, at least not in the sense that each day feels like a fresh reinvention of the concept of hell. Eventually you will wake up and realize that you can go on. You will wake up and realize that the death of your child, though still with you in each heartbeat, each moment, is not going to kill you too.

Surviving the death of your child isn’t easy. It requires help, professional as well as personal. You need to go see a counselor; a therapist; a doctor; a spiritual advisor. You need to spend time with friends and family who may not understand your grief, but won’t shrink away in fear when it surfaces. You need to write down your thoughts, scream obscenities to heaven, cry until you fear dehydration, and battle the twin terrors of exhaustion and insomnia.

If you want to survive, you have to fight. If you give up, you’ll die too.

Only it won’t be the physical death you perhaps long for; it will be the death of your soul, your emotions, the part of you that makes you you. No one is strong enough to walk through a child’s death alone. You’ll crave solitude, and it will be an important part of your healing, but you’ll need community, a group of people who can and will go with you through the struggle, especially in the first few months when the world goes to hell and you can’t even make yourself care about eating a bowl of Frosted Flakes.

It’s a bitter irony, I suppose, that the one thing that helps you survive is family. And yet, it’s true.

If you are one of the many people who have searched for info on stillbirths, or have been moved by life events to read When Your Baby Dies, I sincerely hope that you have the family you need to survive the family you lost. If I could offer any other advice it’s merely this: with the right people around you, the best way to heal is to go full-on into your grieving. Don’t push it off. Don’t try to play hero. Don’t pretend it only hurts a little.

Embrace it. Run into the burning building that is your soul. Once the flames have gone out and everything has been reduced to rubble, you’ll find that by the grace of God and the strength of the people around you, you’re still standing. You’ve survived.

That’s what we all hope for. May you find it.

Sometimes, You Just Need to Listen

I’ve worked with teenagers for over 13 years now, and if I’ve learned anything it’s that whenever something happens to one of their own, teens take it very hard. There is an internalization of tragedy that the teenage years magnifies by a thousand, and the need to explore that internal struggle is vast and immediate.

So that’s why my phone blew up yesterday afternoon. Lots of people needing someone to talk to. Or, more accurately, someone to listen.

Really, in a situation like this – when a classmate is murdered, perhaps over something as trivial as shoes – the best thing any adult can do is listen. And not just the way we sometimes do, where we nod our head and say “Uh-huh” a lot while waiting for a break in the monologue during which we will impart our vast, adult wisdom. I mean really listening. Because when you listen, you hear some amazing things.

The uncertainty of life. The tenderness of hearts. The capacity to ask the big questions of life. The idea of mortality.

When you are really listening, you hear that our students aren’t asking for us to make the world perfect; they’re asking us to help it make sense. They want to know that there is comfort to be found inside the madness, to know that the big, bad world won’t swallow them whole. Profundity – even when genuine and truly insightful – isn’t as helpful to them as sincerity. And when you sincerely listen, you earn the right to share the profound thoughts later on down the road, when they can really absorb them.

Last week, the tragedy in Newtown opened up all sorts of conversations to be had with our kids about everything from guns to mental illness to safety to death. Yesterday, those same questions came home to Grayson, and were magnified in the death of Paul Sampleton.

I won’t presume to tell anyone how to parent, because you know your kids far better than I do, but if I may offer one suggestion to those who are uncertain about what to do, it would be this:

Give your kids a chance to talk, and listen to what they have to say. You’ll know where to go from there.

Good luck with the conversation.

The Most Tragic of All Wounds

You never get used to standing over your child’s grave. Not when it’s open, waiting on the coffin to be lowered. Not when the first shovel full of dirt hits the top of the vault. Not when the last shovel full of dirt gets patted into place and the flowers get draped over the mound.

Not even when, eight years later, you stand there to just remember that she existed.

This week, twenty families will learn those horrible truths; they will say goodbye to children who were supposed to outlive them. Parents will stand, weeping, over their children’s bodies, suffering with the knowledge that incomplete lives are among the most tragic of all human wounds. People will do their best to make sense of the world in order to bring these families hope, but nothing that they say will make a difference.

Words don’t do justice to the enormity of the pain. And words can never hope to heal.

Healing comes only through time, an excruciating march through seconds and minutes and hours that eventually gives way to days and weeks and months. Part of the anguish comes from not being able to think of anything else at first–you are consumed with thoughts about what you could have done differently, the sudden realization that the world is cruel and unjust, the pain of missing someone who should be snuggled up in your arms, safe. These thoughts fill your head non-stop until sleep comes to you as a blessed relief (when you’re finally able to sleep; most of the time, you can’t).

Then, you develop a new kind of anguish: starting to forget. It’s not intentional. It’s not done meanly. But one day, you catch yourself thinking about that load of laundry you need to do, or the errand you need to run, and you feel shame and guilt and searing pain at the fact that you were not thinking about your child, your loss, your pain. And the spiral begins, and you stay there until the next time you catch yourself thinking about something else.

Maybe you find yourself thinking about heaven and hell, God, life, death, all of the things that we pay lip service to but often only think about very slightly. Suddenly, the idea of a God that would send someone to hell for not choosing Jesus becomes very important to you. Maybe you spend time reading and re-reading anything you can get your hands on. Maybe you spend time in prayer, screaming obscenities at a God whose existence you now question. Maybe this helps you feel better. Maybe it brings you peace.

Maybe.

Maybe you find yourself not thinking of anything at all. Maybe your life becomes a blur of daily monotony that has no discernible edges to it, and so you feel as if you just float from bedtime to bedtime without ever really caring to see anything in detail.

Maybe you bury yourself in as many conquerable tasks as you possibly can, hoping to fill the emptiness with the sweet release of control and accomplishment.

Maybe you drink yourself into a stupor, hoping to kill off the brain cells that cause you to be aware of the hell in which you now live.

Maybe you do all of it.

Regardless, the first few months are an emotional solitary confinement, even when you have others with which to commiserate. You can share in the tragedy of loss, but grief–what we feel in our hearts–is ours to bear, alone, until the time is right. After those first few months, you discover that you can let others in. Some take longer than others, but eventually all mourners find that peace is easier achieved through opening your heart to another. This is the road to healing.

It is the road back to loving.

Twenty families in Connecticut will begin grieving in earnest this week. My thoughts and prayers–and my understanding–goes out to each.

The Massacre of Innocence

I honestly wanted to write about the Grinch today. Seriously. I got to thinking about the term “grinch” and what it’s come to mean, so I started looking up the etymology of the word, which lead to a whole bunch of searching and, somehow, me ending up at Matthew 2:13-18, commonly referred to as the Massacre of Innocents.

If you don’t know the passage, it’s pretty straightforward: after Jesus’ birth and the visit of the Magi, an angel appeared to Joseph in a dream and told him that King Herod would try and take the life of the Christ-child. The angel told Joseph to take Mary and the baby and escape to Egypt. So they did.

Herod, enraged by the fact that the Magi never told him where the new King of the Jews was, ordered his soldiers to kill every boy child under the age of two in the area of Bethlehem. And his soldiers carried out his order.

The major historical works of the time (mainly Josephus) don’t mention the slaughter of babies in Bethlehem, leading some critics to doubt whether the event actually happened. But the reality is that Bethlehem was a small town in Herod’s province, and the likelihood of there being more than 20 babies within the specified age range is very slim.

In other words, history probably doesn’t mention it because it wasn’t that big of a deal.

Herod’s other efforts towards infanticide are well documented, including him having his own son killed. As one person said, “It is better to be Herod’s pig than his son.” So it’s not exactly like the Gospel writer is suggesting something out of Herod’s character or historical resume. The incident in Matthew is quite in keeping with Herod’s particular evil.

It just wasn’t that big of a local story. So no one covered it.

Think about that. Today, that would never happen. We’re so hardwired towards bad news of any sort that things bordering on effluvia take control of our media cycles and Twitter feeds. If someone, somewhere, commits an act of atrocity, we know about it within an hour.

Sometimes within a minute.

And yet, were it not for the meticulous writing of Matthew, these children of Bethlehem, these few, unnamed babies, would have ended up on the floor of history, forgotten. Instead, they become a sad part of our story of redemption. Indeed, one of the most haunting of all Christmas carols is the Coventry Carol, a 16th century song that imagines the words of the mothers in Bethlehem on the night that Herod’s men struck.

That is a haunting refrain, a lullaby to a generation wiped from memory by the greed and paranoia of one man. And it is entirely fitting as a vital part of Christmas: to remind us that the world we inhabit was and is a dark place, filled with dark hearts, and that our hope–our joy–is found in the birth of the Light who dispels Darkness. We rightly turn our eyes towards Bethlehem’s manger, hungering for a look at the Savior, and Matthew makes sure to bring us back to the reality of our own sin.

Matthew shares with us the massacre of innocents to show us the mercy required to save us. God, vulnerable in human flesh, giving himself to us to be beaten and mocked, tortured and destroyed. God, entering into our world on our terms–soft and pink and exposed. We celebrate this, but do we really think about it? Do we really stop and consider that baby in the manger and what his life, his very appearance in our world, really means?

The Massacre, as is it were, of Innocence himself?

I pray that today you’ll take a few minutes to consider all of the Scripture surrounding the birth of Jesus (Matthew and Luke), and look at the story not just through rose-colored lenses, but as it really was: the entrance of Light into a very, very dark place.

Then, may that light shine brighter for your searching.