Sunday was the first time. There is a first moment for every grief, I suppose, but it never ceases to surprise me how disconnected that moment of grief often is from the point of loss. Sunday marked 142 days since my last lessons with my first studio of kids. I had missed my kids these last 5 months...a few especially so. (There are always a few that wiggle past the active concern and care of a teacher for her students and all the way to the dear, tender place of friendship.) Beyond that, I had been so happy to be home and near family that I had not really grieved the leaving. But as I stood up to lead my first piece for STAHR's Bach Festival and not a single face was familiar (my students would play later in the festival) some taut chord finally broke in my soul and grief washed in.
I have often found that there are two parts to grief: First, there's grieving the loss of present experience (the pleasure or comfort of something or someone to your daily life) and then there's grieving the sudden void in the substance of who you think you are because of the loss of that person or thing. The first is at least necessary if not healthy. The second is much messier and carries much more of the refining fire about it.
As I've pondered the past and the hole it leaves in an otherwise happy and abundant present, I've found it a divine kindness to have already been reading about and pondering time lately. Snippets of old lectures, lots of fireside and firefly conversations with friends from the past three years, a few chapters of The Sound and The Fury, a few hundred pages of Wendell Berry, the Psalms and C.S. Lewis' Pilgrim's Regress, Miracles and The Weight of Glory have formed the backdrop to my thoughts the past few weeks. Three phrases in particular from a lecture I sat in on a year ago this time have served as the pegs on which I'm hanging the rest of my thoughts:
1) "Time is within us... a soulish thing"
2) "The meaning is in the process not the end"
3) "It is an illusion to live in any one part of time."
First, "Time is within us." If time is part of our nature, and we are made in the image of God, then it is worth the Christian's effort to search all that can be known about how God views and acts in regard to time. When I first began thinking about time from this perspective, I came to the conclusion that God was outside time, that it was a thing of his creation...some sort of coping device for little humans to map out their lives while he looked on all events from above as individual strokes of one grand historical masterpiece, the way we might view a work of art. I said as much over coffee with a friend last week, adding that perhaps the key to understanding time was to try to live as much as possible within this divine point of view. She responded to the effect that she thought it very unlikely that God was outside time...that time finds its origin and meaning in God's own nature. We went on to agree that there is a sense in which God's perspective of time is certainly different, simply because he is Omniscient, both Beginning and End, both Alpha and Omega. But her comment kept me mulling over my theology of time.
If time is part of God's nature and he saw fit to craft it into our nature as well (not all of God's attributes are given to us, or at least not in full measure) then there must be something beautiful about it. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that God sees time, not only as beautiful, but as good. Yes, our lives are bookended by eternity, but in this world God made and called good, he created day and night and seasons and years. He could have created angel-like beings, incapable of death and the experience of loss. But he didn't. He created man, with a hunger to know and explore and taste and hold and love. And he placed that man in a world marked by measure lines, to belt out a symphony yet unfinished, loathe to leave each sumptuous chord lest it be the last of a dearly loved melody. Little do we trust, the sweetest one is yet to come.
So does it evidence a lack of faith to tremble at the final echoes of a circumstantial cadence? Is it wrong to weary at an extended passage of ever plodding eighth note scales in your life's proverbial viola part? Is it more wretched still to be in the act of playing out the current measures of our lives but find yourself longing for that first, dear melody to come into our lives again? As I ponder these questions, I've turned again and again to the lines below from the end of Pilgrim's Regress, a brilliant apologetic allegory by C.S. Lewis:
"Passing today by a cottage, I shed tears
When I remembered how once I had dwelled there
With my mortal friends who are dead. Years
Little had healed the wound that was laid bare.
Out, little spear that stabs. I, fool, believed
I had outgrown the local, unique sting,
I had transmuted away (I was deceived)
Into love universal the loved thing
But Thou, Lord, surely knewest Thine own plan
When the angelic indifferences with no bar
Universally loved but Thou gav'st man
The tether and pang of the particular.
Which, like a chemic drop, infinitesimal,
Plashed into the pure water, changing the whole,
Embodies and embitters and turns all
Spirit's sweet water to astringent soul.
That we, though small, may quiver with fire's same
Substantial form as Thou - nor reflect merely,
As lunar angel, back to thee, cold flame,
Gods we are, Thou has said: and we pay dearly."
(Pilgrim's Regress, C.S. Lewis)
How those lines have burned in my soul: "Thou gav'st man/the tether and pang of the particular...that we, though small, may quiver with fire's same/substantial form as Thou." And how often have "I [foolishly] believed/I had outgrown the local, unique sting" and that I, through some heroic strength of will, could "[transmute] away.... into love universal the loved thing." I have long seen this attempt to mature beyond specific earthly ties to love only what those joys pointed towards as not only possible but a duty. It is a strange, wakening delight to see the ache of deep, particular loves as a gift and not a curse. I saw only that "we pay dearly" when these loves fade or are taken. But in the past few weeks, I've been seeing that to have the capacity to love - not generally but particularly, even with all the uncertainty and risk, all the "tether and pang" that is inherent to such particular loves - is to manifest a small part of what it means to be made in the image of God. It is at the core of what it means to be human in the highest and noblest sense.
It is necessary for me to take great care at this point....I think I've looped this block in my brain about a hundred times this week. The loss we feel when a phase of life ends, when we move from a known and treasured place, when relationship with a person we have loved to unspeakable depths is no longer possible is not (as I understand it) part of God's pre-fall creation design. Therefore to grieve in the first sense described a few paragraphs ago, is appropriate partially because it agrees with God's original design. In the Garden of Eden, there was no shred of separation between Adam and Eve and no hindrance in their fellowship with their Creator. Like the union of The Holy Trinity, the first man and woman were designed for relationships with no division in fellowship, purpose or direction. But with sin came a past marked by grief, a present of mistrust and division, and a future riddled with fear. When Man fell, Time fell too.
Man was created in the image of God, but without the capacity to achieve an omniscient perspective. Man was also created with an innate attraction to mystery. God himself was to be our inexhaustible mystery, and human companionship the grand and immensely good particular refraction of his Trinitarian glory. But in the fall, Eve chose to reach for a tangible mystery. Rather than explore the riches of the glory of God forever, she chose to taste what it was to be like God herself. She (and we her children through her) got what we wished for, but "we pay dearly." The Fall gave us clearer knowledge of refracted glory and keener lusts toward twisted tangible glory, but the weight of this knowledge without the divine capacity for Omniscient Perspective fractured man's perception of Time into a Past to be regretted or pined after, a restless and passive Present, and a Future scarred by fear.
So how do we begin to submit this fallen perception of Time to the sanctifying grace and wisdom of God? This is where I begin to run into the second and third thought hooks from that lecture: "the meaning is in the process not the end" and "it is an illusion to live in any one part of time." Time in the Garden of Eden before the Fall was an eternal "now" of worshiping with every act and thought the great glory of our Creator. The past and future were mere reverberations of a present life of worship where work was pursued with gusto as participation in God's Creative act, food was tasted with relish as God's gift of refreshment equal to His gift of hunger, each kiss was the celebration of an unmarred union between man and woman which echoed the glory of Trinitarian community. No part of life was out of the bounds of this participation in and celebration of the Glory of God. Because this was lived out faithfully and fully, there was nothing lost and nothing to strain towards that could not be found in the present. We cannot say the same. But - and this is a grand, redemptive "but"- we can live in the fallen present with the same hope with which we were created. Though marred, we are still made in the image of God. Though crushed, the watch still ticks. We can either be driven mad by it in the frantic rush for what is next and the throbbing reminder of what is past, or we can let it be the rhythm to a liturgical dance of confident, active hope.
One of the first musical things a child can learn is rhythm. From the time they are just a baby, they can begin to clap along with their mother to make a steady beat. They quickly learn that it is the proximity of one clap to another that gives any individual clap its meaning. In other words, a clap is only "now, now and now" - individual, active, even disconnected events. But when all those events are strung together, shaped by a composer and led by a conductor they become music. The note we are playing now is the only one we are able to pour ourselves into. But that note is meaningless without the note before. The note already past shapes the present note and the present note sets the stage for the note to come. Some days those notes go by so quickly and before we know it the run is gone. That's when we see the importance of the slow careful scales that started the day where we rehearsed to ourselves, consciously and repetitively the shape and tone and direction each individual note of that run should have when it reaches tempo. Sometimes we get to the end of a passage and we realize that as we played each note, we didn't live within them but just let them happen, unconsciously, even reluctantly. We excuse ourselves with the thought that our part matters little in the grand scheme, or that we've already played our favorite melody and aren't likely to have that part again or that we'll always have the next movement to truly get ourselves together and play real music. This is just the overture after all. Other times we take ourselves too seriously, rushing through the boring parts to get to the part we like best, some passage we've deemed to have "real substance," headless of the conductors tempo and the havoc we've reeked on the orchestra around us. Other days, weariness sets in, the shooting pains in our back flare up and we come to the point of truly believing we can't make it to the end, no matter how satisfying the finale is promised to be. The melody we've had is enough. Let the music die so my aching body and tired mind may have its peace.
My faith truly is infantile. Do I not see by now, that every note in my past, whether it seems to me anomalous or mundane or unspeakably dear, was part of a currently building, eternal counterpoint? The note I'm playing "now, and now and now" is interwoven with and built upon each and every note in my past. And the note I'm playing "now, and now and now" is equally part of a harmony yet unknown. Transpositions and meter changes are always dreadfully unsettling, but are they not (looking back) some of the most delicious points in the piece? Can I not savor the mystery of the development, even as it meanders through minor scales, and circles round and round through dissonant chords and false cadences? I can live in fear that I'll never reach the finale or I can exist through the mundane fugue pining after a long gone melody. Or - and again we reach a great redemptive "or" - I can choose with each note to participate in the development, building on a divinely orchestrated exposition, and actively anticipating the surely coming, eternal recapitulation. And if we're deeply, thoughtfully honest: is it not the mystery of the development that catches our breath and leaves us intoxicated with the beauty and skill of The Composer? Is it not the cadences of our past that teach us to lean into the dissonance of the present as anticipation of the resolution to come? It would take an Omniscient, Omnipotent and completely engaged Composer to craft a contrapuntal recapitulation which encompasses and perfectly interweaves an entire history of melodies. But we are the resident orchestra for just such a Composer. How do we know we can trust Him? There are two unshakeable proofs: First: remember the Exposition! Second: take a long look at the Incarnation.
Advent begins tomorrow. Will you join me in leaning into the tether and pang of each particular moment, "now and now, and now" through this season, building on the Exposition, savoring the mystery of the Development and anticipating the glory of the Recapitulation?
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