• Death and Dying,  Scholarship,  Scripture

    Flipping the Script: A Reflection on Hannah’s Song

    April 3, 2019

    One of my favorite parts of my thesis was the section on Hannah. Hannah’s prayer was one of the last places I would have expected to find insight on the use of dust and ashes in scripture, but it turned out that her story held one of the most personally meaningful bits of truth for me.

    Hannah’s story is perhaps one of the most well known among women in the Bible. She is often compared to Mary, and her song in 1 Samuel to Mary’s, the Magnificat. When the author of 1 Samuel introduces us to Hannah, she is the beloved but barren wife second wife, suffering at the hand of her husband’s other wife. She cried to God at the temple, desperate with sorrow and grief and unmet desire, promising to give her son wholly to God if God would just allow her to bear one. Her infertility was a window into the weakness of human bodies. Eventually, God answered her prayer, and she was given conception, and a son full of life and health. And then we see that the suffering was not over—in fact she has signed herself up for a sort of life-long suffering by promising to give her son up as a gift to the God who gives and takes life.

    What is amazing to me about Hannah is not just that she faithfully acted on her promise to God, but that her song after leaving her young son at the temple is a song of praise. Her song is full of images of dust and rocks, which is how I got there, but in it she does not focus on man’s frailty as a detriment, but flips the script. Instead of being sad and intimidated by the frailty of man, she uses human weakness as a launching point to remind her of man’s creation from dust. The result of her meditation on man’s frailty is not further despair, but praise. 

    This praise came in the face of not just leaving her only, much sought-after son, but leaving him in what could have been an unsafe place. The author of 1 Samuel calls Samuel’s new companions, Eli’s sons, “worthless men.” (1 Sam 3:1). It seems likely that Hannah would have known the character of the men she was leaving Samuel with, which makes her prayer striking. She sang a song of praise. This sets her apart—my instinct as a mother would, short of a miracle of faith, notbe praise at that point. But Hannah had faith, and she sang a song of joy. And the reason for her joy, surprisingly, is closely tied to man’s dusty origin.

    “He raises the poor from the dust;” she says, “he lifts the needy from the ash heap.” Her words are reminiscent of both Abraham, who states that he was “but dust and ashes” (Gen 18:27), and Job, who said, by one translation, that he was “comforted in dust and ashes” (Job 42:6). Both of these men, in their acknowledgement of their relation to dust, turned to God and were comforted.

    These examples make Hannah’s choices of imagery in her song stand out. She praises God as the one who “raises up the poor from the dust,” and “lifts the needy from the ash heap” (1 Sam 2:8). She knows that she is dust, drawn up and formed by her Creator. And just as she did in her years of infertility, she runs toward God, trusting him to “guard the feet of his faithful ones.” Not only did she trust God to protect her and her son, but because of his history of protecting and raising up the weak, but the same image gave her comfort that the wicked would be powerless over her son. The worthless men who had power over her son are also dust.

    And there is one more reason why she can praise God as she is separated from her precious son. Her God is not like man. He is not dust! He is a Rock. Firm. Unmovable. Infinitely stronger than the wicked men who are made of dust. 

    Not only is he not dust, he is the Creator. Hannah praises God because of his power over the life of his creation: “The Lord kills and brings to life; he brings down to Sheol and raises up…” Hannah reminds herself that even though the men with whom she has left her son are not good men, it is not they who are in control. The God who created them is. In the midst of what I can only guess must have been incredible grief at leaving her son behind, she joyfully turns to God—“for the pillars of the earth are the Lord’s, and on them he has set the world.” Her rest is in the fact that the Creator God has power over life and death, that he “will guard the feet of his faithful ones”—including her son. 

    What a good lesson that is for us! Are our hearts and minds bent toward praise when we’re experiencing loss, or being confronted with the frailty of our bodies? Have we trained our minds to look to him with praise when we our bodies, or our loved ones bodies are returned to dust? I’m not, usually. But Hannah sets a good example for us. Maybe we should teach ourselves to sing with her when we are reminded of our own frailty as dust-made and dust-bound creatures. Maybe, like Hannah, we should gladly remember that yes, we are dust, because it reminds us that our God is not. We can praise God that even though we are weak, we are hidden, protected in the cleft of the Rock—the one to whom belong the foundations of the world.

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  • Grief,  More Stories

    Where Is Thy Sting?

    March 26, 2019

    Someone passed this blog post on to me, and it seems appropriate to share here, as well. Anyone who has lost someone “before their time” can probably relate to the question “What kind of God would take my loved one?” This particular blog post was written by a mother who has lost two infants. She knows the question well.

    But her answer is just two more questions: “Oh Death, where is thy sting? Grave, where is your victory.” And those questions provide a good answer, even when given through the tears of a broken heart.

    So please go read the post. Here’s an excerpt:

    Sometimes the enemy tries to offer me the lies that death and the grave have won, and that God isn’t able to be trusted. And sometimes, I reach for those lies because I don’t always understand. What kind of God takes children away from their mommy while her body is still freshly bleeding from birth? What kind of God watches a father comfort a grieving mother at their baby girl’s graveside? What kind of God sees the secret places of a mama’s heart, the parts that know the exact location in the corner of the closet of her baby boy’s ashes and yet, after almost three years, she still cannot bear to peek inside that little box? What Author of life can snatch life away before it has even begun? What Abba Father can take a child away from a mother? What kind of God would do that?

    Sarah Reike, on Risen Motherhood March 21, 2019
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  • Death and Dying,  Grief,  My Story

    Days to Remember

    March 25, 2019

    This is it, you guys. This week marks the anniversaries of car accidents, suicide, and my first miscarriage. 

    I sang with the congregation in church yesterday, and tears welled up and overflowed as we sang of death and resurrection. Most of my losses this week are from over a decade ago, but this week still marks most of the darkest days of my life—the loss of four teenage peers and one tiny baby. This week is worth crying over.

    I used to mark it well, taking some time off to sit and contemplate the losses I’ve experienced. To remember the people who have died, and intentionally grieve their loss, pray for their families, and let sorrow lead me to prayers of “Maranatha! Come, Lord Jesus!”

    The last few years have been, simply, busy, and I’ve let that be an excuse to let this practice fall by the wayside. But it’s worthwhile, I think, to take the time to mark loss, and my lack of planning is unfortunate. One reason I want to continue this practice (maybe I’ll have to shift the date to next week this year) is that I don’t want to miss out. I think there’s real gain in grieving.

    2 Corinthians 4:7–16 has been influential in my thinking in this regard. There, Paul speaks of the treasure we have—”the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” Our bodies, in the metaphor, are jars of clay. As these bodies, these jars, suffer and become cracked, the light of Christ shines out with greater and greater brightness, being “renewed day by day.”

    So I remember, consciously, the times when I have felt the most cracked, the most worn. I remember the cracking so that I remember, too, the strengthening of the light within me and the comfort of the Holy Spirit.

    And I also remember for the sake of what Paul speaks of in 2 Corinthians 1:3–7, a passage I stumbled upon in my reading the morning after I learned of my cousin’s suicide: “For as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ we share abundantly in comfort too. If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation; and if we are comforted, it is for your comfort…Our hope for you is unshaken, for we know that as you share in our sufferings, you will also share in our comfort.” I remember for the sake of my empathy. If I remember my own suffering, and my own comfort, I can more easily enter into the suffering of those around me for the sake of their comfort. Taking time to grieve renews my compassion for those whose grief is fresher than mine, and allows the comfort I have received to flow over into the lives of others.

    So, what does this time look like for me?

    Usually it involves some time spent in quiet remembering—literally just thinking back on those days, and reliving them. I put together the timeline of events, remembering the conversations of the day, and stepping back into the emotions of the day. 

    I like to take some time to journal and pray, too. I try to remember the people who were most affected by loss in those days, and pray for them. Grief for sons and daughters never goes away. The loss of children can have an enormous impact on marriages, jobs, and all of life. Trauma in adolescence is powerful for good or ill. I never want to assume that 12 or more years later friends and family are “over it.” So this is my day to remember to pray for the people that I know who have been impacted the most.

    Usually this takes just an hour, maybe two. It feels like a short time to remember such life-altering events, and mourn lives of sons and daughters, people made in the image of God.

    Life is precious, and death is catastrophic. Two hours of grief a year doesn’t seem like enough. 

    For those of you who have lost friends and family, I’d love to hear from you. Do you take days of remembrance for losses you’ve experienced? How do you enter intentionally into grief as the years progress and the open wound of loss becomes scar tissue?

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  • Books,  Death and Dying,  Grief

    “A Letter of Consolation:” An Introduction

    March 17, 2019

    The first book I read after I finished my MA program was A Letter of Consolation, by Henri Nouwen (no, I still don’t know how to pronounce his name).

    The book is a published version of a letter that he wrote to his father six months or so after the death of his mother, about their shared grief. It’s a moving book, and a helpful one. Also, notably, it’s short. My copy is only about a hundred pages, with large font and wide margins.

    After reading through it once, my copy is full of underlining and marginalia. He said a lot of things I have either thought before or experienced but have never thought coherently or put into words. Things like: 

    “Real grief is not healed by time. It is false to think that the passing of time will slowly make us forget her and take away our pain. I really want to console you in this letter, but not by suggesting that time will take away your pain…I would not only be telling a lie, I would be diminishing the importance of mother’s life, underestimating the depth of your grief, and mistakenly revitalizing the power of love that has bound mother and you together for forty-seven years. If time does anything it deepens our grief. The longer we live, the more fully we become aware of who she was for us, and the more intimately we experience what her love meant for us. Real deep love is…very unobtrusive, seemingly easy and obvious, and so present that we take it for granted. Therefore it is often only in retrospect—or better, in memory—that we fully realize its power and depth. Yes, indeed, love often makes itself visible in pain.”

    p 16

    And: 

    “The same love that forms the basis of our grief is also the basis of our hope; the same love that makes us cry out in pain also must enable us to develop a liberating intimacy with our own most basic brokenness. Without faith, this must sound like a contradiction. But our faith in him whose love overcame death and who rose from the grave on third day converts this contradiction into a paradox, the most healing paradox of our existence.”

    p 33–34

    And:

    “Death indeed simplifies; death does not tolerate endless shadings and nuances. Death lays bare what really matters, and in this way becomes your judge…Long-forgotten events [return] to memory as if they had taken place only recently. It seems as if we could put our whole lives in the palms of our hands like small precious stones and gaze at them with tenderness and admiration. How tiny, how beautiful, how valuable!”

    p 41–42

    And this one too:

    “What makes you and me Christians is not only our belief that he who was without sin died for our sake on the cross and thus opened for us the way to his Heavenly Father, but also that through his death our death is transformed from a totally absurd end of all that gives life meaning into an event that liberates us and those whom we love… [Mother’s death] is an event that allows her altruism to yield a rich harvest. Jesus died so that we might live, and everyone who dies in union with him participates in the life-giving power of his death… each of our deaths can become a death for others. I think that we need to start seeing the profound meaning of this dying for each other in and through the death of Christ in order to catch a glimpse of what eternal life might mean. Eternity is born in time, and every time someone dies whom we have loved dearly, eternity can break into our mortal existence a little bit more.”

    p 60

    I didn’t intend to fill this post with quotes. But maybe that’s the best way to introduce you all to the book. I’m hoping to write a follow-up post with some more developed engagement with some of his words, but I’ll leave you with a quote that resonates with the purpose of this website:

    “I am writing you this letter in the firm conviction that reality can be faced and entered with an open mind and an open heart, and in the sincere belief that consolation and comfort are to be found where our wounds hurt most.”

    p 17

    I share Nouwen’s hope and conviction. This is why I’m studying and writing. If this is true, if our consolation is be found in our most painful wounds, then bandaging our wounds with greeting card sympathy and resurrection-talk before, or maybe “without” is a better word there, we have examined their depth is a mistake. And to be honest, it’s a mistake I don’t want to make. 

    I think this is why I found A Letter of Consolation helpful. He doesn’t shy away from a deep examination of what happens when someone dies. He digs, looking for the diamonds of hope God intends for us to find as we plunge down into the depths of grief. I’m glad for Nouwen’s introspection, and that he was willing to publish such personal reflections. I think they’re well-worth reading.

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  • My Story,  Stories and Songs

    An Introduction

    March 16, 2019

    In the last months of grad school, I got the same question grad students everywhere answer countless times: “What is your thesis about?” 

    Now, what is the least-shocking way to tell people that you’re interested in human death and decay?

    I couldn’t just tell them that I was studying dust in scripture—seriously, is there anything less interesting-sounding than dust? So I would explain it in the context of a larger philosophical/theological question, and the fact that it’s neglected by nearly everyone who will, in fact, return to dust.

    It wasn’t always a comfortable moment to share stories of grief and loss, but the truth is that there’s more to my interest than merely academic curiosity. In fact, I’ve been contemplating death from a young age. 

    I won’t go into too much detail here—partly because some of these stories don’t feel like mine to share, and partly because I’ll probably say more about them some other time. But I want to give you a picture of my experiences so that you can understand a little of why I am the way that I am. 

    It started in high-school. 

    High School

    My family moved to Minnesota in June of 2002—the summer before my freshman year of high-school. I started at a new school that fall, and to be honest, that first semester (okay, the whole year) was pretty rough. It was a small school. The kind of school where you “know” people without even necessarily talking to them—you have most of your classes together, so even if you never have a one-on-one conversation you still have an idea who they are and what they’re like.

    In the spring semester, one of my classmates became ill and missed a lot of school. I remember hearing updates occasionally, and then learning finally that he had cancer. We continued to hear updates, positive and negative, throughout the school year. Sometime mid-summer, he passed away. My grief was different from my classmates. I had only known him for a few months—most of them had known him their whole lives. Even so, close proximity, with or without a relationship, to the death of a peer at 15 is not something to discount.

    The following spring I was a sophomore, a little more secure in my new school, though still in the “new kid” category—something you never quite lose when everyone else has grown up together. In the early morning, before my sister and I went to school, my parents received a phone call. I didn’t hear it, but my sister came downstairs, knocked on my door, and told me that our cousin had committed suicide. He was just a few years older, and we weren’t close. But there’s still something profoundly shaping about losing family, another peer, in an unexpected and violent way. My sister and I went to school anyway, not knowing what else to do with ourselves, and knowing we’d be missing school to travel back home to Montana for the funeral.

    Within days of the one-year anniversary of my cousin’s death, compounding my grief, a school-mate in the grade below me, was killed in a car accident. My junior year was nearly over, and I had yet to have a year of high-school not marked by loss. 

    My senior year rolled around and I think we were as hope-filled as any senior class. You never think catastrophe is coming. But then one day three of our class-mates never made it to school. They were planning to meet before driving to attend, if I remember correctly, the state basketball tournament. After a stress- and rumor-filled morning, our principal confirmed to us that there had been a car accident and two of our classmates, weeks from graduation, had died in an accident just a few miles from school.

    And then we were adults…

    Fast-forward through happy college years—where I began to let go of the expectation that the last week of March would bring unexpected news of loss. And since 2006, it hasn’t, thankfully. 

    This week has been filled with joy for the last nearly-four years—it’s the week of my daughter’s birthday.

    But even her birthday is a reminder. Before my daughter was born, we lost her older sibling in a miscarriage. An unexpected loss in a season that we had reason to expect to be filled with joy—for us and many of our friends.

    My son’s birthday is in March too, a little earlier. He just turned one this week, actually. But even so, I see the age gap between him and my daughter and remember that there is indeed enough space in there to have been filled with the birth of a second child lost through miscarriage.

    Heavy Weights

    Do I make more sense now? The last fifteen years of my life have brought significant sorrows nearly every year. I haven’t even included the stories of my aunt and uncle, and various others from slightly more distant circles whose loss I’ve grieved. Each new grief adds a little weight to the others, an extra dose of empathy for the closest mourners. 

    And do you see why this matters? None of us are above this sort of experience. We don’t think about it often, but we, and everyone we love, are one speeding car, one bad decision, one illness away from a close encounter with grief, death, and decay. No one is exempt—age, health, and habits are no guarantee.

    Are we prepared? Do we have the tools in our belt to deal with loss? Can we answer with confidence that even in our weakest, saddest moments that God is still love, and that he is still kind? I

    I’m not encouraging fear or paranoia. But my own experiences have taught me that we should be ready to undertake the task of grieving and dying well. And it is a task—there is nothing easy about it. But, like muscles grow able to bear heavy weights with practiced motion, I think we can prepare our souls to bear greater weight as well. Great weights never get lighter; great griefs will always be heavy. But we can practice so that just as weight-lifters perfect their form, we know how to bear them when they come.

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  • Death and Dying,  Scholarship

    Beginnings

    March 11, 2019

    If you’ve read my About the Blog page, you saw that I wrote my thesis on a topic related to death and dying, particularly as it pertains to the Christian. I started this blog as a way to keep myself motivated to continue studying, so I wanted to tell you a little more about my thesis work and where I’m thinking my research will take me—or us, if you come along with me here on The Unhurried Chase (don’t forget to subscribe!). 

    My thesis title was “I Am But Dust And Ashes”: Pride, Humility, and the Appropriate Response to Man’s Creation.” It was my attempt to understand what being made of dust means for man’s life and relationship with God. At the start of the writing process, I was interested in human decay. At most Christian funerals the primary focus is the resurrection, and the abundant life in heaven. To understate it, this is a good thing. But, why, if God intended our sole focus to be the risen body and the eternity to come, do human bodies decay at all—surely we would miss our loved one just as much if they evaporated into thin air at death. My thesis, I thought, would be a good chance to learn what we might be missing by speeding so quickly past this disconcerting part of human life.

    After some preliminary research, it became clear the root of all of these questions was what scripture has to say about man’s creation from dust. All other questions about funeral practices, and grief, and dismissive sympathy cards are downstream from this question—what can we learn from scripture about man’s creation from dust and its implications for mankind?

    I started, fittingly, with creation. I undertook a close reading of Genesis 1–3, trying to understand what is being communicated to readers regarding Adam’s creation from dust, and subsequent exile and death. Three things came into focus through this reading: first, the dust that man was formed from was lowly, barren, and worthless; secondly, God formed Adam with special intention; third, man’s creation from dust was an integral part of man’s relation to God. If man’s first sin was pride, as a number of church fathers believed, then Adam and Eve’s move to cover their bodies after their fall could be read as a move of shame and embarrassment to hide any hint of their bodies’ lowly origin from one who was so entirely superior to them. If this reading is accurate, Adam and Eve’s exile was closely tied to their perception of their body of dust. Instead of drawing near to God as they realized the humility intrinsic to their physical bodies, they hid, and God sent them out in exile to the dust from which Adam was created.

    Next, I wanted to see if there were other passages in scripture where man was confronted with dust, and how these passages might relate to what I was seeing in Genesis. I soon realized that dust is a very common image in scripture, and that there was a pattern emerging from the text.

    I saw that in general, dust was used as an image in circumstances when men were prideful, either attempting to mimic God’s creation from dust in an idolatrous way (for example Babel, or the story of the Golden Calf), or directly defying God (as in the case of the Pharaoh of the Exodus), or when circumstances when the people of God were suffering or witnessing judgement (as seen in the stories of Abraham, Job, and Hannah). 

    The second pattern was that in each case God drew near—just as he had sought out Adam and Eve in the garden. 

    The prideful and idolatrous seemed to try to distance themselves from God and his offered relationship. As a result, they were met with the scattering hand of judgement, led to exile and destruction—scattered like chaff before the wind.

    However, the righteous found their lowly origin as a reason to turn to God, and were even comforted by it. Job and Abraham both turned to God for relief or comfort using the phrase, “I who am but dust and ashes.” Hannah, leaving her beloved son in the hands of worthless men, praises the God who creates and raises man from the dust and the ash heap. In each case God was near, and comforted them.

    The only adequate reaction to the realization that one is like chaff in the face of a gale, then, is to seek shelter in the Rock, like Abraham, Job, and Hannah. When man relates to his body of dust humbly and turns to God for comfort and shelter against the gale, he is met with care and comfort. He is not scattered like the proud, but is sustained, held together, and kept near.

    This is the work that we see in the incarnated Son of God, who took on a body of dust in order to undo Adam and Eve’s exile, to gather what had been scattered, and to become the cornerstone of a building made not by human hands, for man’s glory, but a temple made by and for the glory of God.

    So that’s it. That’s a summary of my thesis. What do you think? I’m hoping to adapt portions of it into blog posts or articles to post both here and perhaps publish elsewhere. Let me know if there is anything that you think is particularly worth reading about in more detail.

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  • Death and Dying

    The “Why” Question

    March 8, 2019

    Every now and then I’m struck by how weird it is that I am so interested in death and decay. I don’t think I’m a morbid. I don’t think I have an unhealthy interest in or attraction to the macabre. But still, I seem to continually circle back around to this topic, admittedly with some intention, but often without even realizing what I’m doing. And then I stop and look around and notice that not very many others are here with me. 

    What seems obvious to me though, is that the question shouldn’t be “why am I so interested in death,” but rather, “why isn’t everyone else as interested as I am?”

    My life experience has taught me that death is something that none of us can expect to be free of. Some of us come into contact with it sooner than others, but we will all see the deaths of loved ones—parents, spouses, friends, even children. And that’s not to mention the loss of acquaintances, or friends of friends, whose loss can usher in a rather confusing form of grief. 

    This is why it is important for human-kind in general to care about death—it impacts every single one of us, and is perhaps one of the most painful experiences in human existence to both experience and observe. Who of us doesn’t have questions about death? 

    For Christians, it carries perhaps an even greater weight. We claim to know the truth about the eternal destinies of human souls—not so much that we have confidence in any particular person’s eternal destiny, but that each human has an eternal destiny. Death, we believe, is a sort of checkpoint. A border crossing where we transition from one state of being into another. And more than that, it is the place where we move outside of time to join the God who created us, his son who has prepared a place for us, and whose presence we have been longing for since the first day we met him.

    So, the question is—if death is such an important time for humanity, and for Christians specifically, why would we not spend time seeking to understand and prepare for it. Why would we not think about it, so that when we lose loved ones we are prepared to answer the questions and inevitable grief that comes at their loss?

    This blog, then, is primarily, and for the foreseeable future, dedicated to this topic. My aim is to read a lot, and then process my reading here. Alongside my reading, I will share my own stories of loss and grief. 

    Would you like to come with me? If the answer is yes, go ahead and enter your email address in the sidebar to subscribe. I’d love to have your company!

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  • Miscellany

    Welcome!

    February 26, 2019

    I’m so glad you’re here! I’ll be posting some things in the next week—I’m still trying to test out the new website and get everything figured out! Thanks for coming!

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