Inhabiting God's History in the New Year

"Sorrow needs not a map, but a history. It is not a state of being but a process."  

C.S. Lewis  (paraphrase mine)

I had no plan to write a blog, but as I followed some rabbit trails along on Youtube I watched a dramatized discussion between Tolkien and Lewis about the True Myth of Christ and then in another video heard the quote above regarding sorrow. 

This past year has been a very difficult one. For the last several years on January first I have taken some time aside to reflect over the year that has gone by and all the things that happened that I could never have imagined, planned for, or understood had I seen them coming. Standing on that sharp edge at the beginning of a new year I think about the mystery of the time to come. Usually it's a big mix of gratitude, curiosity, wonder, and fear when I am in that place. 

I never could have seen this year coming. I could say a lot about it, but the focus of my thought for this post is what Lewis hits on about Sorrow not being a  mapped out state, an easily navigable path, but a process, a history to be inhabited. Maybe this year has been a kind of holiday, a time set apart to dwell in a land that has felt foreign and wild, untamed and fearsome. I haven't known what would be over the next hill or around the next corner. I've scarcely felt equipped to understand my own heart clearly. God often takes us into the land of our own soul which we find to be a strange alien place.

At times, I longed for techniques! I ached for some clear-cut allegory of sorrow that I could cling to, some sermon to make sense of it all. But when I got those answers they didn't warm me. Technique, machinery, maps, answers... all cold and mostly useless. There are no short cuts through history, you just have to live it and listen, and participate in the telling. 

Liturgy has helped me more than sermons this year. Stories more than speeches. Imagination more than instruction.  I am thinking now of friendships. Family-work. The common liturgies of cooking, cleaning, reading, praying, singing, conversation, bed-making, basic affection, and presence. I'm thinking of the resting place that some people are to me. I'm thinking of the trust and safety that make freedom and healing visible on the horizon of a new year. This year pain has had more to say than ever before. And it's been a season of listening that has felt as important as it has been difficult. 

Still, I wish I could map it. I wish I could unfold the paper and count the paces clearly to the next stop. But life is not as simple as I'd like to believe, not so black and white.  We tell ourselves and those in pain that the night will end when the dawn comes up. I believe Jesus and his history. As a believer in the bringer of the dawn, I find myself continuing to struggle when the dawn rises and the day has turned out to be cloud-covered and grey. Even Jesus doesn't always offer us the fix-it we wish for!  But he does offer us the common liturgy of his love and friendship. It's actually funny to me how we say "Jesus is the answer!" that's very true - the answer is in his presence being with us more than in the maps and techniques we think we can derive from him. He doesn't always explain everything, we don't always understand. We live though, and live truly with him, in him. We walk out a history, a process, a relationship. 

I've been encouraged the last week or so. Do you remember when Sam asked Frodo in Mordor if he could recall the taste of strawberries? Frodo says he can't remember, all his awareness can contain is the terror and trauma of Sauron's evil ring. We'll I'm beginning to remember the taste of strawberries and the color of grass. Hope is scary though and the appearance is tentative. I feel careful but eager to step forward in faith that Jesus can shape even the sorrowful history I inhabit to tell a story of redemption. Like Tolkien says, in God's Myth catastrophes become 'eu'catastrophes. Eu means good or great as in Eucharist - they become good-catastrophes. 

That doesn't negate the sorrow. The Cross was deeply tragic and painful and even wrong. God labored in that pain and, impossibly, bore forth a life beyond our comprehension but within our apprehension, a history we cannot pin down, but that can be inhabited. I don't know what is possible for my life! But I am beginning again to have the courage to wonder if God can bring forth, from the labor of my sorrow, a good story to inhabit . It's happened before.