I’ve been pleasantly surprised by life. It’s not at all what I expected it to be, and along each unit of time I find thrilling little reminders that “the One who made the promise is trustworthy.” By way of illustration I will tell you a story from a few weeks ago. I’d been traveling in the mountains this week with my mom and my dog, Milo, and for the first time in either of our lives, I’d been letting him explore off his leash. This new freedom lit up something inside him: he ran faster, immersed himself in the world of smells more deeply and diligently than ever before, and, I noticed, he trotted about with his tail higher than usual, the white tip flicking about like a whimsical little feather.
Milo loves me. When I sit somewhere, he walks over and rests his head in my lap. When I come home, he wags his tail with such fervor it’s almost an error to say it’s his tail wagging: his whole body gets into it. When I reprimand him, he practically hates himself, cowering and staring at me with an abject forlornness that is nearly too sorrowful to bear—but when I praise him, he is so pleased with who he is, he’s pleased with the whole damn world, he loves being alive, and, my hand to heaven, he beams. Because of this, I’ve never worried too much on the occasions when he’s slipped out of his harness on a walk, or when he’s gotten out the door as I come home. He loves me, so he won’t go too far.
But he also loved his off-leash independence, and he tested its limits. One morning, I let him wander out of sight, thinking he’d come back on his own, but he didn’t. When he didn’t return after some minutes, I started walking around the large property where we were staying. I called his name, and nothing. I checked all of the spots he’d seemed to like best over the last handful of days—the pile of logs, the creek, the dark and pungent world beneath a neighbor’s back porch—and he wasn’t there.
A small stone of dread settled in my abdomen. Had I trusted his affection for me too much? The house where I was vacationing sat in an expanse of grass at the base of some mountains. The property was narrow, but long. After some minutes of calling his name, I began to go through all the worst possibilities in my mind. He explored too far up the creek and could not find his way back. He’d been run over by one of the large pickup trucks that clipped around the mountain passes with fearsome force. Oh, my God: maybe there was a bear. I’d been walking around, calling his name every minute or so, for some time, when I heard a faint sound like something rumbling, and looked to one of the far reaches of the property. Squinting, I was able to make out a small spot moving toward me, growing larger in the grass as it came into view. And there was Milo, barreling toward me at full speed, his ears flapping behind him like the scarf of a cartoon flying ace, his long tongue lolling out of his mouth: he heard me call him, and made haste to come flying back at full tilt, his animated body the response to his name.
There are things in this life that seem too good to be true, and yet they’re true: my dog is alive, and happy to come to me when I call. My dog likes his life, and I am the steward of it. How odd; things don’t seem like they could be that good. But they are that good.
Anyway, enough of that. Life also sucks. Let’s not beat around the bush. When you get right down to it, it’s all sort of a nightmare. At times an arduous slog, at others a living litany of agonies, life never stops, and it never stops being painful.
I think I’ve defined two basic and essential, unavoidable reasons that make life the most rotten monstrosity one could imagine, and I will outline them for you in the precisest of philosophical terms. The first reason is that we’re the worst. The second reason is that shit happens. The first seems sort of self-explanatory: we can’t stop screwing up. We are always prepared to ruin our own lives or those of others. And the second is self-explanatory, too. Shit happens: all kinds of freak accidents and illnesses that are outside of our control. The most inevitable and uncontrollable shit that happens is death. There’s not a single person or thing on this earth that we will encounter that we will not one day have to bid goodbye to, whether we’re the ones remaining in the domain of the living or the ones moving beyond it. I’m going to die, you’re going to die, our friends are all going to die, every single member of our families is going to die. To me it’s staggering, how comprehensive the reach of death is. The cashier at the Dollar General in the mountains, who had pock marks on her face and hair bleached ’til it was brittle who scratched my dog’s chin with her long, purple acrylic fingernails, and said to him, “Oh, you’re just a lover, huh? You’re just a lover,” for example: she’s going to die. The guy who walked in afterward who flinched a little at my dog, though he must have been 280 pounds of pure muscle—him, too.
A handful of years ago now, a very dear friend of mine died of an illness that was sudden and aggressive at the same time as it was lengthy, painful, and drawn-out; and within ten days of her passing, another dear friend of mine also died in a very sudden and tragic accident. This had an intense effect on the state of my spirit for the next two years—but it was also, in some ways, I knew, business as usual. Whenever loved ones at the time asked me how I was doing, I would say, “There’s not much to say about it.” The new grief was enormously bulky and disturbing. I couldn’t get it off or out of me. It caused my soul to wretch and creak. But even then I knew there was hardly anything noteworthy about that season. People die all the time. Grief is like dreaming: a universal experience that nonetheless occurs to each participant in a particular way, operating according to a deep, interior non-logic, a system of meaning making that defies description or definition. It exists squarely at the crossroads of the profound and the mundane. Most of the time, talking about it feels like trying to tell a story in cast shadows, using a light that comes from somewhere indefinite and ever-moving. Though it begins in and is rendered from reality, the story distorts and becomes peculiar, overblown, and grim.
The day I found out about the death of that first friend, the one who had been suffering, then, for about two years, I woke up early, which was uncommon in that period of my life. It doesn’t matter why, but for months I had been trapped in a state of melancholic apathy; my passion for almost everything had flatlined. And I lived alone, so nobody cared. But I woke up that morning with the startling and inexplicable desire to get out of the house, and take the bus into town, and buy a few nice things. I remember being struck by how odd and out of place this inner vibrancy felt; I was curious about where it had come from. But I went about the morning, grateful for the windfall. This feeling persisted until I arrived back at my apartment with my shopping bags a couple hours later. Almost as soon as I walked through the door, the happiness fled from me, and I was overcome by another sense altogether, one of deep, dark, inky anger, like I have never felt before. It was anger with neither origin nor destination, it had nothing as its object, and it seemed to be happening to me from the outside, like a great storm, or else arising from some nowhere-place in my spirit. I stayed in that turbulent state for about five minutes, mindless with rage, and then, suddenly, it broke over me, and I began to sob, now overcome with profound sorrow that rocked me from without and within. I didn’t know what was happening to me. In fact there was a part of me that existed apart from it all, calmly watching all of this take place, silent in wonder.
All of this ecstasy had to end back in this world, and I feel a little humiliated to say that when I was finally set down, catching my breath and bewildered and regaining sight, I checked my phone. It felt like an entire age had passed, but it had only been twenty or so minutes. Then, I (again, with my apologies for these lowly intrusions of the material world on the reverie) logged on to Facebook, where I saw the news. Kate had died. In fact, she’d died in the very moments my strange removal from myself had begun. I believe that my soul felt the rupture in the spiritual fabric of things, when my dear friend’s luminous spirit went to the next world, where she is, I am confident, with Christ, in whom she placed her trust.
I recently watched another of C.T. Dreyer’s cinematic masterpieces, called Ordet (note: spoilers ahead). The film tells the story of a family of Danish farmers, including brothers Mikkel and Johannes. Mikkel has lost his faith, but finds fulfillment in his family, particularly his wife Inger, who expects to give birth to a new child soon. Johannes, for his part, has by all appearances become delusional, proclaiming that he is Jesus Christ. I will spare you too many plot details, but each member of the family experiences their own challenges and pain, all of which gather and come to a head when Inger, after a long and difficult labor, abruptly and unexpectedly dies. Her family, especially her husband, are completely lost without her. The movie ends with her funeral, where Johannes, the so-called lunatic, says he will bring her back to life. “Johannes,” his father says, “now you are blaspheming God.”
“No,” says Johannes, “all of you blaspheme God with your lukewarm faith.” He approaches Inger’s open casket, where her husband weeps, to the somber indignation and disbelief of all in the room except Inger’s eldest daughter, who urges Johannes, “Hurry, Uncle.”
“Do you believe I can do it?” Johannes asks her.
“Yes, Uncle.”
“When I say the name of Jesus she will arise,” he says, and then: “Hear me, thou who art dead. … Jesus Christ, if it is possible, then give her leave to come back to life, give me the Word, the word that can make the dead come to life. Inger, in the name of Jesus Christ, I bid thee, arise.”
And then she does. Almost imperceptibly at first, Inger’s chest begins to slowly expand, drawing in breath; then, her hands stir; and when her husband whispers her name, she opens her eyes.
When I taught creative writing at the college level for my Master’s degree, I used to tell my students that they couldn’t write a story in which the laws of this world’s biology and physics did not apply; nor could they write what I called a “Best Night Ever” story, in which everyone was drunk or stoned and having the biggest blast. To me, these—magic, uninvented technology, the excuse of intoxication—are easy narrative cop-outs; I wanted my students to figure out how to write a story in which they could not rely on absurdity or gimmick or sleight of hand to get their characters out of a corner.
Nonetheless, that disturbance of the worldly is what I like so much about Ordet, because it signals to an honesty about what on earth is going on here. The fact of the matter is that we’re backed into a corner: we will continue to operate from our own brokenness and sorrow until one day, we lose one another forever, unless something miraculous happens. But something miraculous has happened: the Lord Himself came to earth to redeem what we cannot. I used to think of this as a breaking of the rules, that this indicated that our God was a God of absurdity, but no: Christ is the Rule, and He is also our only way of keeping It. From the moment we are conceived, we are commanded to live, and we follow that command without conscious prompting: every cell in our bodies strives toward it. But we’re the worst—or rather, we’ve done the worst—and shit happens, and without help, we’re going to hurt a lot and then die, and that will be that.
This year I’ve been developing a closer relationship with scripture, and I discovered something that is perhaps obvious to everyone, but was not to me. In Matthew 4:4, Jesus famously says, “Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes forth from the mouth of God.” I did not know until some months ago that Christ, here, is quoting Moses, who is explaining to the Israelites the law that he received on Mount Sinai forty years before. During his time on Mount Sinai, receiving this law, Moses spent forty days taking neither food nor drink. By human measures, this is not possible: no one can live that long without so much as a drop of water. Nonetheless, Moses survived because God willed it; it was His order.
God issues the same order to us. Live, He says. We can’t do it. We’re trying all the time, and look around. It’s a disaster. But we know how the law God gave Moses was eventually fulfilled: the God lent us the Word we need to follow His impossible Rule. If living is a call, living is also the response. It is what it is: it is good. The One who made the promise is trustworthy. If life is an uttered Word, we the living say it back.