Today was surrealistic.
I kept walking around the house after church, expecting to see Mom. Even knowing she was napping, safe, with yarn to crochet when she was ready and a fresh supply of chocolate. Or later, knowing she had dinner and went to bed around 7, each creak or gust of the wind made me think I'd've seen her if I had just looked up sooner.
As if she would be healthier if I had just been better.
And the truth is the possibility of Mom dying rubs against so many hard things I have to accept as a christian. It's in the hard times of suffering when I can do nothing other than watch and accept when the ideas of grace, or the beauty of some esoteric idea of God feels most irrelevant.
See, that seems to be the ugly, most hushed up secret about christians: we doubt, too. A lot. Often. In our heads and in our prayers.
And the brave of us talk with God about it, hoping He has some time between dealing with failed American foreign policy consequences and the next hurling comet to listen.
Friends will listen, but faith is a personal choice, no matter its flavor. No matter how empathetic or sensitive the ear, each person's soul (or state thereof) has been trusted to a single individual. And their faith.
Two of my closest supports through this dark winter are atheists. They have both questioned faith, questioned Occam's Razor of living as if there were a god to dullness. And settled into the conclusion existence begins at birth, and ends at death.
The pragmatist in me appreciates the beauty, the clean-ness of that idea. This body recycled to the earth from whence it came, leaving only memories of a life lived. Those, in turn, take as little or as much space as is chosen and preferred. Debts collected would be written off, pictures, things collected dispersed into new homes or given to those with greater need and less possession.
But this in-between of Mom being-present-but-not resonates with part of me I have the least words for. The entire situation makes my inner pragmatist twitch, troubled by the absolute illogic, the overwhelming messiness, but that part has plenty of things to say.
The quieter, smaller part sees everything, but knows my eyes are not just cameras; they're also projectors. Small projectors tilted by fear of loss and the unknown, not showing what is but what may be feared to be.
And because fear cannot hold the same space as love, that still, quiet voice fills spaces with better, possible stories; stories of faith and questions asked of a God who makes time for a surrealistic Sunday and the occasional dull razor.
I kept walking around the house after church, expecting to see Mom. Even knowing she was napping, safe, with yarn to crochet when she was ready and a fresh supply of chocolate. Or later, knowing she had dinner and went to bed around 7, each creak or gust of the wind made me think I'd've seen her if I had just looked up sooner.
As if she would be healthier if I had just been better.
And the truth is the possibility of Mom dying rubs against so many hard things I have to accept as a christian. It's in the hard times of suffering when I can do nothing other than watch and accept when the ideas of grace, or the beauty of some esoteric idea of God feels most irrelevant.
See, that seems to be the ugly, most hushed up secret about christians: we doubt, too. A lot. Often. In our heads and in our prayers.
And the brave of us talk with God about it, hoping He has some time between dealing with failed American foreign policy consequences and the next hurling comet to listen.
Friends will listen, but faith is a personal choice, no matter its flavor. No matter how empathetic or sensitive the ear, each person's soul (or state thereof) has been trusted to a single individual. And their faith.
Two of my closest supports through this dark winter are atheists. They have both questioned faith, questioned Occam's Razor of living as if there were a god to dullness. And settled into the conclusion existence begins at birth, and ends at death.
The pragmatist in me appreciates the beauty, the clean-ness of that idea. This body recycled to the earth from whence it came, leaving only memories of a life lived. Those, in turn, take as little or as much space as is chosen and preferred. Debts collected would be written off, pictures, things collected dispersed into new homes or given to those with greater need and less possession.
But this in-between of Mom being-present-but-not resonates with part of me I have the least words for. The entire situation makes my inner pragmatist twitch, troubled by the absolute illogic, the overwhelming messiness, but that part has plenty of things to say.
The quieter, smaller part sees everything, but knows my eyes are not just cameras; they're also projectors. Small projectors tilted by fear of loss and the unknown, not showing what is but what may be feared to be.
And because fear cannot hold the same space as love, that still, quiet voice fills spaces with better, possible stories; stories of faith and questions asked of a God who makes time for a surrealistic Sunday and the occasional dull razor.
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