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there’s a wideness in God’s mercy

10 Comments

Let me try to tell you.

There have been exactly two afternoons in the past two months and two weeks (because yes, I still count in months and weeks; this is what mothers of newborns do, remember – or should do in a world where nature does not betray and babies do not die) when my despair has been tempted to fling open the front door and scream at the top of my tired lungs that the world has forgotten us.

On each of these afternoons – and I cannot explain this – I have tripped over a package on the doorstep.

I have calmed down enough to sit on the stoop next to a white USPS package with a return address I did not recognize. And I tore open its top to unwrap something rare and beautiful from an almost-stranger.

Each time this surprise has sprung forth gut-felt gratitude, wet with tears. You guessed this much. But not for the reason you think.

Because each time that package was not a thoughtful token of a single someone’s affection. No.

It was the fullness of Everyone.

Every single one of you, stranger or neighbor, who have loved and held and prayed and carried us along this sorrowing, stumbling way. I understood this truth instantly, universally, with a jarring clarity that cuts into memory and opens up something deeper.

As if I could feel, on each darkening afternoon when my toe dipped down to the coldest point of despair’s pool, the rushing force of Everyone pushing me right back up to the rippling surface, leaving me gasping but breathing again.

This is what I am trying to understand. There is a wideness.

. . .

When we escaped to the cabin last weekend – and the choice of verb is deliberate, because even a simple spring day for mothers was too much for me this year – I could not stop searching the horizon.

Always the great lake seizes me. It is the longest reflection of sky and water that I know. Its embrace is intimate as a wide, wet womb.

But this time it was only the horizon I yearned to discern.

Grateful when fog first blurred the other side from my sight, because why the hell should any horizon dare to be crisp and clean anymore.

But softened when I started to see again – when the haze burned away and I could make out that there was beyond, as there always was. And that it was still beautiful for its promise of another side, defining where I stood as much I as shaped its opposite shores.

I feel God’s silence in this lake in the holiest way. I cannot explain how its waves make my life make sense. How its hidden depths reassure me of ancient mystery. How every time I have doubted my place in this life I have found something of truth again in the rocks at its edge.

There is an expansiveness of God that makes the smallness of my life settle into place.

There are not words enough for this. But there is a wideness.

. . .

When Maggie died, I felt her soul expand.

Between one moment and the next, I realized that her life was no longer contained within the tiny body I held in my arms. The fullness of her – no longer an infant, not even a child, beyond an adult – was suddenly all around us. I knew I could not see it, but still my eyes searched each corner of the ceiling, so thick and real was her presence.

It was the fullness of a whole human life, wrapped around us in that space. I cannot explain it any other way.

When we held her sister the next day, Maggie stayed there, too. And then in the same faint shift of one small second to the next on the hospital clock, Abby’s soul was no longer held within her body or the bundle of blankets or our cradling arms – but beyond, above, elsewhere, united, embraced, expanded.

Their lives were together in their fullness, right around us.

I know you cannot read these words (and believe me, it is much harder to write them) without slipping into sentimental or spooky territory. Forgive the limits of letters; there are only 26 slim ones in our agreed-upon alphabet, and I cannot contort them to capture what I am trying to convey.

What I mean to say is that we cannot wrap our arms around this. We do not even have to try.

There is a wideness.

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Comments

  1. Nell @ Whole Parenting Family says

    12 May 2016 at 7:01 am

    Stunningly beautifully written, as always. We feel their spirits in our family, too, to risk the spooky sentimentality. Their holy card above the toaster oven, their names at the end of each meal prayer, the joy they bring my kids by merit of their Heavenly reward.

    Reply
  2. Annette says

    12 May 2016 at 7:23 am

    One of the beautiful gifts of our faith that I have learned to appreciate even more through our many losses is its constancy. I am a convert, and it makes me even more aware. The rhythm and beauty of the liturgy is like the heartbeat of the Church. During the many times I wasn’t sure if I could get out of bed and face another tomorrow. During the many times it felt like the entire world should stop rotating because in my mind it had. The Church continues. With her liturgical year and cycles. Just as the morning turns to night and night to morning. Just as the seasons change from one to the next and back again. It helped me to realize that tomorrows will still happen and gave me the grace to accept them and eventually embrace them again.

    Reply
  3. g says

    12 May 2016 at 7:46 am

    the wideness of Maggie and Abby. there is a chaos in the wideness. it becomes eschatalogical. time does not exist in this wideness. there are moments where i feel that i met, that i held Maggie and Abby. then i remember, in the wideness, i met them in their brothers, when i walked through the door to your home, in your embraces, in your tears and in your laughs, in your silences and in your rages. all of this is holy. all of this is wide. all of this is… thank you for always being so honest and authentic to your words.

    Reply
  4. Jody says

    12 May 2016 at 9:42 am

    Beautifully written. There is a widened we cannot wrap our arms around. We don’t even have to try.

    Reply
  5. Val Starkgraf says

    12 May 2016 at 11:08 am

    Yes. There is a spiritual reality as real — MORE real — than the tangible physical reality. Yes. There are moments in life when we get tiny glimpses of this reality that exists in this plane beyond the power of description. Words may fail, but it does not make it less.

    Reply
  6. Shannon says

    12 May 2016 at 11:27 am

    I have read very little writing in my life as beautiful as yours has been since the death of your daughters, Laura. I don’t mean that as an attempt at consolation, but as proof of the Spirit’s nearness to you right now. It’s breathtaking, and we’re all drinking it in. Thank you, again, for continuing to write so that what they’re meant to teach us will live on.

    Reply
  7. Sarah Macon says

    12 May 2016 at 3:08 pm

    “Forgive the limits of letters; there are only 26 slim ones in our agreed-upon alphabet, and I cannot contort them to capture what I am trying to convey.” Wow, I don’t know that I have ever read such beautiful words. On going prayers for you and yours.

    Reply
  8. Michele says

    12 May 2016 at 10:30 pm

    Ohhhhhh, these words. Just what I needed tonight. And thank YOU for being one of those precious ones whose envelope in my mailbox kept me from feeling forgotten. “We will see our little ones again up above.”

    Reply
  9. Marisa says

    5 July 2018 at 5:01 pm

    Laura, thank you for your writing, and for this piece in particular. It reminds me of something Karl Rahner wrote about (it seems to me) that wideness to which you refer, and the difficulty he also admitted in expressing it. I write now because I am wondering whether you’d give me permission to use your photo of the great lake in creating a sympathy card for a friend?
    Thanks for considering this request,
    Marisa

    Reply
    • motheringspirit says

      13 July 2018 at 6:46 am

      Absolutely, Marisa – thank you for asking! I’m so grateful these words touched your heart. (And I’d love to read more about this from Rahner if you ever dig up the source.)

      Reply

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I’m Laura Kelly Fanucci. Mother, writer, wonderer. This space is where I explore mothering through writing. It’s where I celebrate how God shows up in the chaos of raising children. It’s where I love to build community with readers like you. Read More…

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thismessygrace
Nearly 20 years ago (!) these crazy kids graduated Nearly 20 years ago (!) these crazy kids graduated from Notre Dame. Now we’re thick in the midst of life-with-kids, celebrating middle school & preschool & everything in between. 
 
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“How did you do this?” I want to ask her. “H “How did you do this?” I want to ask her. “How did you let your heart break a thousand times?”

I want to call my mother and ask her impossible questions, to probe her heart that held five children and let each of us go in the hardest ways. But I know what she will say, “It’s hard. But you’re doing a beautiful job.” She can’t give words to the deepest yearnings and groanings. None of us can.

I wish I could ask my grandmothers, each of them gone for decades now, each of them matriarchs who raised big broods of their own. I never got to know them as an adult, but I have heaps of questions: How did you do it? How did you not lose yourself or your way? Or did you, and that was precisely the point?

I want a whole book of answers to impossible questions, and none exists. So I send my thoughts to the mothers of faith whose short stories, mere snippets on pages, have sparked small lights to guide me along. To Sarah and Ruth, Hagar and Rachel, Mary and Elizabeth. Every unnamed anguish the holy ones carried, every treasure of love they held in their heart.

Is it any coincidence that birth often brings both cries and screams, laughter and joy?

We hold it all within us. We cannot give words to the enormity of what it means to mother.

I sit outside a coffee shop two blocks from my children’s school on a sunny afternoon, the last day of the year. I wipe away tears for the natural nostalgia, but I also feel the gutting grief welling up from my own wounds of motherhood to know a deeper truth: marking milestones with love and longing is nothing compared to the gaping loss of not having your child here to break your heart in a thousand tiny ways.

So I resolve again, a hundred times again, to let this vulnerability become the strength that keeps me fighting for all children to have what I want for my own: life, love, health, safety, support, opportunity, community, hope. This is how parenting asks us to change. To let the particulars of our lives stretch us to love more widely.

I once thought “to mother” meant to have and to hold.

Now I know it also means to let go.
Many of you asked me to save these suggestions I s Many of you asked me to save these suggestions I shared after the school shooting in Uvalde.

Remember: we can’t do everything, but we can each do something.

Just because we can’t eradicate evil overnight doesn’t mean we can’t take small strong steps toward change.

Any work for justice and peace is long and hard. But we can build this work into our daily lives in concrete ways.

Look at the children in your life. What would you do to keep them safe and alive?

Start there. Let your life and love lead you.
When women meet, the world changes. Today is the When women meet, the world changes.

Today is the Feast of the Visitation. A day when we remember the meeting of Mary and Elizabeth.

Two women pregnant with new life, blooming with prophetic power.
Two mothers called to change the world.

What would happen if we gathered together like this today?
How could the world change if we made Mary’s song our own?

“He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.”
(Luke 1:51-53)

Imagine if we stayed in this holy space—not for a moment’s meeting, but for months together—to gestate the dreams God was waiting to birth through us.

Imagine if we let ourselves be filled with the Holy Spirit to shout out with loud cries.
Imagine if we lifted our souls with prayers of justice and joy.

Imagine if we gave each other strength and service, courage and compassion, as we kept asking how to answer God’s call in our ordinary lives.

When women meet, the world changes.

If you want to know how to fight for justice for your children, for your people, for this world, look to the Visitation.

The mothers will show us the way. They already have.

(Image from the “Windsock Visitation” by Br. Mickey McGrath, OSFS, commissioned for the Monastery of the Visitation in north Minneapolis.)
Here’s what I wish I would have heard preached t Here’s what I wish I would have heard preached today on the Ascension.

Right now is a time to be prophetic and pastoral, a time for each of us to ask how God is calling us to act.
I am writing this to us next week. When our right I am writing this to us next week.

When our righteous anger will have quieted down. When the white-hot fury pulsing through our veins will have subsided. When the news cycle will have moved on.

Do not forget how we felt tonight.
Stay angry. Flip tables.

We cannot live like this. Literally—our children are dying. Our elders are being murdered. We have accepted violence as—a way of life? An unfortunate side effect of freedom? A helpless shrug?

No. I am not resigned.
Stay angry. Flip tables.

Remember how it felt today to hear the news and feel the world crack open—again, for we have heard it a hundred times now. Remember how you felt sick to your stomach. How the children around you glowed, alive and fragile, miraculous and vulnerable.

Remember how you wanted to do something, anything, how you wanted to act, how you wanted to stop and scream for it to end, how every cell in your body cried out that this was evil and unjust and horrific and cannot continue.

Press into that memory like a bruise.
Stay angry. Flip tables.

The only way anything changes is if we change. Change what we believe. Change who we support. Change how we vote. Change where we give. Change how we act. Change how we speak. Change how we pray.

There are no easy answers to terrible, complex problems—which is what gun violence in the US has become. But the lack of easy answers makes it all the more urgent and vital that we press into our righteous anger and say NO MORE.

Stay angry. Flip tables.

I am writing this for us, for tonight, for next week. And I never want to write it again.
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