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God in the wilderness

7 Comments

After our twins died, mothers from all over wrote to me.

They had lost babies before birth, after birth, in childhood, and beyond. They wrote to me with love and compassion, empathy’s impulse to reach out in shared suffering, even to a stranger.

And to a person, they all said the same thing.

God was with me so powerfully in the moments and days surrounding my child’s death.

Later, my experience of God became the wilderness.

If this happens for you, I understand. I am here. 

They knew well enough not to declare it would happen for me, having been on the bereaved receiving end of supposedly-helpful declarations of How Your Grief Will Be and What Will Happen To You Because I Know Best.

They told me it might. They told me it could be hard. They told me not to lose hope.

I read their words and was grateful for their compassion.

(Secretly I told myself it would not happen to me.)

God would not leave me to the wilderness.

. . .

Maggie and Abby died four months ago. The luminous, palpable presence of God that carried us through the early days of raw grief is gone.

I try to pray but I don’t know how.

The rote prayers that got me through the crushing moments of pleading and petition before the girls were born – Our Father, Hail Mary, Memorare, repeat – still cycle through my mind. But they do not sink into my heart.

The deep surrender of complete abandon into the heart of God that surrounded my whole being in the days of their deaths is now a memory. Strong but distant.

I am not angry at God, not bitter or despairing. I am simply in a different place.

It is the wilderness.

All those mothers were right.

. . .

I think back on times in my life when God felt absent. The cruel pain of perceived abandonment, the dark despair that everything I thought I believed was false.

This is not the same thing. Wilderness is not absence. God is here, too.

But everything is different.

There is an abiding presence, more subtle and mysterious. It has never left my side.

Wilderness is by definition a wild land. I will not romanticize it. The terrain is barren and harsh. Stripped of familiar landmarks. Disorienting and dark once the day’s last slivers of light disappear. Lurking dangers unseen, even the shivering threat of death.

The wilderness is a powerful place and a potent symbol in Christianity. Where the Israelites wandered. Where Hagar fled. Where John began preaching. Where Jesus was tempted.

What I learn from their stories is this: even in the wilderness, God is not gone.

I return to Exodus: the pillar of cloud by day, the pillar of fire by night, a steadfast promise to lead ahead and protect behind. I don’t know what sense to make of the God-with-us in this wilderness, what shape or size, what element or direction. I only know that God is here.

The fact of this abiding – the fleeting moments of comfort, the growing acceptance of peace – is what compels me to keep going. We are being led from one place to another.

And this is what wilderness is. A passage between where (and who) we were and where (and who) we will be. We are not there yet. We do not know how long the wandering will last.

We just keep going.

. . .

Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?

I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert. (Isaiah 43:19)

This is the surprising truth about the wilderness. It is still a faithful place to be. It is still part of the way.

There is grumbling and lamenting and despairing, of course. We are humans and we drag all this humbling humanity into the dark desert with us.

But each new morning there is surprising manna left for us to gather from the ground. We have never been abandoned or forgotten.

We are moving somewhere, changed.

The mothers who wrote to me from their own deserts were ancient ammas speaking wisdom to my hermit heart. And they were right.

When we are in the wilderness, God is still there, too.

My friend Shannon makes these beautiful gemstones necklaces for her shop. When I saw this one, it held the promise of dawn in the desert. Can you see it, too? 

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Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Melissa Borgmann-Kiemde says

    30 June 2016 at 7:38 am

    Holding. dawn in the desert.

    Reply
  2. Kelly says

    30 June 2016 at 8:24 am

    Thank you for putting words to some of the thoughts deepest and quietest in my mind.

    Reply
  3. Rose says

    30 June 2016 at 10:32 am

    Thank you for sharing this piece of your heart. When Jesus brings me to the wilderness, I am consoled by Revelations 12:6 “and the woman fled into the wilderness, where she has a place prepared by God, in which to be nourished for one thousand two hundred and sixty days.” He has prepared this wilderness for you and will nourish you! Also remember that flowers bloom in the desert!

    Reply
  4. Patty says

    30 June 2016 at 4:27 pm

    While I have not experienced the utter pain of loosing a child, I can relate to what you said Laura about being in the wilderness (God there too) in my own experience of a divorce, a different kind of loss.
    And yes we just keep going. Thinking of you and your family in a special way today 🙂 <3

    Reply
  5. Shelley says

    30 June 2016 at 10:09 pm

    This is so beautiful. Thankyou again. You make me fear death less, Laura. That might be naive of me to say-I’ve had such little experience of it that I don’t really know what I’m talking about. But maybe that’s the point. I’ve avoided death all my life. It horrifies me so I skirt around it, avoid it, run from it. But your writing about death is so full of hope and honesty that it invites me to dare to be in the same room with it. Because if you have lived it and written it all out then I figure I can read it.
    Death-our own mortality-is the feariest fear of all. It’s the primal fear. I know objectively that if I faced my own fear of death then I’d be a better person but I, like the rest of western society, shrink from it and then run. I feel that your writing at the moment is like a friend who holds a steady hand on my back and says “STAY”. “Stay in the same room as death and just see what happens.”

    Reply
  6. Kristin Lescalleet says

    2 July 2016 at 8:30 am

    This is so beautifully written. And such an encouragement to me today. No matter how each of us arrived in the wilderness, God is still there. Thank you for sharing.

    Reply
  7. Sara Kazlauskas says

    4 July 2016 at 3:35 pm

    Thank you, Laura! I have been wondering what this stage was. I buried my stillborn son 3 months ago. I have followed your story and given thanks to God that you are there ahead of me on this journey. You shed light and put into words what I cannot. Hugs, brave mama!

    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

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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Rules: Open to the U.S. only. Entries will be accepted until 6/11/22 at 11:59 pm CT. The 2 winners will be chosen at random and announced on 6/12/22. Per Instagram rules, this promotion is in no way sponsored, administered, or associated with Instagram, Inc. By entering, entrants confirm that they are 13+ years of age, release Instagram of responsibility, and agree to Instagram's terms of use.
“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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