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still a good story

5 Comments

And then from the backseat, you hear a fidgeting restlessness. He begins to speak, and from the second the sentence ends, you feel the air around you change.

“In the last chapter of Narnia that we read, they killed Aslan.”

You grip your hands tighter around the steering wheel. Your knuckles turn pink-white, hard.

You reply, breathing evenly.

Yes, they did.

You know this is not the end. You wait for the next. You can feel questions creeping, circling around the pathways of his brain, only almost-five years old.

“That was really bad. The White Witch cut his mane to look like a kitty cat’s mane. And all the creatures on the Witch’s side made fun of him like he was a little kitty cat.”

Your fingers ease up on the wheel. Maybe it is not the question you think. Maybe it is not why-did-Aslan-die or why-did-God-let-him-die or why-did-Maggie-and-Abby-die.

Maybe you are just talking about the book.

Yes, they did cut his mane and make fun of him. That’s a hard part of the story, isn’t it?

Your breath begins to deepen. This is not so hard.

We are only talking about the book.

And then he continues.

“But when we read a part of the book that is bad or sad, why do you always say, ‘This is such a good story’?”

There it is. The breath is caught and the knuckles are whiter and the pathways of your own brain flood with a torrent of worry: I cannot do this, I do not know the answers, this is important, don’t screw it up, say something.

Well. You start to reply.

Well. Where is the answer.

I say that because even when it is a hard part of the story, the story can still be good.

There can still be good that comes out of it.

This is all you know. You hope it is enough. There are no answers.

“Oh,” he says. You glance in the rearview mirror to see him looking out the window, green fields rolling by, hopeful waves of spring.

You want to say more. It is not enough. You start to say something about Jesus, the part of the story when he died and people hurt him and made fun of him and killed him.

That was a terrible part of the story, right? But there was still good that came out of it. Right?

“Right,” he says again. He is still staring out the window.

It is not enough. Your heart sinks. Stubborn stories of resurrection, how are you supposed to know what they mean, nothing makes sense anymore (if it ever did make sense Before) and the world is full of staggering suffering, heaps deeper than your small life will ever hold, and yet God is still unrelenting goodness, and you have no idea how to understand this, let alone explain it to a child.

Does that make sense? You wonder out loud, hoping something might be enough in the face of nothing.

He is silent. Still turned away.

“Yeah,” he finally says. “But can we read another chapter tonight?”

Yes, you rush to say, yes of course. 

You want to keep going, to say something else, something about how there is always more to the story, something about how the hint of what comes next can be enough to keep us going, something about how the promise of hope can make even the hard chapters good. But you cannot find the words.

And when you do read it again that night, books and brothers and blankets all heaped into one bed and all of your heads together on one pillow, and Lucy and Susan are wandering and despairing like Marys at the tomb, and suddenly Aslan appears again, brilliant and breath-taking and pouncing and playing and all of them delighting in each other, more than they ever did Before – only then, after the last paragraph has ended and you close the cover and you hold the book to your chest and sigh that satisfied smile, only then do you realize how he was right. You do always say this, after every chapter, the terrible and the triumphant, no matter what happens.

Isn’t this a good story?

Because somehow you know it still is. And he reminded you.

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Comments

  1. Julie says

    13 June 2016 at 2:33 pm

    Oh, Laura. So, so hard–loss and pain. But because of His death, His pain, we can suffer with him. Because of His Resurrection, we have hope! Hope for our eternity and peace in the knowledge that those who have gone before us are interceding for us and that we will be reunited with them. My continued prayers for you and your family.

    Reply
  2. g says

    14 June 2016 at 7:52 am

    Ugh. This kid and his questions; what a little theologist. Such a good reminder that we mess around in the messiness of life at all times. (i actually haven’t read the books- but i watched the movies, does that count?) The fact that these books are captivating people of ALL ages throughout the ages is a reminder of the timelessness and resonance of this story- however it is told- we are to have hope- but that does not come easy most days.

    Reply
  3. Kateri says

    15 June 2016 at 10:25 am

    Oh Laura, I needed this so much right now! We are in the thick and painful experience of our second miscarriage right now, and it is so very, very hard to remember that it can still be a good story. My heart just isn’t there yet. I often think of you and Franco in the moments when it feels exceptionally hard, and wish I could be as strong and hopeful in my grief as you, unfortunately, have had to be. Please know that our family continues to pray for yours, and that you (and your beautiful little girls) have been an inspiration to me. Thank you for once again sharing words that remind me to hang in there….even (especially?) when I just don’t want to.

    Reply
  4. Steph says

    20 June 2016 at 12:14 pm

    I need to thank you, Laura. I’ve always found that organizing words–though prayer and journaling–helps me best express emotions, work through new ideas, or find meaning in my experiences. But ever since our baby Gabriel passed away, my attempts to pray and write have mostly failed.

    Thankfully, I stumbled across your blog in those first weeks of grief. I can relate to you in a few ways: I also have three young children at home, had a surprise(!) fourth pregnancy, began having placental complications, and just prayed each day for the baby to get another day of safe growth inside. Gabriel was born March 1st, at 23.1wks gestation, and lived 15 minutes in our arms.

    I pray one day to be able to organize this mountain of emotion and valley of numbness into words that tell a “good story.” In the meantime, your essays buoy my faith and offer me hope. Thank you, so much.

    Reply
  5. Laura says

    17 August 2016 at 12:56 pm

    When we lost our Francis (miscarriage at 1 month), the most difficult part for me of loosing this child was also loosing the opportunity to take care of him. I was praying about this in church in front of a statue of Mary, the Mother of Jesus. At one point during my sobbing, I looked up at the statue of Mary. I was blessed with a vision of Mary in Heaven with many little children of various ages surrounding her. Then I saw one little baby, new born (I knew that it was my little Francis) being held by Mary in her left arm. Then Francis climbed up onto Mary’s shoulder, crawled across the back of her neck and sat down on her right shoulder. Then Mary and Francis looked at each other and began to delightfully, playfully laugh. I thought to myself, “Mary is taking care of my baby. I to not have to worry about him. I do not have feel sad that I cannot take care of him. He is being taken care of far better than I ever could take care of him. Most of all, he is completely happy and content. ” Whenever I felt sad about Francis, or about Christian whom I lost a couple of years later, I recalled this vision. Most of the time, I now feel joy that my babies are in Heaven with Mary. I am certain that this vision was real. This is what happened in Heaven with Francis and Mary and all the little children that surrounded Mary, playing and laughing, completely at peace and content. Praise God for His love for our children! I pray for healing and joy to be yours soon!

    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
If our daughters had lived, we never would have pl If our daughters had lived, we never would have planted this garden. 

There are pockets of beauty in my life today that could not have existed if they had survived.

Acknowledging this does not mean I accept their loss. Or that I wouldn’t trade it all to have them here instead.

But the grieving know this strange, stubborn, saving truth: that goodness can grow in the gaping holes left by the ones we love.

I don’t know any simple ways to make sense of the hard times in which we’re living. As a porous soul, I feel it all and it breaks my heart, even as I cling to what I know is true.

But loving and losing my girls has taught me that life is both heart-breaking and resilient, that surviving is more complicated than we suspect, that most people are walking around shattered beneath the surface.

Sometimes I can catch a glimpse of it, searing as sunlight: the grief in someone’s eyes behind their anger, the burden sagging their shoulders, the past that’s poisoning their present. Few things have transformed my life more than learning to recognize pain in others.

Grief is a long letting go of a life you thought you’d have. Most of us are carrying more of it than we realize—or remember when we’re dealing with each other (especially when we’re tearing each other down).

Go gentle today. Practicing compassion and generosity of spirit will crack open more of the world and its confounding struggles. You might lose the satisfying clarity you clung to before life broke your heart in complicated ways, but you will find more of God in the messy, maddening middle.

I have learned this much from the garden I never planned to plant, from a version of life I never dreamed.
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. 
 
Since June is a month for graduations & celebrations, I’m delighted to help you celebrate with @grottonetwork .

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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.
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