EDITOR’S NOTE:
Regular readers of Sarah Clarkson’s work will spot that the piece of writing featured below is taken from her 2021 book, This Beautiful Truth: how God’s goodness breaks into our darkness, where it serves as chapter number four. We are featuring it here, however (by the kind permission of Baker Publishing*), because this chapter began life as the winning entry of a writing competition, hosted by the University of Oxford’s evangelical seminary, Wycliffe Hall. The competition, named in honour of Frederick Buechner, encouraged entries from all students of written pieces inspired by the work of our namesake. Regarding this competition, Sarah writes:
For me, it was a gift. During that year, I was in the midst of finishing an undergraduate dissertation on theodicy when I lost my first baby to a ‘missed miscarriage’. The loss took place amidst essay deadlines and exam preparation, and though my studies directly addressed the grief, bewilderment, and doubt through which I was walking, I felt detached, barely able to take time to, in Buechner’s beautiful phrase, ‘listen to my life’…until the announcement of the creative writing competition. The challenge and grace of that opportunity helped me to stop, breathe, and begin the pondering of what God might speak into the silence of my loss. I have rarely experienced the kind of compulsive, explorational writing upon which I embarked in that season. I became quickly aware that I was wrestling directly with all the ideas I had acquired by academic research as they collided with my own pain. The result of that competition was an essay that wrote me as much as I wrote it, a piece that helped me to ‘listen’ to my life and speak forth, in the language both of story and theology, what God tenderly spoke.
Today, The Buechner Review is proud to collaborate with a growing number of higher education institutions and seminaries around the world in hosting Frederick Buechner writing competitions. This year’s edition of the Review will feature three essays, selected from last year’s competition winners by our editorial board. In anticipation of these three pieces, and by way of an introduction, we are delighted to feature Sarah’s chapter as a beautiful example of a Buechner-inspired, competition-winning essay.
Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.
— Frederick Buechner, Beyond Words: daily readings in the ABC’s of faith (2004)
The darkness reminded me afresh of God, and when we arrived, it was absolute, like the approaching death that summoned us into its depths. We drove the two hours from the airport south into the still wild hills of rural Texas where my grandmother, they told us, still breathed. I felt shadow seep into bone and skin, felt as much as saw the last lights of town and city die in the yawning black of the rural night.
When I was a little girl, the huge darkness of the country nights got tangled up with my idea of God, and I sat often in the back seat of the car on the long drives home, as I did now, knees curled to chest, face pressed against the cool glass as the darkness outside pressed back, like a countenance bewilderingly large, inscrutable both in breadth and beauty, too vast for comprehension and so both a fascination and a terror.
Oh yes, the long dark reminded me of God. But tonight, it was cold. For death lurked too in the unmapped shadow, incomprehensible and chill, staining the warm night with angled edges that made the night and my own self strange. My face— weary, doubting—loomed back at me in the glass as we pulled in over the rough gravel of my uncle’s drive. Silence as large as the dark surrounded me as I stepped out of the car into the tiny oasis of brightness made by the porch light.
And I relived, in that instant, the almost identical moment of my first arrival in the Texas countryside almost twenty years before. I had been nine years old when my parents took us from a nice suburban neighbourhood in Tennessee to live with my grandmother in the wilds of Hill Country. My grandmother had stepped out of her house to welcome us, a tiny figure in the spotlight of the porch, dwarfed by the ocean of night around her. Sleepy and awed by the darkness, I had walked toward her, drawn toward the lit house out of the mystifying black, like the night moths that fluttered round the lamp just over her head.
As they fluttered round my uncle’s head now. Garrulous, even that night, when we had been drawn back into the past and the countryside and the dark by Nana’s impending death, he herded us into the room where she lay, tiny and shrivelled in a hospital bed, her eyes closed, her breathing unnaturally rhythmic. We stood around her, chatting, stroking her hand under the glare of borrowed hospital lights. We spoke to her so brightly, wanting love to touch her in the deep place where she slept. But even as I knelt to stroke her arm and touch her face I felt at a vast distance from her, as if she was already being drawn into a silence in which I could no longer reach her.
Not that I ever really had. I sat there for a long time, thinking of all the things I wished she could have heard from me, or that I wished I’d heard her say. She baffled me in childhood. She was an outdoorsy woman, most comfortable when she was sweating at some task in the searing Texas heat. I loved her practicality in helping me to identify the fossils that littered our limestone hills or pick melons from the madly twisted vines in the run-down orchard or identify the worth of old stamps in my budding collection. The joy we both took in our shared tasks made me always expectant of affection or endearment to follow, but it rarely did. In her work she was close to me, but never in her words. I was in my late teens before I began to understand that in young womanhood she had retreated into a space within herself from which affection or self-explanation were almost impossible. She simply, I told myself, couldn’t speak.
And she did not speak now. She had last been wakeful that morning, when they’d told her that we—my father (her son), my mother, and we children—were on our way to her. She breathed steadily, even peacefully now as we sat round her, hoping that somewhere in her waning consciousness, she knew that we were there. But silence gathered about her like shadow. She did not wake, and after many hours, we crept away to our guest beds. At 3:00 a.m., my mother shook me alert to tell me that Nana had died.
We crept, one by one, to sit awkward and exhausted on a couch in one corner of the room with Nana, dead, in the far other corner where no lamp was lit. One person began to tell raucous jokes, as if we were not awake at 3:00 a.m., as if Nana’s body did not lie in the rumpled disorder of her last minutes, as if we, living, were not in the presence of her, dead.
I laughed hysterically, briefly, at the jokes as my parents attempted strained conversation. Then I averted my eyes and lapsed into silence, the laughter aching in my stomach, my sight drawn toward the shadows in the far corner. The jokes subsided as the minutes of our watch stretched long, the hospital so far away that hours would pass before Nana’s body could be collected. I turned my face away from her, from the person who had departed into a silence I could not breach. And my eye caught the long stare of the night out the kitchen window.
In an instant I was nine years old again on our second night in Texas, tucked into my narrow bed under the two thin, ceiling-high windows of my new room. I had been prayed for, kissed, and left to sleep. But I lay rigid with fear. I read once that bedtime prayers are a preparation for death. Parents never tell children this, of course, but the rituals surrounding the release of the conscious into the boundless territory of sleep prepare us for our banishment into the wilderlands of death. I understood this inchoately even in small childhood, and I think it was why I clung to my parents’ prayers as if they were incantations. But I knew it consciously, viscerally that night.
For everything in my knowledge of the world had changed. We had left the house and yard and friends I knew. We had left the sounds and shadows I knew at bedtime. We had left behind a world I deeply loved, whose contours bordered and protected my being. Now all was strange and I was strange within it, aware that what I loved could be snatched beyond my grasp. And if home, why not parent, or sibling, or self? The vast darkness out my window, glimpsed upon our arrival the night before, pressed in upon my imagination, huge and foreign, enlarging the strangeness and making of me something so ephemeral I felt surprised to find myself still there at all. I lifted the flimsy shade and looked out.
And oh, I was terrified.
Frederick Buechner writes achingly in The Sacred Journey (1982) of the moment when his father’s death set him “in” time, summoned him into that consciousness of adulthood that is somehow the knowledge that the clock of our lives ticks on toward death. My own such moment came, I think, in the instant I stared out at that night, aware that nothing I knew was safe from change or loss. Somehow, in the small grief of childhood held before the vastness of the night, I encountered my own mortality.
I leapt from bed and ran wildly into the next room. My mother was away, and it was my father who turned in surprise to greet a teary, shaken little girl. We both felt slightly awkward, for such out-of-bed-after-hours events were usually handled by my mom, but he took me on his knee as I choked out something that I’m sure was incoherent. To his profound credit, he recognized that my terror was more than a simple fear of the dark. He rocked me until I was quieter, able to articulate something of the knowledge that had come to me of loss, of change, of all that I loved being irremediably haunted by the presence of a someday death.
Then my father did something that I have never forgotten, something that endures within me, a living image that I can still inhabit, one whose beauty tinges every sorrow I have faced. He took me back to my room, but he did not turn on the light or pull the shade down the timid inch I had lifted it. Rather, he sat on my bed with me and settled in so that we both faced the window. He put his arms firmly around me and, without preamble, snapped the shade fully up, letting it roll dramatically to the top of the window so that the night flooded in, swift as black, sweet water, settling round us as we faced it wide-eyed together. Held, I faced the darkness afresh as my father began to whisper, even sing I think, of the Love at back of that vast and star-spattered night. He swayed gently, he held me firmly, and his heart beat strong at my back as we faced the long night together. He mapped the night by the story he told of the Love that is the light of the world, come down into the darkness to hold each person alive so that none was lost or forgotten. His words were like a fire lit in my inmost being so that I became distinct from the shadows and safe once more. He bordered the darkness with presence so that it became a wild and lovely country to explore instead of a void into which I would disappear. I tasted, in that instant, what I think was eternal life, and is no more and no less than love not only defying but radiantly remaking death.
Death. I snapped back to the present, where my just-dead grandmother lay in the far corner of the room, lay where I had been afraid to go, afraid as I had been when a child, fearing that the borderless dark of death might lay hold of me too. But with the memory of my father’s arms burning afresh in the core of my being, I rose. I glanced at my dad, older, greyer now, asleep on the couch after hours of watching but present with me, and I crept to where Nana lay. I picked up her hand and held it as my father had once held mine. In the quiet, I held her wrinkled hand, recalling every memory of her that I could, holding her in the whole of her essence as best I could. I was with her, as my father had been with me, and together we looked into the long dark of death.
As we did, I remembered the years following that night with my father when the country dark became my own. I dared more and more often to walk in it alone, sneaking off from the lit yard where my siblings played to stand for a minute, maybe two, in the first lapping waves of the blackness brimming the countryside around our house. I remembered the way that my eyes would slowly adjust until I could see afresh in the night-time, until it filled my sight and was near and sweet so that I began to see the starlight speckling its skin.
Just so, as I sat with Nana, assenting to the silence both of her life and death, no longer fighting her quiet or demanding that she speak, her silence became familiar. And in it, I understood that her wordless departure was like her inarticulate life. She spoke by her presence, perhaps only in that way, but she gave it prodigally to a young granddaughter who also loved the golden fire of the summer days and the ribbed treasures of the old earth. She was simply present, and that was her language and her last word, for she had remained, wilfully breathing until we arrived.
Darkness and silence: how swiftly the terror is drained from them by the remaking presence of love. I looked out the window where a just-born dawn was crying the world awake in a thin line of light. I remembered something I had forgotten in my adulthood: that by the time we moved to the city in my teens, I felt myself native in the long, adventurous dark, and I’d walk alone at night with the world expanding immeasurably at my feet. Something untamedly good and unexplored stretched out before me so that I rued the need to return to the known and prosaic, the tiny circled porch light of the ordinary world where my mother called me into bed.
Even the darkness is not dark to You,
And the night is as bright as the day. (Ps. 139:12 NASB)
I looked at Nana and wondered . . . What if the radiance of love transfigures and translates even death so that it is no longer the darkness in which we are lost but the passage we travel on our way to being found?
But I’m modern in my limited experience of death.
I met it in Nana, of course, and the distant, impenetrable news of the passing of two grandfathers (whom I was too little to know), another grandmother (so ill for so long that her death in my teens came as a strange grace), and an uncle I barely knew. Nana’s death began to teach me something of loss, but her death remained separate from my own being: something that saddened but did not touch me in my essence. Susette’s death struck more deeply, an early and awful death that stole something immeasurably precious. Yet her death was couched in the maturity of her faith, one that framed and transformed my sense of loss.
The death that has shaken me the most arrived without preamble to knock my consciousness into a new dimension. There were no goodbyes, no final words in this death that made such a difference to me. Only the abrupt plunge into silence and, with it, darkness. Like that of the Texas night, except that now it was the dark of my own womb, a black, echoing oval on the ultrasound screen with my baby—that clear, startling outline of a tiny human—sunk to the bottom like a precious stone in a small, fathomless ocean.
“There’s no heartbeat,” the nurse said quickly as my husband’s and my eyes fixed hungrily, quickly on the image, desperate to catch our joy by the heel before we climbed too high and fell even harder. The tears came instantly, my heart and body reacting even before my mind grasped her meaning. But when my reason caught up, it was bewildered. The strangeness of seeing the shape of a baby within me while knowing its life to be absent left me feeling that my own body contained a vast darkness in which my child had been lost, a darkness in me that was a channel into the greater blackness of death as it stalked the back doors of all the living.
That strangeness remained even after the physical pain had passed. What hurt me most and tinged my sadness was the panicked sense that my baby had been taken into a darkness where I could not reach, protect, or shelter him. It was the fulfilment of every dread of my OCD. Of course I grieved the loss of him, known, cried for the passing away of his story and embodied self, of my story as his mother, and the story of what we had already begun to be as his parents. But worst was that sense of him simply disappearing, of death as, again, an unfathomable night in which what we love is unmade, unnamed, and lost.
The old terror of my childhood returned, my long mental illness returned, and for a while, I hated to be alone. Especially at night. I sat in bed, wakeful with the awful insight of the small hours, and saw that we humans stand brave and oblivious in the tiny circles of our faith. We live in the courageous light of our given and accepted love, but the ocean of that fathomless dark laps at the edges of our being, always waiting to flood our hopeful little islands. We are frail. “I say headache,” my husband teased me in the first months of our marriage, “and you hear death.” But it’s true. And in the loss of our little baby, in his total disappearance from any realm of touch or sight, I saw too easily the possible, perhaps inevitable loss of everything else I loved. We are so frail.
Holy Week arrived just weeks after the miscarriage, and since we live across the street from our church, I could not escape the intensity of worship demanded by the season. I felt dismissive and strangely flippant, as if that great tragedy had nothing to do with my loss. I was learning the strange way that grief suspends things you once could count on—emotion, faith, prayer—as if a massive jolt had tossed your life into the air and the whole of you waits to see what parts of yourself will crash, and what will fall to the ground still whole.
I wasn’t angry, merely indifferent in that strange suspension. What mattered the abnegations of the flesh when the flesh that mattered had been taken? How could I face the death of God himself when I was still mourning my baby? In sheer obedience I went to church throughout that week, knowing that as a professed Christian I should be able to see beyond the death of Christ (and my baby) to his rising, that I should be able to say with Martha, standing there at the tomb of her brother, “Yes Lord, I believe in the resurrection.” But the darkness is very long. And it comes very close.
As it did in the church on Maundy Thursday. I almost regretted my attendance at that service, with the ritual stripping of the altars at the end to symbolize the way Christ’s passion laid him bare. Though I knelt with the others in the small cove of candlelight in the side chapel, I clearly heard the ruthless work of the servers as they stripped the church of altar cross and cloths and candles, leaving it bare and echoingly empty. I tasted the long, lonely darkness of the nave as I left, saw the strange, veiled faces of the statues. And next day I saw the gaping space of the empty altar when I reluctantly arrived again, obedient, for the Good Friday service.
I struggle with that service every year as it is, and I struggled far more this time. The liturgy still felt new to me, for I grew up in churches where Good Friday was barely marked, where everyone galloped toward Easter morning and its crashing joy because that, we were told, was our true reality. Living as we do in a world in which people still die, I always felt this was a rather blinkered approach to the season (not to mention faith). But the wide-eyed wrestle with the visceral reality of death confronting me now in the more sacramental worship of my current church continued to rattle me deeply.
Especially the Good Friday veneration of the cross. Every year I wondered if I was toeing idolatry by joining the line to bow before the almost-life-sized crucifix that is processed through the church after a reading of the Passion, or even, as many, to kiss its feet. There was a part of me that craved the sheer physicality of the act, that wanted simply, childlike, to touch Jesus. And another that found the whole thing ridiculous, perhaps idolatrous, the desire to grasp something that cannot be held. And yet, I always found myself in line, curious, starving for a nearer sense of Christ.
But as I stood in the Good Friday service after the baby’s loss I wanted to mock that sense. I wanted to turn from the dying Christ, not embrace him. Death had made God distant to me. I felt that the baby and I were both lost in some kind of darkness beyond the touch of love or comfort. My prayers echoed blankly in my sorrowing mind. Death seemed to make my spirit a grey space in which no voice rang with hope. Grief veiled Christ from me so that he truly seemed like all the statues in my church, shadowed and remote. And when they brought the crucifix forward during the Good Friday service, Christ shrouded and invisible, I felt that I could not follow.
But I had forgotten what came next. For as the procession made its slow way down the aisle, the priests stopped every few feet. And a corner of the veil was dropped. Hand, face, nailed, bony foot. Little by little, Jesus became visible. “Behold the wood of the cross whereon was hung the world’s salvation,”1 the priest chanted again and again as the cross moved into our midst and Jesus became a little clearer. I found my eyes fixed on that figure as it came toward me. “Come let us worship,” they sang as the cross moved on to the front of the church and was fixed there in the centre of the huge, stripped emptiness that symbolized the totality of death. I stared. There, in the ropy, muscled carving of the old crucifix, the figure of Christ hung fully exposed, embodied, graspable, invading the very core of death’s echoing vacuity.
I joined the procession.
My mind ached with the sense of something it yearned to understand even as my feet moved forward, closer, closer to that suffering body now filling the emptied space of the altar. As the line in front of me thinned, I glimpsed more and more of the yellowed skin on the crucifix, the muscled arms, the bowed head, the brutally nailed hands. And then there was no one in front of me and I stood alone, bared by my grief before the stripped Christ. I knelt, obeying heart rather than thought, and before I understood what I intended, I placed my hands on either side of the nailed feet.
And at their touch I abruptly remembered the night with my father when my world was dark with my first knowledge of death. I remembered the feel of his bulk at my back, his muscled arms around me, his hands holding mine so that I was outlined, remade, recalled to form and life by love. I remembered the way that the night became bordered and mapped by his loving presence so that I was no longer afraid.
My hands grew warm on the wood, and there, touching the figure of Christ, I knew that my father’s act was only the echo of Christ’s ultimate act. The cross was the moment when God himself came to sit with us in the darkness, his flesh-and-bone arms with their pulsing, precious blood wrapped round the whole of humanity so that Love claimed and recalled us from the unravelling of death. The cross is Creator with us, comprehending the darkness by his wounded hands so that it may not comprehend us. Christ on the cross means Love with his arms mapping not only the night but death—making of it a starred path we follow not to destruction but to life. The cross means our father has come to hold us, and no one is lost.
Not even my tiny baby, washed out into the ocean of death.
Holding the scuffed feet of that old crucified figure I knew that my little one had been caught by the scarred hands of Love and was held there living, and that even as I knelt, I was held too. For that brief moment, we sat together, in the circle of Christ’s arms, looking out the window of my heart at the vast, dark grief of the last days as it was veined by light and bounded by Love.
And though I was still grieved, I began, just barely, to be unafraid.
The next evening, I stood in the dusty courtyard of our old church, the lithe tangle of spring branches overhead as the Easter Fire was kindled in the twilight. I love the rich scent of that wood fire, the crackled music of the sparks as they dance. I love the friendly mutter and hum of people gathered from all over the parish to watch the kindling. And I love the ritual by which the Easter candle is lit from the roaring fire, its single flame passing to each of our slim candles, so that we may process in the light of that fire into the tomb-dark church, singing aloud as we move, “The light of Christ, thanks be to God.”
And the darkness leaps away from us.
In the candle-starred shadows I sat, half listening to the Easter Exultet, half mulling my own eased heart. For it was fear not grief, I knew now, that had held me suspended in my sorrow, unsure that anything was safe. Perhaps it was fear through all the years of my OCD. And it was Love, with arms around my sorrowing heart, sitting with me in the darkness, that now lit a fire within me and drove my fear away. I was not kept from grief and death, or a broken mind, but Love held fast to me in it, mapping the night, denying that sense of annihilation that stalks the edge of every loss. For, “living or dying, we belong to the Lord” (Rom. 14:8 NCV), and every candle in the church burned in affirmation of that fact. Their scattered light would someday be gathered into a great dawn. That’s the gospel, I think, though I had never so truly perceived it before.
A tiny commotion in the next row down distracted me, and I looked down to see a mother dive to catch her little girl’s candle as it wobbled in the child’s small hands. But the child, eyes wide and determined, pushed her mother away, sat a little straighter, and held the candle more firmly. She fixed her big eyes on the light, as if it were a face. She smiled. She swayed back and forth, watching the swish of the flame. She kicked her feet and hummed with pleasure, eyes fixed ever on the fire. She loved the brightness. She saw nothing else.
I lifted my face to the figure of Christ, and as the child that I am, with the child no longer lost, I too fixed my eyes on the fire and adored the brightness. And the words of the Easter Exultet sang round me.
“The night is past, the day of life is here.”
*Excerpt from This Beautiful Truth by Sarah Clarkson, copyright © 2021. Used by permission of Baker Books, a division of Baker Publishing Group. http://www.bakerpublishinggroup.com
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