Yes, of Course this is in Conversation with Donne
On my fear of death, the importance of lament, and my theology of the cross
Death, why do I fear you? If I believe that one day, the ashes of my body strewn across the cold, damp earth will rise, recollecting themselves, then why does your sting still cling to me like bonfire smoke on my jacket? You take and you take and you take, sucking the soil dry, turning it to wasteland. Maybe a better question is, why should I not fear you? How can I look at this world and the horror of disease, bodies overwhelming morgues, and think that there could be a world where all things are made new? Where the wooden boxes that once held us become flowerbeds? I wrap my hands around the stories of the Good Book, letting the ink sink into my skin, hoping it will be enough. But for all I know, death, you’re the end; my body could bleed out all those words and there could be nothing left. You don’t let your captives speak of what lies on the other side. Still, there are just a few moments where I believe you will pass away— the budding of flowers in spring, a butterfly passing by, a laugh shared between friends, crosses in churches. If you are the end, I’ve resolved that you still cannot kill me. You can only take me if you get through Love’s bleeding hands.
I figured this was a fitting poem to post the week of Halloween, la Día de Los Muertos, Samhain, and All Saints/Souls Day. All of these holidays have a connection to death in some form, with rituals of honoring those in our lives who have passed away (I mean, modern capitalist celebrations of Halloween less so than the other holidays, but…). Like “They Were Wrong,” this was another poem written during my final semester creative writing course, and it was written after the pandemic started, so that is where the line “bodies overwhelming morgues” is coming from. I think the pandemic took my already existing fear of death and turned it up to 11.
So, the “Donne” in the title is the 16th/17th century English poet John Donne, who wrote “Death, be not proud,” one of the most famous apostrophe1 poems ever written. The assignment for class was to write an apostrophe poem, and I ended up creating one that is in conversation with Donne’s, as well as with Audrey Assad’s song “Death, Be Not Proud” which takes inspiration from the poem. I wanted something that was less triumphant than Donne’s, a more nuanced hope than the pure victory over death. I needed space for lament and grief. I actually now wonder whether that final stanza is trying to tie everything up in a bow too much.
I think about my loved ones dying one day. It scares the hell out of me. I don’t know how I’m going to handle it and live with that. I do believe in the resurrection of the body and that Jesus will make all things new (NOT make a new earth. This earth is our home and will always be our home, which is why it is so important that we care for it). But there are still doubts. The belief and doubt and hope exist together. I fear my own death and I fear growing old. I know I want my body to be cremated or for my ashes to be put into one of those tree pod things2 because I’m a poet and the phoenix metaphor is just too tempting—I believe God will reform my ashes or the dirt into a body, my body, but transformed the way that Christ’s was after he rose. And I no longer believe that anyone is going to be tortured for eternity just because they didn’t “welcome Jesus into their heart,” which I think was why I was afraid of death when I was an evangelical (imagining my agnostic brother and sister burning in hell was not fun). But that does not make death any less brutal or painful.
In one of my classes today3, Service and Sustainability, we talked about how to enter into solidarity with people who are suffering. Before class, we had a discussion board prompt to respond to: “Douglas John Hall, in God and Human Suffering: An Exercise in the Theology of the Cross, differentiates between the suffering of becoming and the suffering that ceases to serve life. How do we as agents of change enter into solidarity in those places that cease to serve life?”
Here is my response:
“I was listening to a song today, "The Road, the Rocks, and the Weeds" by John Mark McMillan, and the lyrics felt very relevant to this question:
Come down from the stars Show your human scars Tell me what it's like to believe Through my Christ haunted thoughts That the losses you bought Are the nights that you peopled with your dreams Well, I've got no answers For heartbreaks or cancers But a Savior who suffers them with me
I grew up being taught that everything happens for a reason, that God is in control and we just need to trust God, that our suffering is for a purpose (usually, for the perfection of our faith), but when in my first year of college I had a lot of hard experiences hit me at once (depression, roommate conflict, Trump getting elected and the church I grew up in supporting it, a relative passing away from thyroid cancer on the night of the election), I realized that these platitudes and the way I was told to pray weren't working. It was like putting a band-aid over a gushing wound. When my questions and doubts first started happening, I told myself I was selfish and I asked God to get rid of my doubts. I had no idea that so many people had gone through or were going through similar experiences. I had no one who came alongside me or had solidarity with me. But slowly, I discovered the progressive Christian world and different ways of interpreting the Bible and cultivating spirituality--I saw characters in the Bible who had their own stories of suffering, including Jesus, and found solidarity with them. And when I started cultivating progressive Christian community in-person in my life...I've built such deep connections and have people who I know will walk with me through anything. Although people might find comfort in forms of meaning-making of their suffering, I think that's the work of that person to articulate it, someone else can't tell them what the meaning or purpose is. The work of the person entering into solidarity is to be present and to hold our hope when it has become impossible for us to hold ourselves.”
I think to say that there is a purpose for our loved ones dying, that it is God’s plan, is wrong. I believe saying that God caused or purposed any suffering is not true. God’s plan for us is always one of flourishing, never punishment or test. Yes, God wants us to grow and be challenged, but not to suffer.
I don’t even believe that Jesus’ suffering on the cross was of divine necessity, but a result of the earthly powers that conspired to kill him (the majority of which came from the Roman state and the religious establishment that had aligned itself with the state). I believe that in the face of death we need to hold space for grief , remembering how the disciples of Jesus felt in the time between the crucifixion and the resurrection. We cannot skip from Palm Sunday to Easter. But there is also the hope that death isn’t the end of the story. I believe that the goodness, love, and life of Jesus were more powerful than the empire, and in this way he conquered death and beat the powers of evil–no payment, no transaction, no wrath4. And this resurrection life is something Jesus offers to us; he calls us to a new way of being human.
I want to walk alongside others in their dark moments the way Jesus did. He wept with those who wept, mourned with those who mourned, and he did not try to theologize from it. He physically healed people and told them that their sins were forgiven, and in the book The God who Riots: Taking Back the Radical Jesus by Damon Garcia, the author illuminated that when Jesus did that, what the original readers of the text would understand is that Jesus was freeing people from the shame and sin that society had placed upon them.
In class today, the professor talked about the role of lament and asked us what it might look like if we practiced it in community. On the cross, Jesus quoted a Psalm that was a lament: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me,” and in that hospitable act, Jesus makes space for the most tragic part of the human condition, that of abandonment, and with that, all that is human. Lament actively declares the way that things are without justifying them or sugar-coating them. Lament creates empty, lonely space for what is right. Lament offers space for the suffering to speak for themselves. And I think if we really allowed ourselves and our faith communities to mourn the injustices and suffering in this world in this way, our lament would turn into a revolution, a plan of concrete action so that, although we cannot stop death completely before the time that the beloved community of God is fully realized (what I would have called “during the Church age” when I was a dispensationalist evangelical), we can take Christ’s invitation to make all things new here and now, preventing the unnecessary death and decay of God’s creation, moving towards the flourishing of all people.
This language sometimes feels so far-fetched to me when I look at the world around us that is often called a dumpster fire. When the fears arise that maybe there is nothing after this life, I remind myself that even if that were true, I will have spent my life trying to make this world a better place. And that’s enough. But the Love that I have encountered in God is more than enough, and I know that They will not let me go.
Do you wrestle with some of these same fears and questions? How have you processed them? Have you ever had a moment where you felt transformed by communal lament (for me, it was the 2017 Women’s March on Roanoke)? How do you think we can embody the way of Jesus in entering into solidarity with others’ pain?
When poets direct speech to an abstract concept or a person who is not physically present
This PNW-based company offers to transform bodies into nutrient-rich soil, like compost! From dust we are and to dust we shall return…
My posts go live on Sundays but I write them on Thursday and I didn’t think about that when I wrote this sentence…
This way of thinking about atonement and the cross is called Christus Victor, and is historically the view that most Christians throughout the centuries have held. The concept of penal substitutionary atonement theory is a much more recent phenomenon.