The whiplash of life
Complications of being human
“This is what I know: that the small is huge, that the tiny is vast, that pain is part and parcel of the gift of joy, and that this is love, and then there is everything else.”
-Brian Doyle (59)
I decided to read Brian Doyle’s One Long River of Song over Thanksgiving break because I have heard it is an excellent book to read when you want to feel grateful. And it is. It is full of short essays on all sorts of things—the beauty of birds, memories of childhood sports, moments of holiness discovered in unlikely spaces. It has all of that.
But it also has more. It talks of cancer and infidelity and war. I’ll read a two page essay about Doyle seeing an unlikely animal in the woods followed by a two page essay on a school shooting and the teachers who stood between the shooter and the children. The topics are not cordoned off from one another, they don’t have easy sections to choose from like “Gratefulness” or “Grief.” I can’t easily skip to the happy parts.
They are part and parcel, belonging one to another.
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I got back on Instagram recently in an attempt to better follow my out of town friends. I decided to get back on after spending a weekend in LA for one of my best friend’s weddings. I couldn’t have scripted the weekend better. The wedding itself was beautiful. I cried as I watched him cry as he watched his bride walk down the aisle.
Usually weddings are rather bittersweet affairs for me. I am so happy for my friends, but there’s a floating thought in the back of my head that goes, I want one of these. But that didn’t exist in this one. It was just unadulterated joy. It was sneaking cookies before the ceremony and dancing in an old California house and laughing at my friend Bonnie’s superhuman ability to know every lyric to every mid-2000s punk song.
It was beautiful.
So I went home and set up an Instagram account and began following all of these special people. Then Instagram did what it does and began recommending people for me to follow. One of them was a friend who passed a year and a half ago. I guess Instagram didn’t know about that.
A month before she passed I sent her a Kathleen Norris book that she was wanting. She Venmoed me for it and was excited about my writing. Her funeral was hard, and afterward I cried as I hugged Bonnie—that same Bonnie—because the world just felt smaller somehow and I was alone in a tiny raft in the middle of it.
It seems that in the vast world of Silicon Valley, it is no one’s job to shutter the Instagram accounts of the deceased; in the eyes of social media, she might still be reading that Kathleen Norris book, all this time later.
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I have a number of friends—many of whom were at the wedding in LA—mourning the fall of a church we all used to go to. I interned there for a summer, but some of my friends gave years and years of their life to the place. When it started it was a bright, gleaming thing, potential piled up and filled the dinner table it sat at.
Multi-generational. Multi-ethnic. Gospel-centered.
That was the mantra, and it lived it really well. But, like so many other evangelical churches in America, it grew quickly and that growth launched the head pastor into celebrity. Suddenly he had his own podcast and guest preached at other churches and wrote a book. He was on boards across the country and had his fingers in countless pies, all of which had his face and name plastered across them.
And he dyed his beard black. I don’t know why that was so significant for me, but it was.
A few weeks ago, the church publicly announced that the celebrity pastor was involved in an “inappropriate texting relationship.” What do you do when a gleaming thing falls to earth? What do you do when something with so much potential is not noticeably being redeemed?
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It’s been a year since I moved home to Oklahoma. Professionally, I felt I spent so much time trying to build something really beautiful only for it to crack and crumble and collapse and bury me beneath the rubble. I was burnt out and exhausted and questioning what the point of any of it was. Why did God have me on this exact journey? What’s going on?
I look back at that year now with a lot of grace and—ironically—with a lot of gratefulness. I’ve grown and changed, my edges aren’t as sharp as they used to be; I’m learning how to receive my life from God rather than build it on my own. It’s hard though. Confusing. I fail at it constantly. But still, I am learning.
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The Bible says to weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice. But if we really do that well, won’t we get whiplash? Isn’t there always weeping and rejoicing happening all at once? It can just get so overwhelming, being open to life in that way.
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Brian Doyle passed too early from cancer, his own life a lesson in the whiplash of life.
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On Saturday I saw a deer as I sat in my car at the park praying before the coffee shop opened. I was reminded that I am called to pant for God as that deer pants for water. Then I saw ducks flying in a V high above me and was reminded how much God cares for the birds of the air. How much more will God care for me, his child?
I was reminded of all of this as I processed life and whiplash and the mystery of it all. It—life—is just so large and complicated and blisteringly severe and beautifully mundane. It is a constant paradox. Weeping and rejoicing exist a page apart, sometimes on the same page.
How could any of it be processable without the love of God?