Imagine this:
A hawk at evening.
I was eight years old and playing in the sandbox under a growing African dusk. Dad called me to him. He crouched down and watched the trees. I burrowed beneath his chin and crouch too. In front of us was a hen. Her chicks were scattered and aimlessly pecked at the ground. One ruffled his feathers and shivered for the sheer delight of it. Mother kept pecking the ground for insects or seeds. They were chickens. That is what chickens do.
Dad pointed into the tall tree across the yard, behind the car garage. “Look,” he said.
It was dusk: “I can’t see anything,” I whispered.
“Wait and watch,” he said.
We crouched very still. I was beginning to think of the sandbox and the waning light.
He lifted my chin and I looked up into the tree. Nothing, then something, a movement like a cloak amongst the branches. With a wide spread of dark wings, a hawk materialized. It was a hawk. That is what hawks do.
I had not done the math yet, but I sensed something ominous.
Mother hen also sensed something ominous. She perked up and pandemonium broke loose. She screamed. Her babies, plump and soft-feathered, scrambled, tripped, ran one way and then turned around to run another direction.
Among the squawking and squeaking and flapping of wings, some of the chicks found their mother. Most of them did. But the hawk descended with power and intentionality and precision. He opened his talons right before my widening eyes. Talons squeezed around two little chicks that kicked and screamed. The mother hen screamed some things I am sure would make an eight year old blush, but I was too busy crying with her. I, too, wanted to rise up on wings and bring down the brute and restore the chicks to their mother, still plump and soft-feathered. Dad held me tight against his chest. The hawk was gone. Still, I could not bear to watch the grief and so I closed my eyes.
Dad made me look. He is a good father.
I saw the mother, bigger than before, her wings pulled tight to her body, but squirming, and I noticed little beaks popping out from underneath. They trembled. She tousles their feathers one at a time and in a minute they ventured out from beneath her shelter. It had been only a minute since the terror.
Dad leaned into my ears and whispered a portion of Psalm 61 to me: “You have been a shelter for me, a strong tower from the enemy. I will abide in your tabernacle forever; I will trust in the shelter of your wings.”
“O Lord our God, under the shadow of thy wings let us hope—defend us and support us. Thou wilt bear us up when we are little and even down to our gray hairs wilt carry us. For our stability, when it is in thee, is stability indeed; but when it is in ourselves, then it is all unstable” (Augustine, Confessions).
Pain has a context. It is framed by the Master Storyteller. We are imagined: before we materialized on this whirling globe in all our three dimensionality, before the nurse pricked our heals and we cried out, before we threw a snowball and squealed with delight, God imagined all of it. The death of grubs and the death of the chicks that ate them are also sprung from his imagination. Such trouble is part of his story but “the mystery of God eclipses the darkness and the struggle. We realize that suffering calls our lives into question, not God’s” (Eugene Peterson). We are a part of his story. We are, as Alexander Schmemann said, the epiphany of God.
We are, like Tumnus, like Lucy, like Puddleglum, like Edmund, characters whose life events have a purpose for us and for the story. This author loves his characters and the story in which they find themselves. Every character has a purpose, a reason for being. Every event drives the plot forward toward its telos, its resolution. Because every event has purpose in the author’s larger design, every event has meaning—even the bark of a dog, even the death of a baby chick.
He knows the falling of a sparrow.
He knows the number of hairs on your head.
Pain does not make the imagination shrivel. People shrivel, but the imagination is always perceiving and conceiving. Now, pain might very well reorient the imagination and paint a whole different story than was previously conceived, but the goal in our lives is to see the pain as the author sees the pain. As every decent author knows, each event of a story has purpose. If a character trips over a toy and mashes his nose into the front doorknob, there is a reason. If a character loses her child in a car accident, it is because the author has written it into the story for a purpose yet unknown to the character.
If pain has purpose because every detail of our lives was already imagined by God, then aligning our imagination to God’s imagination, our view to God’s view of circumstances and trials, is foundational to the soul’s spiritual pilgrimage home—a journey that takes many turns. “Grief is like a long valley,” C.S. Lewis once wrote in A Grief Observed, “a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.” Let us prepare ourselves for such bends in the road of our pilgrimage. While we are in grief, let us remain a moment. Let us call grief what it is and not hide from it. Yes, we are raw. Yes, we are in the dark belly of a whale. Who can be Jesus’ little sunbeam at such a time? And would Jesus want such a thing? One of the most godly men to grace the pages of Scripture spoke profoundly to our human state when he said, “For God has made my heart weak, and the Almighty terrifies me; because I was not cut off from the presence of darkness, and he did not hide deep darkness from my face” (Job 24:16-17).
This pain is a deep darkness before my eyes, but I don’t know how to talk about pain. I can’t even write about it without approaching it with sidelong glances or describing it as through a prism, from different and differing angles. I can see it and think about it, but a vocabulary of pain escapes me. How might we develop a grammar of grief, a vocabulary of pain?
Sink the tap root deep into the loam.
Sink it like Tolstoy.
Follow it like Augustine.
