We will have them over soon, the couple who have been married only three years and had six miscarriages. They have one little boy. We will have them over, but what will I say? I understand? I don’t understand. I’m praying for you? Sometimes I pray, but not usually for them. Hang in there? Trite and meaningless. We will probably play some games and laugh and eat and drink and then they will say goodbye. Maybe we shall be quiet. The Spirit will lead. Maybe we will laugh until our sides hurt. She might wear black. She does that sometimes. Maybe we will pray for them before they go. Maybe it will be good to laugh and eat and drink and say goodbye like normal people do. But what is normal? Six miscarriages? No, indeed, but “on my heart hath fallen confusion, till I know not what I am, nor whence I am” (Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Passing of Arthur).
We are the epiphany of God—six miscarriages.
We are imagined by God—six miscarriages.
We are the story of God, Evangel—six miscarriages.
God authors our lives. We are his characters and the story in which we find ourselves has divine meaning. Every event drives the plot forward toward its telos: resolution. Six miscarriages are not the resolution. They are the in-between. They are the mines of Moria and Gandalf gone, fallen from the bridge of Khazad-dum while the fellowship weeps and weeps. They are Christ’s disciples huddled together in a darkened room, for they are scared and bewildered with all their hopes swallowed up by a tomb. They are Isaiah crying out, “’Look away from me, I will weep bitterly; do not labor to comfort me because of the plundering of the daughter of my people.’ For it is a day of trouble and treading down and perplexity by the Lord God of hosts In the Valley of Vision—Breaking down the walls and of crying to the mountain” (The book of Isaiah, chapter 22).
The Christian world is colored by God’s story. In other words, it is colored by the murder of a brother, the rape of a sister, the betrayal of a friend, the pounding of nails into flesh and bone, and the darkening of the sky. It is a world of what-ifs, and could-have-beens, peopled by has-beens and might-have-beens. It is a world soaked in fear and drenched by the blood of a million martyrs without even beginning to recount the nearly two thousand years of church history since the destruction of Jerusalem. It is a dark history with pain oozing into all its hidden corners.
At the center of Christianity is a death. Christianity is perhaps the most morbid religion of the world: perpetually meditating upon death with little crosses around their necks, Christian disciples sing their way to martyrdom. Anticipating death and calling it gain, Christians are evangelists of the grotesque. Such meditations are a beautiful thing to those with a strong imagination, however, because they know that a resurrection can only happen if there is a death. As Walter Wangerin Jr. wrote, “I know no resurrection except that first there’s been a death. And as a writer, I cannot speak genuinely or deeply of resurrection except I speak the same of death and the sin that engendered death. That I can speak accurately of death without despairing is hardly melancholic. It is liberty—and victory.”
If there is only death, then there is no hope. If resurrection follows death, then hope springs eternal. The hope of the Gospel rests directly upon our ability to imagine and, therefore, believe the possibility of resurrection. The world was once like a wall, white and clean, until sin glued black wallpaper across its surface. The glue has set, to be sure, but it has not changed the reality of a white wall behind. Truth-telling stories, therefore, have moments in which the author scratches a portion of the black paper off and provides a “fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief” (J.R.R. Tolkien, emphasis mine).
