Making Sense of it All

As I sit here early today Beth Nielson Chapman’s voice offers comfort as it has Elton John and others.  She’s singing ‘No One Knows but You’ from her Sand and Water album.  Beth has known suffering and tragedy—the death of a husband and cancer—as did Elton John at the death of Princess Di. 

In Sand and Water Beth wrote of love in the midst of her grief.  

This morning I am for whatever reason acutely aware of the hate, evil and meanness in the world these days, there is a bumper crop of it. 

We were in Chattanooga this week for Grandparents Day.  The festivities at Boyd Buchanan school were cut short midmorning as the news a high school junior had died in a single car accident on her way to school.  Gratefully, her younger brother who normally rode with her had come to school earlier on Wednesday.  Her grandparents are attending her funeral today. 

It was yet another reminder how fragile our lives really are.  We all are variations of control freaks moving to insure and protect ourselves against all the uncertainties…an absolute impossibility.

So when Elton John was asked how he’d coped with the tragic death of his friend Di, he replied “I’ve listened to Beth Nielson Chapman’s Sand and Water daily”.  I personally was introduced to Beth at Women in the Round at the Barn Dinner Theater fund raiser for Daystar—the non-profit where I rented a tiny space as I began private practice twenty-five years ago.  

There is so much in life, in the world right now that separates us—to rip us apart.  The pandemic has driven our isolation to even greater degrees.  Then we have those out there who relish feeding enmity and animosity between groups of all sorts—against connection, opposed to unity fanning the flames of discontent—and our own fears and ignorance.  

Some of us manage to romanticize love and suffering (a defense mechanism of sorts)—just consider the themes of almost every movie, series, play or book, that is our entertainment.  There are medical shows, cop shows, murder mysteries…even the Hallmark movies we joke about include a reverse, a tragedy or a death.  It is a story constantly repeated in our lives yet we never seem to get enough.  Is that our struggle to make sense of evil? Of the tragedies that befall us? Of the pain it all creates? Of the grief we carry? 

What surprisingly is in the midst of the unexplainable—if we let it be, is connection—love and regard for others in shared, common suffering.  And like ‘common sense’ we learn this sharing of suffering isn’t common either, it is other worldly, mystically comforting.  John Bradshaw said long ago that all recovery work is grief work.  I would agree. Bearing my own suffering sensitizes me to the suffering of others near and far.

In the end, it’s only God—or whatever word you use for all that is out there beyond us, only God knows my soul through and through.  Better than I myself do most days.  

So as I am beginning this cold November Saturday I’m thinking of a family in Dunlap, Tennessee shaken to the core this week, that is burying their daughter, granddaughter, today.  Again, suffering unites us.

Beyond that, no really in the throws of it—there is a love, the metal, the cords that bind the universes together.  It is a given. 

Personally, I see this 'metal’ as a Being.  You and I are—have always been connected to it, in it.  We discover it is the very ground of all Being. Attempts at explanations fail quickly.  

So I’m drawn again this morning into the mystery of it all—all I don’t know.  Science and my faith tell me there are realms of Being we are already in simultaneously.  Sci-fi stuff.  That cloud of witnesses we’ve heard about is very near by.  Maybe we are stardust…who knows.

Yet, what is ‘real’ on this often lonesome journey is ironically we are never alone.  The greatest of all scriptural promises.

In life, suffering along the way is not a choice.  But to love is. 

I rest there.