All at Once

Some weeks of life pass by with very little to set them apart. Other weeks turn your world upside down and inside out. 

In the last week of October 2021, I found out my dad was dying, across the sea in a country whose pandemic border restrictions wouldn't allow me to get home in time to see him. That same day, I dragged my aching heart along to my hen's party and spent the weekend saying goodbye to a dozen of my dearest friends. I finalised packing and shipped off all my worldly possessions to an island state I'd never visited before. My fiancé and I boarded a plane to that island. We arrived and found a rental. My dad died, ending his long battle with cancer and a shockingly brief acute illness. I wasn't there, when I'd always thought I would be.

In the weeks that followed, I set up the little home that would become our first as a married couple, made frantic arrangements for an emergency allocation quarantine bed and flights to New Zealand, cancelled one wedding and planned an alternative one, and met with my PhD supervisors to organise remote commencement. I flew to NZ and stayed (yet another) week in a managed isolation hotel. I finally held my grieving mother, nearly a month after dad's death, and helped her arrange his funeral. I started doctoral studies, tore my hair out trying to understand whether Tasmania would actually let us fly in in time for Christmas and the wedding, and managed to fill out all the correct declarations to get back into the right country and my fiancé's arms just ten days before we said 'I do'. We were married with just two witnesses (and an archbishop), spent five blissful days honeymooning, and adjusted to married life with the unexpected housemate of my mum, who was now stuck outside of NZ herself. I launched into doctoral research work, completed two coursework subjects, and - two years into this dear old pandemic - at long last caught coronavirus.

And here we are. Still recovering from covid. Still recovering from a roller coaster few months that turned the world inside out and upside down. Still learning to grieve, to tread gently, to adjust to this new life that exploded into being all at once.

I remember saying to Callum during that absurd October week, "If only I could do these things one at a time - maybe then I could do them right. But all at once is so hard." If only I could have just been the girl losing her dad, the girl preparing to get married, the girl moving interstate and saying goodbye to a home of eight years, or the girl starting a PhD. If only I could have just been the joyful new wife, or the sorrowful daughter. If only it could have been just horrible, or just wonderful. 

In these months, my darkest days and my happiest have all been folded in together. A valley of shadow and contrasts. A lot that was awful and lot that was glorious. Reality, which is never just one thing or the other, but somehow both/and. All at once.

~~~

For the last few years, my best friend and I have been praying a 54-day novena together throughout June and July. The prayers woven into those rosaries speak of roses: the white buds of the joyful mysteries, the blood-red roses of the sorrowful mysteries. And the full-blown roses of Glory - pure white yet tinged red with the blood of the Passion.

I didn't like it at first. It struck me as somehow cruel and wrong that Glory could not be a simple return to the white of Joy, that Glory must be stained by Sorrow's red. There was no alternative route that avoided the valley of the shadow, no easy way around death to self. And yet here, once again, was that topsy-turvy, deeply painful, undeniably real Christianity that I both rebelled against and found so irresistible:

Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. 

And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” 

But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it." (Matthew 16: 21-25)

Christ speaks of death and loss, of resurrection and salvation, of irrational Love and sacrifice and hope. All at once. Inseparable.

Only in giving ourselves away do we become whole. Only a love that is passionate unto death can undo the knot of a self-enclosed heart. Suffering alone can raise innocence into beauty. 

~~~

Throughout these months of joy and sorrow, in loving and in passing through my own valley of shadow, my own Gethsemane, Christ has offered me a chance to become that Glorious variegated rose, stained by the Passion but redeemed by Love. 

Like that rose, my face and my body bear the marks of joy and sorrow now: I lost weight and gained wrinkles, both unintentionally, both from stress. My heart, too, has been stained with the red of the pain and stretched beyond what I thought it capable of. In saying yes to beautiful and sorrowful truths, the Lord allowed a sword to pierce me and scar me. I cannot emerge unscathed, but my wounds themselves can become a testament to true Love, evidence that Love has touched my life, even in the inside-out, upside-down madness of it all.

I think God has been teaching me that in these Real lives of ours, He never gives us unsullied joy; nor does He give us unlit darkness. Truth is always bigger and more complex. There will always be stars in the night, and always a cloud or two even on the bluest days. Life on earth is chiaroscuro, a valley of shadows and dappled light and perpetual contrast.

And somehow that nuance and contrast is the beauty. Love is born of suffering, and suffering is born of love. If we didn't give our hearts away they could never be broken. 

Our choice is whether to see our scars as our most horrific ugliness or our greatest beauty. Our choice is whether to look at sorrow and say with Peter 'God forbid it!' or to believe in Christ's words that those who lose their life will find it. 

~~~

As the days go on, I'm beginning to realise that my recovery from coronavirus isn't going to be an easy one. I keep waking up expecting to feel magically better, less tired to the bone, less on the brink of tears from the battle still raging inside my body. I keep expecting that I can push through, and then being disappointed by my weakness and limitations. But that is okay. Life can be hopeful and exhausting all at once. I can be sick without it being the end of the world. 

My recovery from grief isn't easy either, no matter how hard I try to push through and return to cheerfulness and efficiency. The wounds run deep; the loss is real; the disorientation from chaos still spins around me even in the steady times. I'm still grappling with many hard questions, and a strange mixture of great joy and great sorrow. But that, too, is okay. 

Sometimes I want to sob and rage at Jesus, "Why can't I just go back to the white rose of innocence, happy and unscathed?" I want for my faith to be simple and pure and lovely, not scribbled all over with red ink and scars of the heart. I want to say with Peter, "God forbid that you should have allowed it to happen this way!" God forbid that, all at once, my world had to turn upside down and inside out. God forbid that loss, and suffering, and unshakeable sorrow, should be part of this story. 

I don't want to be weak in body and heart, crippled by grief and bitter from regrets. The fear of that ugliness haunts me daily. But perhaps what I'm choosing to see as horrific ugliness is in fact the very mark of beauty. Perhaps those dark red stains around the edges of the white rose petals aren't the sign of its corruption, but of its coming into Glory.

Though I do not understand it, Christ is bringing beauty from ashes in my life. He is revealing to me, little by little, the Glory that comes from suffering with love. There is bitterness in that cup as well as sweetness. There are corners hidden in shadow as well as bright illuminations. Some days are awful and some are glorious. But it is all true. It is reality breaking over me day by day, no longer allowing me to delude myself or try to numb what is uncomfortable, but inviting me to be open to it all, to move with love through it all, to offer myself to God in it all.

~~~

This little post is, I guess, a series of vignettes into a heart with growing pains. I've been learning to live the beauty and the sorrow together, a task that isn't easy, that is often deeply wearying. But in the end it's a task that is worth it because it enables me to live fully in the real world, a world that always gives us beauty and sorrow all at once. If I numb myself to sorrow, I will also numb myself to beauty and to redemption. 

For many of us the events of the last few weeks have turned life upside down, in our hearts if not our physical circumstances - the tragedy unfolding in Ukraine, the Queensland floods, ongoing suffering in so many different parts of the world. 

I offer this piece of my story as a reminder that just because something is complicated, just because it contains deep, aching sorrow that makes us feel insurmountably weak - doesn't mean that it is wholly ugly or irredeemable.  In fact, it's in those wounds that beauty will often find us in the most tangible and transformative ways. Suffering is not a good in itself, but it is made great by the glorious Love that comes to touch it, when we open our hearts to receive that love. 

Let me be open to "all at once", Lord, even when I feel incapable of bearing all of these things together. Let me be open to beauty and sorrow, to the wounds and the resurrection, to the full reality of life. Let me find in You the answer I seek to the seemingly endless questions that haunt me. Let me take up my cross and follow you, even when I don't yet understand why I should have to. Let me not emerge unscathed from this valley of shadow, but be proud to bear the scars of love. 

Let me be pure white and passionate, bleeding red. All at once.