Joy and Sorrow

I just want to break things. There are not enough broken things in this world. A world that desperately avoids its brokenness is no world at all for me. A gospel that avoids death is not good news. To live honestly is to live in the messy truth that joy and sorrow inhabit the same heart.
– Christy Bauman, A Brave Lament

Yesterday I came home to find that an extensive number of branches had been lopped off the redwood trees encircling the back of our house. We live in an Eichler, squeezed like a sardine amongst similar abodes with tiny adjoining yards, and those branches had provided some semblance of privacy. Viewed through the many windows in the back rooms of our house, their foliage created the illusion of being in a forest, rather than an overcrowded neighborhood. But all that was gone. Redwood trees don’t regrow branches.

The kids, while taken aback by the change, moved on pretty quickly. But I could do no such thing. I felt grieved that something so wondrous and beautiful, one of my favorite things about our plot of land, could have changed so abruptly. I felt angry and powerless that something so irreplaceable had been lost for no good reason. Suddenly, my body felt like it did when I found out I had cancer. The same pit in the stomach, the same dysregulation of sleep and appetite. The same feeling of wanting to rant and rage while having to appear normal for the kids.

This was ridiculous. As one of the kids said, Mom, it’s a plant. They weren’t wrong. How had I become so fragile? So attached to things around me? So affected by forced change? In a crazed moment, I imagined the trees like my body, victims of involuntary amputation. Left with an inescapably altered landscape we now had to live with for the rest of our lives. Yes, we’re still alive. Yes, most people wouldn’t know it to look at us. But something has been lost.

I got up the next morning as the sun was rising, unable to sleep, and went to sit at a wide window. Without the branches, I could see straight through to the horizon, where the sky was turning orange. A flock of tiny black birds winged their way through neighboring trees I had never noticed before. Ironically, the cleared branches left a space where we could now put the trampoline we had been struggling to fit in the yard. I thought about the kids jumping up and down in the new space and it felt like another heavy-handed metaphor: joy and loss, coexisting, never the one without some degree of the other. The one making space for the other.

I thought about the kids, each detaching in their own way as they move through the teen years, even though when I look at them I see the younger children they used to be. I think about my altered body, how the numbness where my breast used to be still catches me by surprise and makes me miss what used to be there in ways too personal and private to ever really explain to anyone else. I thought about the branches, forever gone but leaving a space that brings new things into view. Is this what it feels like to get older? How cavalierly I used to move through the world, too focused on the next thing to look back. Now it feels like all I do is look back; every step forward is made in the shadow of something left behind. I have to learn to let go, to navigate the particularity of each loss, in order to move ahead.

I had just finished writing a seminary paper on eschatology, or the doctrine of last things. Christian hope is an eschatological hope: it is not blind optimism or detached existentialism, but hope firmly rooted in a future reality. One day, Scripture tells us, the world will be remade. Our bodies will be remade. It will be creation as God intended it. I looked at the trees and thought, the world is not as it should be. Any gospel that avoids death is no gospel at all. But we have this hope, one that when grasped can make the loss easier to bear. I imagined gathering up all the losses of this year and holding them up in that bare bare space. Help me, God. Help me see through all this to the joy, whatever joys may come now and the joy that is so sure one day to arrive.