I Get Sad About The Past But There Is Mercy

Plus links to some recent listens and reads

Here in New England, autumn has arrived. It is all wistful and melancholic; darkish mornings of cold rain like a scene from Wuthering Heights through the windows while a candle glows on my dining table. Streets are lined with amber-tinted leaves and maples burdened by their gilded boughs. It’s a poetic time of year.

Something about this season always makes me nostalgic. Probably because of the way, as many others have noted, the natural world seems to be telling the story in broad daylight of the passing of time, the fact that memories are memories precisely because they are in the past, and that looking forward with hope and anticipation as much as we are able still leads inevitably to loss.

When I was a kid, we always went camping in the fall. The spring and summer too, but the fall trips are the ones that evoke sadness when I think about them. In part, because those trips hold a lot of memories of things that are no longer. Those are the trips we went on with families that I grew up with in our church, families that after a horrific church split in my high school years, we never talked to again. Like arms and legs that were cut off, it felt like entire pieces of our life, of my life, had been erased with the memory still lingering in all its phantom pain.

I’ve lived for my whole adult life with the aftermath of that church split and the many ways it affected my immediate family. It is not a story entirely without redemption, though that is something that takes a proximity to my parent’s lives to see, and the ability to hear their heart over many many years of growth and change and the work of grace that is both beautiful and messy and sometimes hidden. I don’t know about the redemptive work being done in the other families or people that were affected. Someday, I hope I have proximity to that too.

Like any hard thing in our lives, the shadow of it will always be there. Even though I can see traces of God’s care and the way He has not given up on working in any of our lives, the cracks on this side of Heaven still sit there, never fully healed. Even if smaller than they once were, they are still visible enough to bring pain when I’m reminded of them. And that’s what happens come autumn, the crunch of leaves in a campground, or the memory of some way our family used to be before we were haunted by chasms and long silences.

My mom once told me something her aunt said to her many years after the tragic drowning of her teenage son. Something to the effect of, “The pain doesn’t lessen with time, it’s just that with time I think of it less.” She was perhaps speaking of the way the pain does not always overwhelm you with its ever-presentness. But the pain is as real as ever. I’ve never had that level of loss, but it does make me think that the wounds of loss whether through actual death, or the death of a relationship are profoundly deep and not the kind of thing that time heals.

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Lately, it seems that everything I’m reading or listening to wades through the theme of broken relationships and forgiveness (or the tragic lack thereof):

• The decades-long reflections of an old man looking over the history of his grandmother and her marriage and his own fractured family in Wallace Stegner’s, The Angle of Repose.

• The inevitable tragedy of a family responding with nothing but (as grace-obsessed writer Philip Yancey terms it ) ungrace and the fallout in a small New England home in Edith Wharton’s, Ethan Frome.

• More disastrous endings, irreparable breaches, and the slow slide away from life-giving love in Edith Wharton’s, The House of Mirth. (Loved both Wharton novels btw).

• The deep rifts and sorrows that a lack of grace brings to families, to nations, to so many relationships, and the piercing, hard-to-swallow (but we must!) redemptive power of grace in Philip Yancey’s, What’s So Amazing About Grace. (His memoir from a couple of years ago is a deeply moving and beautiful exploration of how this grace reached through the cracks in his own life).

• Gut-punching discussion about the current generation’s propensity to cut off relationship with one’s parents in this discussion (conversation begins at 27:00 mark). I’ve seen firsthand the horror of this reality and it is complex and it is so deeply painful and I wish it on no one, no matter what they have done.

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I was listening to an interview with Jen Wilkin yesterday, and though the conversation was mainly about her new study on Revelation, at one point she deviated to a poignant discussion about care for her aging mother. There is a striking way that the bookends of our lives mirror each other. When we are young, we are helpless and in need of the care of our parents. When we are old, we are helpless again and need the care of our children. She noticed that her mother in her declining abilities would always apologize for needing help (something that children never do). She would repeat to her mother again and again, “You are a person to be loved, not a problem to be solved.”

I teared up as I listened to her say that. A person, with plenty of problems no doubt. But it is not ours to solve them. It is ours to love them.

Blessed are the merciful, for you will be shown mercy.

When I think back on painful rifts, people I no longer know but are persons to be loved, cracks that remain present even if I think about them less, I don’t know what else could bring these broken things together than an act of mercy. Undeserved forgiveness. Undeserved grace. We all long to be whole.

Inevitably, these golden afternoons and evenings with wood smoke hanging in the air will remind me of the way ungrace has brought ruin. And yet, somehow we who live with the hope of mercy still walk towards it, still strain our eyes to see it, asking in whispered prayers for it to show up in our lives and for the ability to show it to others. And I think we do not ask in vain.