Hello friends,
It’s been quiet on the Dear Exiles substack front for the last 7 weeks because I’ve been in the thick of releasing Season 2 of the Your Pastor Reads Books podcast. I hope you’ve had a chance to check out the lineup of conversation topics I’ve had with guests. My pastor-guests have been deeply inspiring to me and our listeners.
I wanted to break my inactivity on the Dear Exiles, however, because today is a grief-iversary.
Fifteen years ago today my 36-year-old big brother died in a car accident.
That narrative is straightforward enough, but the understory is that he was drinking at a bar with a friend that night. Instead of riding his own motorcycle home, he called his wife to tell her he was getting a ride—with the friend who had also been drinking. On their way to my brother’s house in a tiny town surrounded by Iowa countryside, they flew 120 mph over the hilly roads. How do I know? Because these boys were joyriding, and my brother texted a photograph of the speedometer to a mutual friend, just minutes or seconds before his friend lost control of the vehicle—just minutes or seconds before the car flipped and both men flew out of the car, along with a toddler’s booster seat and a 5 lb bag of potatoes.
Layered on top of this true story is the fact that my brother’s only child was eight months old. On top of that is the fact that he and I hadn’t spoken in a year, not because we’d had a falling out but because the mental illness of a family member had left us quietly estranged.
At the time of his death, I was in an MFA program for creative writing, required to turn in pages and pages of work every month to my faculty advisor. I could do nothing but write to him and to the younger and current versions of myself (grief has a way of making us stand outside ourselves)—by crafting the story of our lives against the backdrop of our parent’s mental illness and the way it dotted the plot points of our story as brother and sister. My monthly scribblings amounted, eventually, to a creative memoir, which was published five years after his death. I call it a “grief” book, cathartic for those who observe grief-iversaries. I call it a book that searches for the ways in which Christ holds all things together, even a brother and sister separated by mental illness, drunken recklessness, and death.
As some people’s pastor, I caution: “This is not a Joyce Meyer type of book.” It’s not a victorious testimonial, unless by that you mean I stared into the depth of my brother’s freshly dug grave and still believe in the resurrection. I still believe in the Jesus of Julian of Norwich’s vision, who promised, “but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”
I’m no longer wrecked by this date as I was so many years ago, but I know some of you are wrecked on grief-iversaries coming, and I want to kindly ask you to let yourself be wrecked if that’s what you need. The poet Christian Wiman reminds us of theologian Jurgen Moltmann’s claim “that all honest theology has to be conducted ‘within earshot of the dying Christ.’”1 To paraphrase Marianne Moore, Wiman also writes: “Hope is not hope until all ground for hope is lost.”2 Every promise of God, then, stands out brilliantly in relief against our otherwise quite hopeless state.
Even on the cross Jesus, the honorable one, courageously despaired with words that cause Christian triumphalists to squirm: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Bearing the unbearable shame of the cross, he caved to utter despair as the light went out in the land, as darkness swallowed up hope.3
Of course, Sunday was coming. Of course: the resurrection! But when it’s night, you may take a note from his female disciples and go home and rest a while. And then, when you can, revisit the grave with your tears. The Resurrected One who does our own resurrecting will be waiting right there.
Hey! Thanks for being here. I’m a book-obsessed pastor, author, and holistic life and leadership coach. Find out more about me at www.heatherweber.org. For essays and podcasts that come straight to your inbox, subscribe to this Dear Exiles newsletter in the subscription box above. Fun fact: I’m also the author of Dear Boy:, An Epistolary Memoir and the host of the Your Pastor Reads Books podcast.
Christian Wiman, He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art.
Wiman, He Held Radical Light.
Mt 27:45-46