If being alive means inexorably to suffer, then what’s our consolation in being here?

I thought this the other day, like a week and a half back, and I wrote it down. If you subscribe to the way of Jesus, you’d probably say Him. He’s our consolation. But he’s not here – he was already and he is no longer. So what breadcrumbs, with his Spirit, has he left for us to feast from? Well, I’d say the things in the world that are true, beautiful, and good. I feel that’s a fair assessment for most of us, definitely for writers.

I’m not here for money or a nine-to-five or even marriage in its simplest form. I want swallowing bodies of water, racial reconciliation, and a glass of wine in California with my husband who will not leave me. I think while we each await a death that is coming and bear a life that is hard, we humans hunt in a pattern and it’s usually in the direction of truth, beauty, and goodness, all of which preceded our being here and don’t depend on it either. 

And while some may say we’re just lucky to have breath and that the experience of life is consolation enough, to a lot of us, it’s still just Saturday – our faces aren’t symmetrical in the way that science calls us pretty. The hospital smells bad, we can’t afford housing, there’s no guarantee we’ll be attracted to the opposite sex, and our wombs are unbearably empty. And even though we’re periodically consoled by this love that gave us earthly truth, beauty, and goodness, our bodies are tense because the next shoe will drop and God only knows what Sunday might bring. Hopefully relief.

I’m not sure about coincidence and all that, but this is a piece I found fifty-five weeks ago, read from Father Henri Nouwen’s book, A Letter of Consolation. It came up again today in my memories on Black Saturday, with the idea of consolation swirling around in a two-week-old incubator. Thankful for that grace today, and I hope it’s a grace to you, too.

“If the God who revealed life to us, and whose only desire is to bring us to life, loved us so much that He wanted to experience with us the total absurdity of death, then – yes, then there must be hope; then there must be something more than death; then there must be a promise that is not fulfilled in our short existence in this world; then leaving behind the ones you love, the flowers and the trees, the mountains and oceans, the beauty of art and music, and all the exuberant gifts of life cannot be just the destruction and cruel end of all things; then indeed we have to wait for the third day.”

We needn’t anymore consolation that the one of a third day.

It’s a piece of a poem called Love by Roy Croft – translated and taken almost directly from Austrian writer, Erich Fried, in his Ich Liebe Dich (I Love You). Out of turn, I’d change the bottom half of this to read, “You have done it despite the temptation to be yourself.”

Since this flag hung at the altar more or less than 900 days ago, I’d say we’ve laid our heads amongst tavern people a great deal more than we’ve dwelt in the worship of a temple. And not because marriage has been singly hard or worse at the beginning, in the first years, like they say. I’m saying some nights it’s noisy and there’s drinking and at least we have a roof above us until morning. We’re lodgers, young companions that have a place to stay and want it with each other. I actually love this part of marriage! I don’t want to wish it away.

But I catch this flag across the room when he’s gotten the worst of me for the fourth week in a row now. Everyone else has gotten our best all day long, so we arrive home and we’re finally free. Finally ourselves. Temperamental, tired, glued to a screen, spouting opinions, sex if we feel like it, eating whatever garbage is convenient and easy. Slowly but surely making an idol from the security of our oneness. They safety of for better or for worse. 

It’s weird seeing these words in our new home now. It feels like something new. Like we can give it another go. And I realize that as long as I’m just “being myself” apart from the sanctity that Christ brings to a room, there is no virtue in my being there, not really. A wife, maybe, but not one that’s pleasing. We cannot sustain in faithfulness just because we’ve gotten cozy in our own skin. Only the Spirit can sustain us in faithfulness and it doesn’t matter what kind of comfort or commitment we offer up.

The temptation to let it all hang out because that’s what they signed up for will always be there. And it’s no bad thing to be yourself with a partner if you’re certain that’s not what’s saving you. It’s too big a burden to say you’ve done it all by being yourself. We’ve done it because Christ is in us and his yoke is easy, his burden light. David Benner, in his book The Gift of Being Yourself, says, “Our true self-in-Christ is the only self that will support authenticity. It and it alone provides an identity that is eternal.” It takes a lot of digging - painful excavating of a self that’s untrue - to finally be ourselves but only because we’ve known God. Our existence doesn’t hold up against his divinity, and woe to all of us should we forget that.

One day, maybe we’ll have a drink and say that from the lumber of our lives, we’re building together not a tavern but a temple, and we’re doing it in spite of our very selves to reveal an ever better bridegroom.