The Shack: Don’t Get Your Hopes Up

The Shack was a terrible book, badly written, offering shallow comfort and questionable theology. I’m not optimistic that the movie (premiering March 3) will be able to transcend these immediate problems unless it totally abandons any commitment to its source material and engages a screenwriter who can make us forgive the stereotypes and articulate a coherent spiritual response to the unrelenting grief of a bereaved parent.

Protagonist Mack receives a mysterious invitation to revisit a shack where his young daughter was abducted and murdered. He finds Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu waiting for him—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; and Mack challenges them with his questions and doubts about his battered faith. They cover theodicy, of course—reconciling the existence of evil and suffering with an omnipotent benevolent God; but they also discuss Trinitarianism, the incarnation, Hell, predestination, original sin, and forgiveness.

Author William P. Young tries for a fresh characterization of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but falls back on stereotypes and predictability. Papa is a jolly Black mother-figure who bakes pies and whips up four-course meals. Sarayu is a mystical, Asian-influenced, pan-dimensional being. And Jesus, of course, is a rugged but gentle Middle Eastern handyman with a big nose. Mack “knew instantly that he liked [him].”

The Shack strays from orthodoxy with vaguely universalist theology, and along the way it fails to provide any deep or satisfying answers to the problem of pain.

The plot revolves around Mack’s suffering over his daughter’s horrifying death. When Mack talks to Jesus about this, seeking understanding and peace, Jesus tells him that his daughter was never alone because the Holy Spirit was with her; they talked and she was comforted; “she was more worried about you and the other kids, knowing that you couldn’t find her. She prayed for you, for your peace,” Jesus tells Mack. “She was so brave!”

This flaccid response to grief and suffering offers the shallow comfort of make-believe. The key question of the book—How do I cope and find comfort in the deepest grief?—gets a cursory treatment in the form of a dialogue with no universal truth or wisdom.

Mack’s conversation with Jesus is fiction, of course—but even in fiction the reader seeks truth and wisdom that transcend the page and translate to real life. Author Young shows Jesus attempting to “fix” Mack’s grief with bromidic assurances. Even if it’s true that the Holy Spirit is with us—and I believe it is—these words don’t bring relief from grief and suffering. They don’t reverse the bad thing that has happened.

We live in a world that still suffers the consequences of sin. Christians sometimes get confused about the promises of the Kingdom.  We are not promised that we will be protected from these consequences. We do experience new life in some ways and at some times—yet clearly not in other ways or times. We cannot “claim” the blessings of comfort and peace right now, on our own timelines, in spite of the vapid affirmations of popular health and wealth preachers.

Even Jesus experienced this already and not-yet paradox of the kingdom. In the garden of Gethsemane, Matthew tells us that Jesus was “very sad and troubled…He fell to the ground” and cried out to God: “My Father, if it is possible, do not give me this cup of suffering.” Luke writes that Jesus was “full of pain” and that “his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground.” But His Father did not answer this prayer. Jesus continued to suffer, to the point of death on the cross.

Through his resurrection, Jesus conquered death—but still people die. Aidan died.

In my journey through the valley of the shadow of death, there were no grief-erasing Bible verses, no magic conversations with Jesus, no portion of my faith that instantly turned my sorrow into peace and comfort. That’s not how the blessings of the kingdom work this side of eternity. There is still grief. God has not yet wiped every tear from our eyes.

In real life there are no words that can bring comfort to a grieving parent. It is not only feckless to try to take away a person’s sorrow, it is manipulative and insulting. There are no words, no faith, no message, that take away grief.

What the real Jesus would have said to Mack, what he would say to me, is, “I hate this. I hate the evil that took your child away from you. It’s wrong, and horrible, and no parent should have to endure it. I wish I could take away your pain.”

It’s called empathy. God the Father endured the loss of his own Son. Jesus is “not a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but…one who was tempted in every way.” At Aidan’s funeral, the pastor said “Jesus does not come to death with a gracious invitation. Death is, for Jesus, the Last Enemy, and to death he comes with a sword. To death Jesus comes with his robe dipped in blood.”

These violent images of war convey with Shakespearean vividness that death is the enemy—and that’s what Jesus would have communicated to Mack. He would not have offered unhelpful platitudes that do not bring comfort in the face of such a grievous loss.

So the book failed in its treatment of the universal problem of pain, and the movie will fail too unless it reimagines these conversations and offers a more realistic depiction of what faith can and cannot do for a grieving parent.  

My own recovery from paralyzing grief after the death of my son entailed a long and emotionally grueling process. Time, tears, prayer, therapy and friendship—not to mention wine and anti-depressants—brought me to an experience of grace such that grief is no longer debilitating.

Now I am able, sometimes, to live in the awareness that God is present with me, in the middle of my sorrow. I finally began to discover moments of peace in the presence of God.

It’s paradoxical that peace, shalom, can exist in a world that contains the deepest grief and suffering. It makes no sense—but that is the paradoxical nature of the Kingdom that Jesus offered. Shalom exists, and Jesus walks with us through our grueling times. Jesus somehow, mysteriously, holds on to us.

And unlike the lame message of The Shack, He does not expect us to pretend that death is OK. He never suggests that we can feel better because of some fake spiritual fluffery.

I don’t completely understand it, but the real gospel, the real Jesus, is comfort enough.

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Summon Him

Aidan's birthday falls the day before Thanksgiving this year. He would have turned nineteen. 

He'd be in the middle of his freshman year at college. I'm guessing he would have chosen to take his post-secondary education slowly, to give himself more time to figure out where he was headed and how he wanted to get there. After four years of diverse learning opportunities as a home-schooled high-schooler, he would likely have already accumulated some community college credits.

I think there was some film-making in his future. His first novel would have been finished long ago. He probably would have found a publisher before me, darn him. He'd be writing poetry, and he'd have chapbooks on the shelves at Quimby's or Barbara's Bookstore. He might be starting to think about seminary.

I dreamed about him recently:

I was working a table at a school fundraiser. Papers, clipboards, and a cash-box littered the surface of a rectangular card table. 

Aidan sat on a metal folding chair behind the table. My tiny, white-haired boss walked through the door and hovered near us, flitting around like a nervous aunt in charge of the cookie table after a baptism in a small town church.

In front of me on the table, photographs and images of varying sizes were arranged on a wide poster board. Flimsy and uneven, most of the photos had been cut from magazines. Captions printed on strips of white computer paper lay with casual inelegance below the images. Some of the pictures had come loose. Others, I noticed, had not been placed carefully enough and covered portions of the captions.

As I tried to rearrange and re-attach the pictures, other pieces came loose and needed to be re-taped. I felt my anxiety building.

“I’m not old enough to help,” Aidan said. There was sadness and frustration in his voice.

“Well, you can help me fix this poster,” I said. I started to show him what I needed him to do with the tape and pictures. He smiled, but barely, concentrating with serious attention on the work at hand.

Somehow, even while I was talking to Aidan and demonstrating how to fix the board, I knew that he had died. I knew that he was no longer with us. It didn’t make sense—I didn’t understand how he could be there with me after he had died.

Maybe Kevin could explain it to me. I couldn’t make sense of it, but he would understand.

I stepped away and crouched down to dig my phone out of my purse. I briefly wondered what my boss would think about my getting out my phone to make a personal call right in the middle of the fundraising event.
 

I pressed the code to unlock the phone. The icons on the home page had been jumbled into a different order. I swiped and searched, looking for the phone app icon. Finally I opened the phone app—but I could not find the re-dial button, or the list of recent calls so I could call Kevin with the press of one button.

I couldn’t remember his phone number. I started to cry.

The phone was a lost cause, so I went off to find Kevin in person. He was sitting on the tuscan yellow leather couch at home. His dad sat on the other end of the couch, and his mom sat on a straight back chair.

“I have to ask you something,” I said. My crying turned into choking, gasping sobs that made it impossible to get the words out. I couldn’t even remember what words to use because I was so confused. 

Somehow I managed to force the words out of my mouth.

“I know that Aidan is dead,” I said. “I know that I can’t make new memories with him anymore.“ I sat down next to Kevin on the couch. His dad was nearby, and now we were all crying. “But he’s there with me, working at the table.”

Crying made it hard to breathe. I closed my eyes. In my mind I saw Aidan standing next to the table, leaning over the poster board where I had left him: cowlicky, flyaway hair; long, slender fingers; a gangly adolescent frame; his shoulders and chest slightly concave from having his chest cracked open several times.

“I don’t have memories of this—I’m making new memories of being there with him,” I said, still crying and gasping for breath. “I don’t understand how I can be making new memories with him when he’s gone.”

The dream ended. It had encapsulated a heartbreaking truth of loss: I will never make new memories with Aidan again, except in the fleeting, surreal images of my dreams.

If I could summon him to my dreams, I would sleep all the time.

Drink of Life Again

Dear Aidan,

It is a cruel element in the anatomy of grief that your birthdays continue to come and go even though you are not here.

You would have turned--should have turned--18 this year.

Every day I miss you, of course. But on your birthday, especially, I miss the marking of your journey toward adulthood. I am supposed to still be parenting you, helping you navigate this beautiful and scary passage. Soon we will reach the time when you would have (most likely) been gone from our house, living on your own. Adulting, as the kids say. But for now, I still grieve for the loss of young you, growing and maturing but still needing a mom and dad to help you along.

We spent the early morning of your birthday in the ER with M. Peevie, who passed out in the shower. It seemed an uncannily fitting way to start the day. You spent so much time there during your short life that the ER staff knew your name and your face. The scary circumstances evoked an egregious flashback to that traumatic day, three years and seventeen days ago, when we lost you.

In Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl observed,

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms--to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

For a long time, I felt unable to choose anything but grief and sadness. There were distractions, of course, primarily those that involve loving and taking care of my family. But everything else had been sucked into the black hole of grief.

Nothing is permanent except change. Now my grief is composed of the constant ache of your absence. Certain triggers cut my heart, and I cry: hearing American Pie, visiting your grave in the West Portal, an unexpected remembrance from a friend. But I am learning to live with this "new normal." I'm beginning to experience feelings other than grief, sadness, and depression. I am gradually gaining the strength to set aside grief in order to pursue meaning and purpose. I'm remembering to be grateful.

We spent the evening of your birthday eating pizza with your pals Ben, Nick, Alex, and Gabriel. Being with these boys--young men, really--gave me the feeling of having a part of you back for a time. I could almost picture you sitting at the table with us, abandoning your fear and anxiety and reveling in the silliness and comfort that these friendships brought you. 

Your pal Dr. Steve stopped by, too. We were so touched that he would take a break from the demands of his patients to celebrate and remember you with us. He loved you. He told me he thinks of you every day when he sees your poem on his desk. Your case comes up in his medical conferences frequently as the team of cardiologists and cardiac surgeons continue to improve their understanding of how best to care for their patients. He said that he has started recommending prophylactic cardiac catheterization to his asymptomatic teenage patients. If the parents decline, he tells them your story.

You are still having an impact on the world. I always knew you would.

All of us miss you terribly, darling. I wonder if you are OK. I want desperately to see you again, to receive a gangly, spontaneous hug from you, to hear your voice and your laugh. I yearn for the other side of eternity where the pain of losing you will be destroyed by joy and peace in the presence of Jesus.

When green buds hang in the elm like dust
And sprinkle the lime like rain,
Forth I wander, forth I must
And drink of life again.
Forth I must by hedgerow bowers
To look at the leaves uncurled
And stand in the fields where cuckoo flowers
Are lying about the world.                                            --A. E. Housman

The Last Enemy

I wrote about the two grief clubs I belong to, and about our vocabulary of loss, over in the blog Circling the Story.

"This grief [after losing Aidan] feels so completely different from my grief after losing Caitlin that it should have a different name. Just like Arabic has eight different words for “cousin” depending upon the gender of the cousin and the side of the family, perhaps we should have different words for grief depending upon the nature of the loss.

"This time around, it feels like the intensity of grief will never end. Now, two years and three months since Aidan died, I cannot imagine a time when his loss will not still be the most important defining fact of my life. I still cry often, usually for just a few minutes; but grief still has the power to astonish me, to knock me off my feet with its exhausting, inexorable tsunami."

Read more of this post at Circling the Story.

Sorrow is the Sea

Stay strong, my friend said.

You are so strong, another friend said.

I don't know how you do it, they said. I admire your strength.

I know they mean well. But what does being strong have to do with anything? And what does being strong look like? Sometimes it feels like people who tell me I'm strong have failed to see the real me--or that I have successfully hidden the real me from them.

Aidan died. We observed his memorial day, the two-year anniversary of the day he died, on November 11. Since that day two years ago, we have disappeared.  We have tried to relearn how to breathe, battled the demons of PTSD, and grappled every day with the changes that made everything both easier and harder. 

This is the real me.

There have been weeks when I felt I was past the worst that grief could throw at me, and I was finally beginning to be able to do more than just put one foot in front of the other. But in the past few months, I have been reminded that recovery from grief is not linear, and that anniversary reaction is a thing. 

Aidan, C. Peevie and M. Peevie, September 2010

One day on a long car ride several months ago, American Pie came on the radio. Aidan's favorite. I started to cry, and couldn't stop. I cried for three straight hours. 

Does this qualify as strong?

Sometimes still I cry so much that my eyes don't stop being red and puffy all day long. One day I started to cry at church, and cried off and on for three days. On the third day, Mr. Peevie came home and asked me why there was a roll of toilet paper on the couch next to me. 

"Because we're out of tissues," I said. We had started the day with a full box.

Is this staying strong?

I'm a different person now. I used to love parties and gatherings with tons of people. I enjoyed meeting new people, and could always strike up a conversation with a stranger. I would always go for the joke. I loved to make people laugh. I tended to be optimistic and positive. I think I was fun to be around. 

Now I'd mostly rather stay home. Occasionally I'll go out for a quiet dinner with one or two friends. I have little energy or inclination to socialize. I feel like grief is written across my face. It feels like an infection that has the power to suck the joy right out of a room.

In Lament for a Son, Nicholas Wolterstorff wrote 

Sometimes I think that happiness is over for me. I look at photos of the past and immediately comes the thought: that’s when we were still happy. But I can still laugh, so I guess that isn’t quite it. Perhaps what’s over is happiness as the fundamental tone of my existence. Now sorrow is that. 

Sorrow is no longer the islands but the sea.

Every second of every minute of every hour of every day I feel the loss, the absence, of Aidan. It never, ever goes away.  

This is not being strong. This is surviving.

November is the worst month for anniversary reaction. We have many significant family dates, each with its own unique sorrow. M. Peevie's birthday is a time for celebration--but at the same time, it's a reminder that she is growing up, and Aidan didn't get the chance to do that. She turned fourteen this year--the same age as Aidan when he died.

November 11 is the day we will always remember as the day Aidan died--his memorial day. A week later we observe Mr. Peevie's birthday, which also happens to be the day we buried Aidan. Mr. Peevie deserves to be toasted and celebrated, with festivities and presents and badly-decorated cake. But now his birthday is inexorably tied to the second worst day of his life. It's a terrible incongruity. 

Aidan's birthday comes next. Every year I wonder what he would have looked like as he grew into adulthood. On every birthday, I mourn the passing of another year in which our celebrations, vacations, and new memories don't include him. On Thanksgiving, the family gathers around the table, and there is a gaping hole, the glaring, excruciating absence of a goofy-grinned, crazy-haired boy.

I am changed, weak, broken, sad, feeble, distracted, fearful, untrusting, and unproductive. I keep searching for evidence that I am doing this grief thing right. That I'm not crazy or unstable. That though I'm broken and messed up, I won't feel this bad forever. 

I keep getting up in the morning. I keep doing what I need to do--although some days it's just the bare minimum. 

Is that what they mean by strong?

"Why is it so important to act strong?" Wolterstorff asked. 

I have been graced with the strength to endure. But I have been assaulted, and in the assault, wounded. Am I to pretend otherwise? Wounds are ugly, I know. They repel. But must they always be swathed?

I cling to faith because of what I know about Jesus. I can't not believe. I hold the hope of the Resurrection close, and I don't "grieve as others do who have no hope."* But I struggle to participate in the communal, emotional aspects of worship. I can barely sing at church, unless the song depicts the "not-yet" part of the "already/not-yet" equation that represents the work of the gospel. I cry during communion, because I remember how seriously Aidan took the purpose and promise of the shared symbolic meal.  

We're well into the new year. I used to love New Year's Eve and New Year's Day. I loved the feeling of the clean slate, the opportunity to start over, to set goals and imagine a new world and a new me. Even though I knew that resolutions were made to be broken, I still felt optimistic and hopeful. I might not be able to make all the changes I hoped for, but I would be able to change some things some of the time. I could learn to do new things, make different choices, travel an untrodden path.

I think there is a still a tiny kernel of my original sanguine nature buried deep inside me; but the new me, the Aidan-less me, is so different now that the seed is dormant. Hope is covered with a permanent shadow of sadness. The heavy weight of this grievous loss dilutes my optimism.

Sorrow is no longer the islands, but the sea.

I will go to bed tonight thinking of Aidan. Tomorrow I'll get up again, and my first waking thought will be about Aidan. And maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day, or next week or next month, the scale will tip slightly over to hope, or peace, or joy.

*I Thessalonians 4:13

Dear Aidan (Can you hear me?)

Dear Aidan,

Can you hear me?

On your birthday tomorrow we will be grieving the loss of yet another milestone that we don’t get to experience with you. You would be seventeen. You would have begged us to let you get your driving permit soon after you turned sixteen, and would probably be ready to take the test to get your license if you didn’t have it already. You’d been looking forward to driving since you were twelve or thirteen and trouncing everyone in Mario Kart.

Your friends are juniors in high school. They’re starting to write college essays, go on college visits, and narrow down their post-high school plans. It’s wrong that you don’t get to have those experiences, too—although your dad and I always said that you’d probably end up living in our basement until you were 30. What I wouldn't give.

I recently opened the birthday present that Grandmom and Granddad sent for you for your 15th birthday. You never got to open it. We stashed it behind the chair in our bedroom, ready to pull it out on your birthday. It was a sweater. You would have politely thanked them for the sweater--and you would have probably enjoyed wearing it, too. You were often cold, and you liked wearing layers to keep your skinny self warm.

They had also sent a Beatles souvenir book from the Beatles store in London, which they had recently visited. You would have pored over it, reciting facts about the Fab Four to anyone within earshot, and jotting down catalog numbers for your Christmas wish list: an All You Need is Love watch, a 
collection of plush band members, or maybe 
the complete book of sheet music for guitar including all 203 Beatles songs.

Ah, darling. I miss you. I hate that I can't know what you would be becoming, and see what new interests you would be developing, and how you would be changing as you grew closer to becoming a man. I want to make new memories with you, finish watching K-Pax with you, plan your new session of home school classes.

I miss talking to you, seeing you, touching you. You would hug me, hug all of us, SO OFTEN, like you could not get enough physical contact from the people you loved. 

Often I stand next to the table that holds your pictures, your poem, cards, and mementos. I re-read your poem, I look at the photographs of you and C. Peevie and M. Peevie, and I shake my head because it's not right that you are not here. It’s not right that we’re celebrating our own birthdays and watching each holiday come and go and taking family vacations without you.

M. Peevie just turned fourteen. You were fourteen when you left us--not quite fifteen, really. It's weird and impossible to get my mind around the fact that she has reached the same age as you, and in a short year will surpass your chronological age. This aspect of losing you, 
like many others, is confusing and surreal.

I did not know the work of mourning

Is like carrying a bag of cement

Up a mountain at night

The mountaintop is not in sight

Because there is no mountaintop

Poor Sisyphus grief

I did not know I would struggle

Through a ragged underbrush

Without an upward path

...

Look closely and you will see

Almost everyone carrying bags

Of cement on their shoulders

That’s why it takes courage

To get out of bed in the morning

And climb into the day.

― Edward Hirsch, Gabriel: A Poem

You used to talk about death and dying fairly often. "I'm afraid to go to sleep in case I don't wake up," you'd tell me in the middle of the night, and my heart would hurt. "Would you still talk about me if I died?"

The answer is yes. Some days, still, you're all I can think about, talk about, care about. Until we meet in eternity, darling boy, I hold you in my heart.

Happy birthday.

Love,
Mom

Fourteen

Hello to the upwards of seven loyal Green Room readers. M. Peevie here, for my annual birthday update.

I will be fourteen (fourteen-going-on-twenty-four, according to my mom) on Saturday, and I have invited a bunch of friends to my basement birthday party. The Doctor and Albert Einstein will both be there (in their life-size flat cardboard forms). I am nervous but also happy about my friends coming over. Nervous-but-happy is my near-constant condition, although sometimes I am nervous and cranky, depending on how tired and/or hungry I am.

(BTW, I hate it when I'm annoyed or upset and my mom tells me to eat something or take a nap. Yes, I might be hungry, or I might be tired, or both--but I'm also still legitimately annoyed or upset.)

School is going OK this year, except for the fact that I have one teacher that constantly misuses the English language. On the first day she used the non-word irregardless, and I instantly hated her. My mom has since informed me that irregardless may not be acceptable in Standard English usage, but it is, linguistically, a word. I do not care. It's ignorant. Don't judge me for being judgy.

I have another teacher who manages to make one of my favorite subjects boring. I love math. I read, or tried to read, a book awhile ago called Five Equations that Changed the World. It was really hard for me to read, because I was trying to understand it when I was only ten or eleven--but it presents math in a human context, which makes it more interesting. My teacher, on the other hand, presents math in a deadly dull context, and it's not acceptable.

I joined book club, writing club, and psychology club this year, which pretty much represents the things I love the most. Oh, and math team. Maybe I should start my own blog and write about these things. But who has time, what with Instagram (@MPeevie) and Pinterest, and all of my fangirl commitments.(I still fangirl the same fandoms as last year, but I've added a couple: Homestuck and Welcome to Night Vale.)

Probably the hardest part of my birthday this year is that I don't know how to think about being fourteen since my brother Aidan was fourteen when he died. How can I be the same age as my older brother? Also: I miss him a lot.

I almost forgot to mention that I started taking piano lessons. This is another source of great anxiety to me. I can never seem to practice enough, and everyone is always screaming at me to practice more and play perfectly! JK, no one ever says that. But I still feel nervous about it. I'm learning the Muse song Exogenesis (Part 3)--actually, I'm pretty much done learning it. It's pretty cool if I do say so myself.

Until next year, Internet (or until I start my own blog)...M. Peevie, out.


P.S.: I startted writing this before my birthday, but didn't get it posted. So my birthday was a few days ago, and my party was fun and BONUS: I got lots of presents from my family and friends. I love presents. 

Because my mom is reading this is I will say that my favorite present was this pair of socks.