Dayna's Musings

Remembering Ethan at Christmas

2010-01-01T09:02:00.000-08:00

In Life and Death

2009-12-27T14:44:00.000-08:00

Ethan James Olson-Getty was born on Monday, August 31, 2009 at 3:00 in the afternoon. His entry into the world was fast and silent. When his dusky-purple face first emerged, Eric wasn’t even sure he was still alive. But when my final wrenching contractions freed his shoulders and he was, at long last, welcomed into our arms, his heart was still beating. Although he never took a breath, his heart continued to beat for almost two hours and his delicate tongue made the tiniest hints at an attempt to suckle.

Soon after Ethan’s birth, Spencer, our pastor, joined us and anointed Ethan with oil, naming him in life and death as one of the great company of God’s own. Spencer told me later that while I was in labor he waited outside the delivery room door, where he could no doubt overhear my labor groans, and slowly read and reread Isaiah’s achingly beautiful promise that someday there will be an end to this agony of infants dying on the day of their birth.

I expected that Ethan’s birth would be anguished or even traumatizing. For months, Eric and I worried about how we would respond to his physical condition and to caring for him as he died. We knew that he would not look like a healthy baby and, because of the failure of his neural tube to close, that his brain tissue and spinal cord would be exposed. We tried to prepare ourselves by studying his ultrasound photos and looking at pictures on the internet of other newborns with similar disabilities, but we still wondered if our love would be strong enough to embrace a child so disfigured. And we feared that the process of dying might be agonizing for Ethan. We worried that we would lack the courage to wait with him helplessly while he suffered.

But what I hadn’t anticipated was how much joy would be present in Ethan’s birthing room. The hard work of grieving and longing for our son for so many months set us free to take delight in all that was beautiful and holy about his birth. Our grieving was very much like the painful and hard work of labor – we were pushed to the very brink of what we could bear, but we discovered in the process that we were stronger than we had known, and that we were capable of giving Ethan everything that he needed from us. The pain of grieving for him had engulfed us for months, but then suddenly we were immersed in the sweet delight of holding our son and, for a moment at least, all the pain was forgotten.

We wrapped Ethan in the fleece baby blanket that my friend Anneke gave me when I first learned that I was pregnant, and we held him in our arms for his entire lifetime. We gave him a sponge bath; we marveled at his sweet round nose and the minute flickers of movement he made with his tongue; we wrapped his miniature fingers around our own. We laughed over his long feet and his tiny crisscrossed toes. We felt with our own fingertips the miraculous heartbeat that we had listened to for so many months. We kissed his soft face and breathed in deep the vanilla-and-peaches scent of him. Our friend Franklin came to take photos of our little family of three so that we could remember those moments forever. We tried to memorize everything – exactly how it felt to hold his delicate weight in our arms, the touch of his silky skin against our faces, the precise size and shape of the tiny half-moons of his fingernails, the round boniness of his knees under our cupped palms, the arc of his pale fine eyelashes. For two hours, we shared life in this world with Ethan.

It wasn’t that we didn’t see or notice what was broken about his body. It was that we could see, in spite of what was broken, that he was as beautiful of a child as God ever knit together. We could see that he was ours – that he had Eric’s brown hair, my blue eyes, the same funny little flat chin that Eric’s brother had at birth, and, as a friend had predicted back in our courtship days, that he was long and skinny, just like us. We could see that he was God’s most precious gift to us. As we held Ethan’s tiny body, our arms were overflowing with God’s abundant and good gift of new life.

Around 5:00, we noticed that Ethan’s arms and legs were beginning to grow cool. The doctor checked his heartbeat and confirmed that it had ceased. Our little boy was gone. Still, we had his beautiful body to hold, and hold him we did. Between the two of us, we held Ethan almost continuously for the next twenty hours. When my sister arrived that evening, we took more pictures and made ink prints and clay impressions of his feet. Our Rutba House friends came to bring us dinner and to meet Ethan. My heart was filled with gratitude to watch these friends daring to welcome and hold our little boy with the same tender joy that they would have given a whole and living child. That night, Eric pulled his pullout chair up next to my hospital bed and we slept with Ethan between us, as we had once dreamed we would do with our new baby in our big bed at home.

Letting go of Ethan was as heart-wrenching as welcoming him was joyful. A nurse came the very evening of his birth to tell us that she was going to get someone to come take him away. When we refused to let him go, she came back twice more to try again. Despite her insistence, we managed to hold on to Ethan all the way through the night and into the next afternoon, when Eric’s parents arrived. We spent hours marveling over his beautiful body and weeping for his too-short life. We told him the story of our love for him and of our dreams for his life. We told him over and over how very much he was loved.

And then it was time to say good-bye to our son. We rewrapped his blanket and snugged down his little cap one more time and we placed his tiny body in one of the hospital’s infant caskets. We gave him one last good-bye kiss. And then we let one of the staff carry him away. Afterwards, holding each other and sobbing in the empty hospital room, we felt like the world had ended, like the last light in the universe had just gone out. We felt like parents whose first-born and only child had just died.

Like every other new mother, I had to wait in a wheel-chair in the hospital lobby while Eric went to get our car from the garage. I’ve never felt more bereft than during the long minutes of waiting empty-armed to go home without my beautiful new-born Ethan.

The next two weeks were full of good-byes and the preparation for good-byes. I washed Ethan’s blanket and brought it back to the funeral home along with his teddy bear and the sleeper we had chosen for his burial. We framed some of Franklin’s black-and-white photos to display at Ethan’s funeral. We met with Spencer to finalize the service. My sister and I went shopping for flowers and came back with a car full of blue and white hydrangeas to decorate the front of the church. We scanned Ethan’s footprints so that they could be printed on the front of his funeral bulletin and tracked down a slide projector and screen so that we could include his photos in the service. As painful as these tasks were, they filled me with a solid sense of satisfaction. Each of them was something I could do – one of the last things I would ever be able to do – to take care of my little boy.

On Friday morning, Eric and I had one final hour to say good-bye to Ethan face-to-face. On Friday afternoon, our church and family and friends gathered to affirm with us that Ethan was and is, even in death, one of God’s own, made in God’s image. Together, we declared that we were returning Ethan to God’s keeping until the day when all of creation is reborn. On Monday and Tuesday, we made the long drive north to Vermont with Ethan’s little wooden casket, covered in his blankets and stuffed animals, in the backseat of our car. On Wednesday, Eric’s family gathered at a cemetery south of Rutland to help us bury our little boy. We scattered rose petals over his casket and prayed together the Lord’s Prayer and then we went away and let the cemetery workers cover him over with dirt. On Thursday, we planted mums to help fill the dark gash in the earth where we’d buried him. On Saturday morning, we sat cross-legged on the grass by his grave and told him good-bye one last time before we headed home.

Two hours down the road, we almost turned around and went back. I felt in the pit of my stomach like a mother who had left her baby behind, as if in some moment of extreme carelessness I had forgotten my newborn son sitting in his car seat in a parking lot, as if he might even now be crying and alone in a strange place, needing my love. But after months of nurturing his little life, there was nothing more Ethan needed from me and nothing more that I could do for him. The empty place in my body where he had lived for all those months yawned like a gaping crater.

That empty space at the heart of our lives, the sheltered space we had made for Ethan, continues to ache with his absence. There is not a moment of the day when I don’t feel the emptiness where he should be. Truthfully, I am not sure I could bear the pain of life without Ethan if it were not for the promise that he is safe in God’s keeping.

On the day of his diagnosis, Eric and I were stunned into wordlessness by the sorrowful certainty of the doctors who had so gently but definitively told us that there was nothing that they could do to save Ethan’s life and no hope of his survival past birth. As we drove home from the clinic, out of the emptiness, the words of Julian of Norwich came to me. All shall be well, she said, And all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well. Later, when an anxious hospital employee tried to cheer us up just hours after Ethan’s death, Julian’s words provided a defense for me against the pressure to pretend that all was well. All was most decidedly not well, yet even as I held Ethan’s broken and lifeless body, Julian’s words called me back to the promise of the Christian prophets – that someday all things, even this terrible moment of anguish, will be made well. I think perhaps that the joy we felt in meeting Ethan, in loving him, was a glimpse of the fulfillment of that promise.

Later, Julian’s words wove their way through our good-byes to Ethan. Spencer quoted her in the sermon he wrote for Ethan’s funeral:

Though there are harms suffered that it seems to us it is impossible that it ever should come to a good end, yet our Good Lord has shown that “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well”...For this is the Great Deed that our Lord shall do, in which Deed he shall save His word and He shall make all well that is not well. How it shall be done there is no creature beneath Christ that knoweth it, nor shall know it till it is done; but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

All does not feel well with us these days. Losing a child is a terrible wrenching dislocation, one that will never be fully healed in this lifetime. And yet, in the midst of this emptiness, I hang on to this promise that, in the moments of light and the days of darkness, in the fullness of joy and the emptiness of grief, in life and in death, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”

Photos of our beautiful boy

2009-09-06T14:33:00.000-07:00

These photos were taken by Eric's friend, Franklin Golden (who is also a Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep photographer), during Ethan's two hours of life. They are the one of the most treasured gifts we've ever received...we hope they also bring joy to the many people who have loved Ethan.

Ethan's Burial

2009-09-03T11:34:00.000-07:00

We will be holding a private burial service with family and a few friends at the East Clarendon Cemetery in Vermont on Wednesday, September 9th. At 3:30PM, following the service, there will be open calling hours at 310 Victoria Drive in Rutland, VT, and we invite all who wish to offer condolences to stop by. Thank you all for your prayers and comforting words.

Ethan's Funeral Information

2009-09-02T12:20:00.000-07:00

Ethan's funeral will be this Friday, September 4 at 3:00 pm at St. John's Missionary Baptist Church (917 Onslow St, Durham), with a potluck meal in the church fellowship hall at 5:00. In lieu of flowers, please consider a memorial gift in Ethan's name to L'Arche USA (www.larcheusa.org) or YO:Durham (Year of Opportunity for Durham Teens www.yodurham.org). For either, click "Donate," then "In Memory of" and enter Ethan James.

Ethan's Birth

2009-09-02T11:58:00.000-07:00

Ethan was born on Monday, August 31 at 3:00 pm and died peacefully in our arms at around 5:00 pm. We are so very grateful that we were able to meet him face-to-face. Although he never breathed, his heart was beating and his tiny tongue was moving. He had blue eyes and brown hair, a sweet little button nose, and beautiful hands and feet. He weighed 3 lbs, 5 ounces and was 16 inches long. It gave us great joy to hold him in our arms. It has been heartbreaking to let him go so soon, but we know that he is safe in God's care and that there are many grandparents and great-grandparents who have gone before him who have been waiting to meet him.

Eric and I came home from the hospital Tuesday afternoon and I'm recovering well. We are planning a trip to Vermont early next week. We plan to bury Ethan in Eric's hometown and then spend a few days with friends and family in New England before returning to Durham.

Ethan's funeral will be this Friday, September 4 at 3:00 pm at St. John's Missionary Baptist Church (917 Onslow St, Durham), with a potluck meal in the church fellowship hall at 5:00. In lieu of flowers, please consider a memorial gift in Ethan's name to L'Arche USA (www.larcheusa.org) or YO:Durham (Year of Opportunity for Durham Teens www.yodurham.org). For either, click "Donate," then "In Memory of" and enter Ethan James.

We are more grateful than words can express for the prayers and support of all those who love us and who have loved Ethan with us. What we have experienced over the past few months as so many people have celebrated Ethan's life and grieved for his death with us has been a foretaste of the communion of saints that we will all experience some day in Christ's presence.

Photos of our Ethan-bump

2009-08-22T08:42:00.000-07:00

These lovely photos of Eric, me and our Ethan-bump were taken by Aimee Bickers of Pure Expressions Photography. Aimee is a volunteer with Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, a non-profit foundation that provides professional maternity and birth photos to parents who are losing a child. We are so grateful to Aimee and Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep for this precious gift!

Why?

2009-08-07T11:01:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago we got the results of the last set of medical tests that might have been able to identify why Ethan’s body developed incorrectly. All of the test results are normal. In one sense, that’s a huge relief – we know now for sure that I do not have any of several possible blood clotting disorders (which might make any pregnancy life-threatening for me and for any other children we conceive). We know that I do not have lead poisoning. We know that Ethan has the normal number of chromosomes in his cells and so it is unlikely that his developmental problems stem from a genetic mistake that might be repeated in the body of a future brother or sister.

What we do not know is why this happened to him. It is much harder than I would have expected to live without an answer to that question. When we first learned about Ethan’s developmental problems, some of my first thoughts were about what I might have done to cause this terrible malformation of his little body: Did I fail to take prenatal vitamins faithfully enough in the months before his conception? Could I have somehow forgotten about the danger of Advil to unborn babies and taken one for a headache? Maybe the baths I took to relieve my first-trimester weariness were too hot for Ethan’s developing cells. Or maybe it was the caffeine or the sweeteners in the Diet Cokes that I found hard to give up. Was it because I gave in to my first trimester nausea and food aversions and stayed away from leafy green vegetables for a couple of months? Could it be that growing up in Hancock, which is built on top of abandoned copper mines and surrounded by industrial waste, could have poisoned my body?

My mind raced from possibility to possibility. I had a desperate instinctual need to find a reason why this happened, even if that meant living with the horrible weight of my own guilt. Eric and I had a painful argument about this soon after Ethan’s diagnosis. In the aftermath of the argument, we both realized that although undergoing tests for a medical explanation for Ethan’s problems might be helpful, placing blame for his problems would only tear us apart from each other at the moment we most needed each other. We both had to acknowledge that whatever happened to Ethan, it wasn’t because of a lack of intention to care for him well.

I have finally, in the past couple of weeks, come to an uneasy truce with the knowledge that I didn’t cause Ethan’s birth defect. Because it is so rare, there is very little medical research available about Ethan’s specific defect, but I was able to find several scientific articles that reassured me that in most cases no one knows why some babies develop with acrania. Certainly all the simple explanations, like maternal diet and vitamin intake, have been investigated and have been found to be insufficient explanations. One of our doctors, an expert in fetal abnormalities, thinks that the most likely explanation is that Ethan had a ‘vascular accident’ – that sometime early in his development one of the blood vessels in my body that supplies him with oxygen had a spasm or developed a clot that cut off the flow of blood to Ethan at a crucial point in time. There is no way to test this theory, but even having a possible explanation helps set my mind a bit more at ease. I suspect that this hypothesis is the closest we will ever get to an answer to the medical question ‘why?’ Since we found out about Ethan’s diagnosis, I’ve learned that having to live without a medical explanation is not unusual – in fact, with 70% of birth defects, no explanation is ever found.

As hard as it is, coming to terms with living without a medical explanation is not nearly as hard as wrestling with the theological question ‘why?’ Soon after Ethan’s diagnosis, Eric and I realized that the theological ‘why’ is one of the most potentially destructive questions we could pursue. Just as the medical ‘why’ holds the potential to destroy our relationship with each other, the theological ‘why’ contains the potential to destroy our sense of God’s care and presence when we need it most. Most of the possible answers to this question lead us to terrible, dark, dead ends: Maybe God planned this for us to teach us a lesson or to mold our character. Maybe God chose this for us because God can will whatever God wants to will, and as mere creatures, we have no right to protest. Maybe we are being punished for something we did wrong or for wanting a child too intensely. Maybe God is testing our faith and is waiting to see how we will respond. Or maybe God wants to show the world something through this situation – either through how we bear it or by miraculously healing Ethan at the last minute and proving all the doctors wrong.

All of these explanations leave us with a terrible, compassionless God, a God who would intentionally cause the malformation of an innocent child in order to prove something or teach us a lesson. They leave us with a God who stands remote from and unmoved by our grief and the painful reality that Ethan will have to suffer through death almost as soon as he is born. They leave us with a God who causes disease and death, rather than a God who is the overflowing source of healing and life. They leave us alone in our grief, the blind stooges of a powerful but uncaring manipulator.

Just as we’ve had to come to terms with the fact that we will almost certainly never know medically why this has happened to Ethan, Eric and I have also concluded that we will never know theologically why this happened. And in the midst of our unknowing, we have had to remind ourselves of what we do know about God and God’s care for us. What I have realized is that the theological question ‘why?’ is really a different way of asking ‘where is God in this experience?’ A week or two after Ethan’s diagnosis, during a walk around the Duke campus wall, my friend Liz asked me that very question. It was a hard question to answer, but a wise one for her to ask. After some reflection, I realized that God has been most present with me through the community of God’s people who have surrounded us with love and support and have joined us in our grief. The tears of the body of Christ have shown me where God is in this situation – God is with us and God is also weeping over the pain of Ethan’s too-short life. If God made Ethan as a reflection of God’s own image, then surely God’s grief over his inevitable death is even greater than ours. If God breathed life into Ethan’s little body, then surely God had even bigger and better dreams for him than we did. If God knit Ethan together in my womb, then certainly God’s heart is also broken over this little unfinished body.

The idea that God’s providence or purposes are somehow at work behind tragedies like Ethan’s death is appealing to many people. I think this might be because, in our moments of powerlessness, this thought reassures us that God is in complete control, even if we cannot comprehend what God is doing in our lives. But I’m not sure it’s an honest conclusion. Surely God is at work in our world and in our lives, and surely the promise of the resurrection is that one day the power of death will be completely swallowed up by the God who is the source of all life. But the moment in which we live is somewhere between the promise and its fulfillment. The moment in which we live requires both stark honesty about the realities of our broken world and radical faith in the coming vision of wholeness that God has promised. The moment in which we live requires us to acknowledge that there is much that remains terribly broken about our world, even as we wait in faith for the day when all will be made whole.

One of the books that has been most helpful to me in the past couple of months is Hope Deferred: Heart-Healing Reflections on Reproductive Loss (2005, The Pilgrim Press, edited by Nadine Pence Frantz and Mary T. Stimming). It was written by five women theologians who discovered, during a conversation in the women’s restroom at a theological conference, that they had all experienced the loss of a child through miscarriage and that several of them had suffered through long-term infertility. The book is the fruit of their long wrestling with the painful theological questions brought about by these experiences. In one of the essays, Nadine Pence Frantz addresses the question ‘why?’ in the aftermath of the death of her only biological child, Jacob, conceived after seventeen years of infertility and miscarried after twenty weeks of pregnancy. In response to friends who tried to reassure her that her son’s death was somehow part of God’s plan, Frantz concluded that they misunderstood where God was present in her experience. Rather than seeing God as the cause of her son’s death, Frantz writes, “Maybe the struggle with death is an ongoing struggle in which God is also a participant, rather than a distant onlooker.” The death of a child, either born or unborn, is not something God chooses for any of us. Rather, it’s a result of the ongoing travail of all creation, as we wait for the day when the powers of death will be finally extinguished by God’s life-giving love. And in this time of waiting, we are not alone as we weep, but are enfolded in the attending, abiding, creating presence of the God who will one-day destroy death completely.

I have found a lot of comfort recently in a vision described in Isaiah 65. It was originally spoken as a promise from God about the restoration of Jerusalem, and of God’s people, given to those who returned to their holy city following the long years of exile and found their city and their society in ruins. Christians later heard in this vision a promise for our world when it is made whole by Christ at the end of all things. It’s a vision of creation recreated and whole, a vision we long for and wait for and pray to see soon.

See, I will create new heavens and a new earth.
The former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind.
But be glad and rejoice forever in what I will create,
for I will create Jerusalem to be a delight and its people to be a joy.
I will rejoice over Jerusalem, and take delight in my people;
the sound of weeping and of crying will be heard in it no more.
Never again will there be in it infants who live but a few days,
or older people who do not live out their years…
For as the days of a tree so will be the days of my people;
my chosen ones will long enjoy the work of their hands.
They will not labor in vain, nor will they bear children doomed to misfortune.

This vision of God’s longing for our world not only reassures me that our world will one day be made new, it also reassures me that Ethan’s suffering, and the suffering of all the other children who die before their time, is not what God intends for them or for our world. God’s vision of peace and wholeness declares that one day there will be no more children stolen away from us by death.

I know that if I am open and listen, there are things I will learn through this experience. I know that the heart-rending experience of loving and losing Ethan will shape me in life-changing ways. At the very least, going through this dark valley has the potential to make me a more wise and compassionate pastor and friend. But I don’t believe for a minute that God caused this to happen or that this was in God’s plan for Ethan’s life. I don’t believe God wills babies to be born with birth defects any more so than God wills tsunamis or genocides or mass starvation. I believe God hovers like a heartbroken mother, tending to a dying child, among the wreckage of our world. I believe God longs with a longing far more intense than what I feel for Ethan, for the healing and wholeness of all the broken and dying life in our world. I believe God is actively fighting against the powers of death and destruction in our world, and will continue to fight against them until the day that they are no more. And I believe that God is grieving with us as we wait for that day when all of creation will be completely freed from the strangle-hold of death.

Things I love about being Ethan's mom

2009-07-07T06:15:00.000-07:00

Ethan's little lamb modeling booties and the smallest of the hats made for him by his Grandma Getty (the hat is tiny just in case he's tiny when he's born)

On the day that we received Ethan’s diagnosis, the genetic counselor we met with assured us that our medical team would fully support our decision, whether we chose to end Ethan’s life early or to continue to carry him until his natural death. She explained that if we decided to continue his life we would have access to a hospice program designed just for babies, including those who are not yet born. The hospice team, she told us, would help us think about how to enjoy the time we have with our baby and make memories of him while he is still with us.

It felt strange to think about trying to make memories of a baby who was not yet born – and who was, on that afternoon, not even yet named. Just two weeks before that appointment I had begun to feel Ethan’s fluttery movements for the first time, and it was only that morning that we had learned that he was a boy. For most of the pregnancy, my experience of him had come only through my symptoms of nausea and exhaustion and through the sound of his heartbeat at our monthly checkups. I had already planned to write down some of my pregnancy experiences so that I could share them with our baby when he was older, but it was hard to imagine how Eric and I might go about forming memories of our unborn son that would last for years to come and console us when he was gone. And it was even harder to imagine, as we tried to absorb the terrible news of his diagnosis, how we might still find joy in his brief life.

But what we have found over the past few weeks is that, amidst the grief, there is a tremendous amount of joy in being Ethan’s parents. Knowing that his life will be short has made Eric and I much more attuned and attentive to Ethan. We have discovered that his in utero antics can still make us laugh out loud and that we are as awe-struck at the miracle of his life as any other new parents. Our days of waiting for Ethan have been filled with both grief and joy, and I wouldn’t trade the joy of becoming Ethan’s mom even if I could be free of the pain that will come with losing him. These are some of my favorite things about being Ethan’s mom:

Ethan loves jelly beans! Shortly after we received Ethan’s diagnosis, he had several days of relative inactivity. I felt very anxious about his well-being because he has a higher than normal chance of dying before birth. But I soon discovered that whenever I feel anxious, I only need to eat a handful of jelly beans from my co-worker’s desktop candy bowl. Just minutes later, Ethan goes wild with kicking, letting me know that he is still alive and well! (I’m guessing that he has inherited my sweet-tooth!)

Ethan gives us an excuse to play with cute stuffed animals and other fun baby things. Eric’s mom sent us a care package at Easter with chocolate bunnies for the grown-ups and an adorable stuffed lamb for her much-anticipated grandchild (the lamb says “baa…BAAA…baa…BAAA” when you squeeze it!). It was one of the first gifts we received for Ethan and was a wonderful affirmation that this child was loved by his grandparents from the first days of his life. We’re not sure how much Ethan can hear, but just in case, the lamb often takes a frolicking lap around my baby-bump. The lamb has now been joined by a little lady bug - and I’m sure that there will be more stuffed creatures that come to live with Ethan in the days to come. Recently, Ethan’s Aunt Holly sent us her favorite childhood book. We read it to him often – and even if he can’t hear our voices, I know he can feel my belly laughs at the silly animals in the illustrations.

Ethan continues to surprise us with his strength. Ethan often wakes up between five and seven in the morning to get in some of his most intense activity of the day. Eric and I have fun speculating about exactly what he is doing in there…Practicing his soccer kick? Jumping jacks? Using my bladder as a trampoline? Maybe calisthenics to prepare to be a state-champion hurdler like his dad and his Grandpa Olson? One morning I was convinced he was doing kick-boxing! I am amazed that a child with such severe developmental problems has not only made it this far in life, but has continued to grow and get stronger. I think that he must be a very tenacious and life-loving little boy.

Ethan’s heart makes beautiful music. Our Rutba House friends put their heads together to think about how they could help us enjoy Ethan while he is alive, and decided to rent us a fetal Doppler so that we can listen to his heartbeat at home. There is no more beautiful sound to me than the “wow…wow…wow” of Ethan’s heart. The Doppler is from a company called “Stork Radio,” so we call our listening sessions “Ethan Radio” – and we listen at bedtime several nights a week. No matter how sad we feel, the steady sound of Ethan’s heart always makes us smile. Eric (ever the musician!) has discovered that my baby-and-fluid-filled stomach makes a wonderful drum. Keeping time with Ethan’s heart, he often improvises some West African rhythms on my belly!

Ethan’s life has strengthened our ties with the people who love us. Jean Vanier, the founder of the L’Arche communities for people with disabilities, talks about how the members who suffer the most or who are the most in need of care are at the heart of L’Arche communities. Community forms around them because they are vulnerable and need the care of others – and this vulnerability and need is the gift that they give to their community. Something similar has happened with Ethan – we have been surrounded and upheld by the love and prayers of dozens and dozens of people in a way I’ve never experienced before. We’ve heard from many old friends and several people we’ve never even met have written to say that they are praying for us. Somehow this fragile little life has drawn together people who love us and know that we, and Ethan, need their care.

Ethan continues to make us into parents. On Mother’s Day, we were still three days from finding out about Ethan’s diagnosis and innocently confident that there would be many more Mother’s Days with Ethan to come. Several friends gave me cards and when our church handed out roses to all the moms, I was delighted to discover that I was included. Although Father’s Day was much more bittersweet, I wanted to do something special for Eric to celebrate that he is, and always will be, Ethan’s dad. Ever since we found out we were expecting, Eric had been looking forward to the day that our child would be old enough for a trip to the North Carolina Museum of Life and Science. For Father’s Day, we decided to take Ethan there. It was wonderful to have something fun to do with and for Ethan in the midst of all the sad things we’ve had to do to prepare for his birth. We spent a long time in the insect room, where Eric was fascinated with watching all the bugs get fed. I’m sure Ethan would have been equally enthralled in a few years. But it isn’t just these celebrations that have made us parents. It’s that Ethan needs us to continue to love and nurture him every day. Some days I think we’re crazy to think of ourselves as parents. But his little life – the steady “wow…wow…wow” of his heart and his insistent kicks – continue to call us to become more than who we were before he existed and to do all that we can to provide for and protect him.

Praying for a miracle

2009-06-22T05:41:00.000-07:00

Over the past few weeks, as Eric and I have shared our sad news about Ethan’s short life expectancy with our friends and acquaintances, several people have responded by saying that they will be praying for a miracle. We are not particular about who prays for us or how they pray – we are deeply grateful to be upheld in prayer by our entire extended community and have sensed over the past few weeks that we are receiving strength we didn’t think we’d have because of these many prayers. (Eric commented recently that he has friends of all three Abrahamic faiths—Christians, Muslims, and Jews—praying for our son). But the choice of some of our friends to pray for a miracle has made me think hard about what and how I pray for Ethan.

I am not praying for a miracle. At first, I wondered if this was because I lack faith. It is true that I have a hard time having confidence that God will supernaturally heal those I love when they are deathly ill. Maybe this is because I lived through my mom’s excruciating death from cancer, despite many prayers for her healing. And probably it is also because I am culturally a rational westerner and am more likely to put my confidence in the technology of medicine than in the healing power of God. My experience at Fuller Seminary, where many of my non-western classmates believed in – and had experienced– supernatural physical healing helped me to realize how much my culture shapes my ability to see and experience God in similar ways.

But I think something else is happening in my heart when I pray for Ethan as well. The truth is, I saw Ethan’s ultrasound photos. I saw with my own eyes that this little boy doesn’t have a cranium – the whole top and back of his head are simply missing. On the cross-section scan of his abdomen, I saw the little white oval that is a kidney and the grey empty space on the other side where his second kidney should be, but isn’t. I know that the doctors weren’t mistaken about what they saw because I saw it too. And I know enough about the biology of human development to know that we are long past the stage of pregnancy when these structures are supposed to form, and that there is no hope that they will spontaneously and naturally form now. I know, in a way that these friends cannot, that it would take a miracle – the ex nihilo, flesh-and-bone-creating kind of miracle – for Ethan to be made whole.

I desperately want Ethan to be born whole. I would give up one of my own arms or legs if it meant that Ethan’s skull could close over and his brain form normally. There is nothing I want more in life than to raise this little boy and to have him outlive me. I want to hold his newborn children in my arms when I am old and grey-haired and know that they will live on long after I am gone. But I am not praying for a miracle because I am not emotionally capable of praying for healing while simultaneously preparing for Ethan’s death. I have to choose one or the other - the two possibilities are simply too much for me to hold together in my heart at any one time. Eric and I only have this one opportunity, now, in these days of waiting, to parent Ethan well. We don’t want to waste this precious opportunity by denying the reality that his life will be very short or by failing to acknowledge that what he needs most from us is our loving preparation to care for him in his dying.

Over the past few weeks, Eric and I have begun these strange and unexpected tasks of parenting. With our hospice team, we’ve started working on a written plan for Ethan’s medical care so that he will be protected from pain and surrounded with love as much as possible during the few moments of his life. I have been searching for the right scripture texts and liturgy for his funeral service. A few nights ago, between coming home from work and grocery shopping, we stopped by a baby cemetery. As we walked among the tiny grave plots with their decorations of sippy cups, baby rattles, pinwheels and matchbox cars, we tried to imagine what it would feel like to bury Ethan there. We have offered his car seat and stroller to friends who are newly expecting, and have been shopping instead for a wooden infant casket. Although I haven’t found the strength yet to buy anything, I’ve begun to think about the kind of clothes Ethan will need for his birth and burial. All the while, he kicks away inside of my womb, letting us know that he is still full of life and energy. These are not the tasks I expected to carry out during pregnancy –and they certainly aren’t the tasks that appear on the monthly ‘to do’ lists in my pregnancy books-- but they are what Ethan needs from us now.

As I go about these tasks, I have not been praying for the miracle of his healing, but I have been taking great comfort in the miracle that is already assured – the miracle that Ethan’s life will not end with his death, but will be joined to the eternal life of the God who made him and gave him to us. Sometimes this promise is offered to people who are grieving as if it is somehow supposed to take away the pain of burying a loved one – and as far as I can tell, it doesn’t. My body is still going to ache for him when we come home from the hospital without him. Years from now I will still feel the pain of his absence and wonder about the person he would have grown up to be. But it does give me great comfort to know that there is something about his life – the life that God put in him – that is not ephemeral and fragile like his body, but that will last forever. In this way, Ethan is no different from any of us. Our bodies are frail and fallible too, and they will all die sooner or later, but we too have the promise of resurrection into life that is not constrained by our frailty and that comes from the One who breathed life into all creation.

I am also incredibly comforted by the promise that Ethan will indeed be made whole in the resurrection. When I was in college, I spent my summers with a group of kids and adults with disabilities at a wonderful little place called Camp Hope. One of the favorite songs of every group of campers was “I Am Going to See the King:”

No more crying there, I am going to see the King;
No more crying there, I am going to see the King;
No more crying there, I am going to see the King;
Alleluia, alleluia, I am going to see the King!

The kids never got tired of making up their own verses – “No more wheelchairs there!” “No more crutches there!” “No more braces there!” “No more helmets there!” “No more doctors there!” “No more needles there!” Their joy at the prospect of being physically whole was uncontained. And I think that this was not only because of the pain that all of those objects and experiences represented, but also because of how our culture treats people with disabilities. A child whose body or mind is not fully functional is treated day in and day out as if they are less valuable and less important than other children. Often they are treated as despicable and shameful. Sometimes they are abandoned by their families. What the Camp Hope campers were saying when they sang this song is not just that their physical pain and limitations will one day be gone, but that they are eagerly anticipating the day when they will be recognized and valued by the whole community of God’s people as God’s wonderful creations. Our culture says that a child without a whole brain, who may well be blind and deaf at birth, and who will likely be incapable of responding to those who love him – a child like Ethan - is scarcely human and is certainly not a life worth celebrating. But the promise of the resurrection is that this child will take his place in the great and joyful dance of the community of God’s beloved ones and all of God’s restored creation. This child will be made whole, not just in body and mind, but will be embraced and celebrated as a whole and holy creation of God.

I am praying for Ethan. I am praying for God’s peace to surround him in his living and his dying. I am praying that he won’t suffer pain in his moments of birth or death. I am praying that he knows, in whatever ways unborn babies can know, that he is our beloved and deeply wanted child. I am praying that Eric and I will have the opportunity to hold him and tell him how much we love him while he is still alive. And I am praying with deep gratitude for the miracle that Ethan’s life will not end with his death, but that he will be embraced in the love-filled life of the Trinity and join the communion of all of God’s people who have gone before him.

Ethan James

2009-06-11T13:26:00.000-07:00

Four weeks ago, at our twenty-week ultrasound appointment, Eric and I learned that the baby that we are expecting in September has a fatal birth defect. Sometime very early in his development something went drastically wrong. His most serious problem is that his skull never formed– the whole top and back part of it simply does not exist (the technical term for this is acrania and it’s very similar to anencephaly). At first, it seemed likely that our baby had one more chromosome than a normal baby and that the extra genetic material caused the problems with his development. But this week we learned that his chromosomes are normal. Our doctor is currently investigating whether I might have a blood clotting disorder that could have caused a clot to form and cut off the flow of blood to him at a crucial point in his development. If we learn that that is not the case, then we will probably never find a medical answer to why he developed this way. Babies with acrania have a fairly good chance at living to full term and even some chance of being born alive, but they usually don’t live more than a few days after birth. Our neonatologist indicated that she expects that, if he makes it through birth, our little one will live for just a few minutes or hours.

The day of our ultrasound has become a dividing line for us – there is everything before and everything after. We are living in ‘after’ time now, and nothing will ever be the same. We were so excited to be having this baby. The day I took a pregnancy test and it produced that astonishing blue plus sign, Eric took silly arms-length photos of the two of us, our faces smushed together, grinning and holding up the positive pee-stick. I love those pictures. We had been waiting and praying for a child for almost a year and I had given up hope of conceiving without some kind of medical intervention. And then, when we were least expecting it, the pregnancy test was positive. We were so certain that it couldn’t be true that I retested again the next morning and, still in shock, Eric called an older, wiser friend to see if he had ever heard of a false positive pregnancy test. Our friend whooped with delight over the phone and assured us that if the test was positive, I was really pregnant.

I made Eric hold out until we hit the twelfth week of pregnancy before I let him put our goofy, happy positive pregnancy test pictures up on his Facebook page and announce his upcoming “major career change” (he was planning to be the primary caregiver for the baby for the first few years). Once we made it past week twelve, when the most serious danger of miscarriage was over, I breathed a huge sigh of relief and let myself settle in to the reality that we really were going to have this baby. At his eight week ultrasound he looked so much like a little sea-creature that we started calling him “Flippery.” At every check-up, his heart-beat was strong. At eighteen weeks, right on schedule, I felt him move. We started collecting donations of baby gear from friends and I made lists of all the things we still needed to buy. I planned my maternity leave and we started thinking about how to turn our guest room into a baby room. We signed up for BabyCenter email newsletters, tried out various name possibilities, and began to think about where our son or daughter might go to elementary school. Each week Eric posted updates on Facebook about which fruit or vegetable our little one was currently closest to in size. Eric’s mom reported that a flurry of knitting and crocheting was underway in Vermont in preparation for the first Getty grandchild. I compared pregnancy symptoms with my friends who are moms, read the pregnancy books my sister had sent me cover-to-cover, signed us up for birthing classes, and started collecting maternity clothes. In every part of our life, we began making room to welcome this little life.

On the morning of our ultrasound, Eric woke up sick. He’d had his wisdom teeth pulled two days before and the combination of hunger, bleeding, and pain medication left him so nauseous and light-headed that we both thought he was going to have to stay home in bed. I was so disappointed that he would miss being with me when I learned the baby’s gender and that he would miss seeing what our baby looked like all these weeks later. But a few minutes before I left, he decided that he felt well enough to come too. I knew that the reason that pregnant women routinely get ultrasounds is to check for problems and not for the sake of curious parents who want to know if they’re having a boy or a girl. But everything had gone so smoothly with our pregnancy so far that I didn’t really give a second thought to the possibility that we might learn anything more momentous about our baby that morning than its gender. My dad said that if my mom were still living, she would have predicted that we were having a boy because my morning sickness wasn’t very bad. And I thought we were having a girl, mostly because it was harder for me to imagine how to parent a boy. When the ultrasound technician got me settled on the table, she asked if we wanted to know the gender. “Yes!” we both said. The first image that appeared on the screen when she touched the transducer to my belly was the bottoms of two little feet framing the clearly unmistakable evidence that this baby was a boy.

We were both so delighted to see our baby. The ultrasound tech explained which body parts she was showing us as she clicked away with her mouse, labeling and measuring the images. As time went on, she got more and more quiet, but I didn’t think much about it. Eric and I were still grinning at each other and marveling over the fact that our little ‘sea creature’ had grown into a baby and that we were having a boy. At the end of the exam the technician said that she was having trouble finding the baby’s cranium and wanted the doctor to come in and look. That was the first clue we had that something might be wrong. The doctor looked at some images of our baby for just a minute and then turned to us and said, “I know this is supposed to be a happy day. I’m so sorry to have to tell you this, but there is a problem with your baby. I can’t find his cranium.” She made us an emergency appointment at the Duke maternal-fetal health clinic for that afternoon and told us that we would be seeing two ultrasound technicians and a genetic counselor. We knew that the presence of a genetic counselor meant that our baby’s problem was probably fatal.

The three hours before our next appointment were incredibly long. Mostly we held each other and sobbed. Spencer, our pastor, came to pray with us. We called a few friends to ask them to pray for us too, but decided not to call most of our friends and family until we knew for sure what was wrong. At the Duke maternal-fetal health clinic, we had an advanced ultrasound that took a whole hour. Many of the images appeared on the screen in 3-D and with almost photographic clarity. I could see from the images that something was very wrong. The baby’s face didn’t look right – it looked as if someone had sculpted a perfect baby face out of clay and then dragged a wet hand across it – it was clearly a face, but with the features blurred together. And the back of his head was missing. Also, there were strange little spiky things on each side of the center of the top of his back where his vertebrae should have been. I cried silently throughout the ultrasound, but even so I couldn’t help feeling a stab of joy at seeing him move. Through much of the exam, he looked like he was energetically practicing crawling – all four arms and legs were moving exuberantly and all at once. A couple of times I could both see and feel him move at the same moment. By the end of the ultrasound, I felt like I knew him better than ever – I had seen every part of his little body in detail. After another wait, the genetic counselor and a doctor came to explain the results of the ultrasound to us. This time there was no doubt – our baby simply could not live outside my womb and might be stillborn at any time. The doctor explained that, in addition to his missing cranium, he was missing a kidney and an artery in his umbilical cord. Throughout the exam he had held his hands in a clenched position, which is often an indicator of the kind of brain damage that results from a chromosomal abnormality. Before we left, the doctor drew some amniotic fluid so that she could confirm that this was the case.

That afternoon, we named our son. His name is Ethan James. We named him because, just an hour before, while our faces were still red and swollen and sticky with tears, we had to decide whether we would end his life early or whether I would continue to carry him until he dies. Eric and I have both spent years as theology students and could easily write papers (and probably a book) about the Christian ethics of this decision, but in the moment there was no need for complex moral reasoning. Only one thing mattered: We love this child. We love him with a love that is far fiercer and stronger than we imagined it could be. All this making room in our lives and getting ready for his arrival has, without our realizing it, made us into parents. We believe that God has entrusted this little life into our care. We have no power to change anything about his development or diagnosis or the length of his life, but we choose to love him with our whole hearts and to provide for him for as long as God gives him life. We choose to parent him to the best of our ability, even if the time we have with him is achingly short.

One thing I have learned from my friends who are parents is that parenting always brings some anguish. It’s the anguish that comes from loving an imperfect child in an imperfect world and of knowing that you can’t protect him completely. This pain that Eric and I are immersed in – the pain of loving a child who is going to die – is the anguish of our love for Ethan. We’ll never stay up all night with Ethan while he cries inconsolably and inexplicably or go through the terrible twos with him. We’ll never cry on his first day of school. We’ll never worry about what he’s doing at his friends’ houses when he’s a pre-teen or rush him to the ER after an accident with a bike. We’ll never comfort him when he’s been rejected by a friend or try to teach him not to be cruel to other kids. We’ll never sweat through his first attempts at driving or dating or have to endure hearing him shout that he hates us. We’ll never have to drive him to college and leave him there. But our love for him is no less, nor is our anguish. Most days, we find ourselves on a wild teeter-totter of emotions. We are, by turns, filled with joy at Ethan’s continued kicks and at our silly games with him (Eric loves to give him kisses and raspberries through my tummy) and swept up by waves of grief and astonishment at all that we are losing and the reality that, even as we are planning his birth, we need to plan for Ethan’s death.

We have been more grateful in these past few weeks for the gift of community than ever before in our lives. This grief would be unbearable if we had to bear it alone, but we have been surrounded and upheld by the love of friends who are heartbroken with us and who are praying for us and for Ethan. One of my co-workers commented recently that although Ethan won’t live long, he is incredibly loved. And this is far truer than I ever expected – so many people who love us have also been eagerly anticipating Ethan’s life and already growing into love for him, just as we have been. We are so grateful for friends and family who will cry with us and keep us company in our grief and who will also treasure these few precious months of our son’s life. We are so grateful that we are not alone in our anguish of love for Ethan.

Dead Stumps and New Shoots

2006-05-01T20:16:00.000-07:00

I've been too busy writing sermons lately (3 in 8 days...wheh!) to blog, so I thought I post one of them instead.

Dead Stumps and New Shoots
(Isaiah 11:1-10)

During my first summer in California, I took a trip up the coast to Oregon with some friends and we stopped along the way at a Redwood grove in southern Oregon. The naturalist who was working in the grove during our visit told us that the bark of Redwoods is fire-proof. So if a wild-fire should rip through the grove, the trees would be severely damaged, but deep inside the trunk and roots there would still be a living core that could send out new branches, allowing the tree to continue to live. It’s hard to imagine anything in the path of such fierce heat surviving. Yet deep inside the trunk of a Redwood, a bit of life survives through the fire to send up new shoots.

The passage we read a few minutes ago from Isaiah makes promises that just such a shoot will spring up among God’s people, Israel. It will spring up where it’s least expected, in a place that looks like all life and hope have been destroyed. This new shoot of salvation will bring the hope of a new and different future for God’s people. It will come in a spiritual and political landscape that looks completely inhospitable to the flourishing of God’s salvation. And its growth will be a sign of God’s continued faithfulness to his promises even in the face of the faithlessness of his people.

The picture of life in Judah which Isaiah paints is a bleak one. For much of the ten chapters leading up to this passage, Isaiah thunders prophetic pronouncements of God’s coming judgment against his people. The sacrifices and worship of Judah are repugnant to God, says Isaiah, because their lives and communities are full of injustice. In their political and economic life they have scorned God, neglecting his commands to “rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, and plead for the widow.” The rich and powerful have filled their houses with wealth that rightfully belongs to the poor. God, through Isaiah, calls Jerusalem a whore, calls her princes rebels and thieves. Hide in caves and the crags of rocks, warns Isaiah, because when the fierce anger of God comes sweeping through, nothing will be left standing.

Why is God so harsh with Israel? It’s because God’s people have failed utterly to keep their covenant relationship with him, to live out their calling to be a witness to God’s character to the surrounding nations. The powerful have exploited the labor of the powerless. The tiny nation Judah, instead of trusting in God’s provision, has aligned itself politically with its more powerful neighbors, accepting their military aid and with it, allegiance to their gods. The descendants of king David have used their position and power to their own advantage, rather than to create a nation which reflects God’s care for the poor, God’s provision for all, God’s peace. The ancient royal tree has become a lifeless stump.

Throughout these passages of thundering warnings of God’s judgment against injustice and economic inequality and failure to truly worship him, come glimpses of God’s vision for his people—of what they should be, of what he longs for them to be, of what he has promised to make them. God’s judgment, says Isaiah, is part of his plan for salvation for our world. It is a sign of God’s determination to redeem his people in spite of themselves, to reclaim them from their scorn of God, which is reflected in their political and economic life. God’s judgment reveals his fierce love for his people, for all the people of the world, and his unwavering determination that those whom he has chosen will yet make visible to the watching nations his salvation.

These passages that show us a vision of salvation are like eyes in the storm of God’s anger, like sheltered crags from which we can see past the fire-storm of judgment to the greater purpose, God’s ultimate plan for his people. Walter Brueggemann calls this passage a “dream of God’s lips” and compares it to Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. The vision of this passage, Bruegemann says, is “an act of imagination from the throne of heaven in which we are invited to participate.”[1] It gives us an image of what God dreams for his people, a dream that imagines a new political and social reality vastly different from our current reality, a dream which we are invited to join God in dreaming.

This dream of God’s lips tells us that God’s vision for our world is one in which new life grows from dead stumps, in which new life and new hope sprout up in burned over, lifeless landscapes. Our eyes may see a hopeless family situation, a dead church, a community in which violence and injustice are triumphing, a church still divided down lines of rich and poor, privileged and powerless. But God speaks a word of hope, a word of vision of what yet could be. Our eyes may see a dead stump, but God calls us to see with him the possibility of an enormous shelter-giving fruitful tree, of a re-created world in which the goodness of the original creation is once again visible.

This vision of salvation, of new life in the midst of death, is a remarkably holistic one. Just as God’s judgment against Israel is sparked by their neglect of their corporate economic and political life, so the promise of salvation comes in the form of a ruler who will restore justice and equity. This isn’t the equity of equal-opportunity, but God’s equity, an equity that provides special protection and provision for those who lack the means to secure it for themselves. Isaiah calls them “the weak” and “the afflicted of the earth” – they are not only those who are destitute, but everyone who lacks the power to secure their own rights - the poor, immigrants, widows and children. In God’s equity, those with power, and especially those who make and enforce the laws, have a responsibility to speak and act on their behalf. Isaiah says that God has a dream of equity and justice, that God intends his salvation to touch not just our hearts, but also our political policies and courtrooms, our banks and corporate boardrooms, our laws and lawmakers.

The vision Isaiah paints is of a salvation brought by a new king, a new shoot from the ancient royal root. This king not only is God’s chosen, but Isaiah tells us that the powerful creative moving spirit of God rests upon him, giving him eyes to discern reality from appearances and truth from rumors. This king is clothed in righteousness and faithfulness, in contrast the current corrupt and faithless leaders. It’s important to notice that it’s God who brings this about – it’s God who calls forth new life from an old dead stump, who calls this recreated world into being. It’s God who appoints this new ruler, who gives him his spirit, who gives him the power to govern justly. When the tree has died, the promises of God remain full of life.

The second half of this dream tells us in vivid images what God’s dream of a world of justice and equity will look like. It’s a vision of world restored to the goodness of Eden. It’s a world in which natural enemies live in peace and harmony with each other. Those who have been preyed upon extend shelter and refuge to their predators—they dwell together in safety. Their children lie down together in peace. Even a baby is safe playing on top of a snake’s den. The most defenseless among us will be safe in the presence of the most powerful. Palestinian settler and Israeli soldier, Irish Catholic and Irish Protestant, American politician and Iraqi insurgent, undocumented immigrant and border patrol agent—they will all live together, their children will lie down together in peace. Can you imagine a world like that?

Isaiah says that when this vision becomes reality, it will overflow into the rest of the world. Knowledge of God, intimate relational knowledge, will saturate the earth like a flood. And all the nations of the earth will come streaming toward God’s holy city, towards God’s chosen one, to receive justice and guidance from him as well. It is good news not just for tiny Judah, but for all the nations of the world.

Historically, the church has read this passage as a messianic prophecy, looking ahead to the reign of justice of God’s kingdom through Christ. And I think we can claim that promise while also claiming something from this vision for our particular situation today, just as Isaiah’s original hearers were meant to do. We too, as the church, are part of this tree, grafted into the ancient root of God’s promises. We too, as God’s chosen people, are called by God to make his salvation visible in our life together. And we too are at risk for invoking God’s judgment.

In a church history class I took before I came to Fuller, I met a woman who was on the verge of losing her faith because of the class—the accumulated weight of the centuries of misuse of power by the church, of fighting between factions that led to the slaughter of Christians by Christians, of the oppression of other people groups in the name of Christ’s kingdom—all this was a weight too much for her to bear. Over lunch after class one day she sobbed out that if this is what the church is like, she wanted no part in it. I wonder that more of us don’t have that reaction. I think if we listen to the voice of God through Isaiah, we have to wonder if that isn’t part of what God feels as he views the ways his church has been complicit in violence, exploitation, and injustice over the centuries, as we are even now. Does he see us and weep that we are a church still divided by race, a church in which some of us still have much more than we need while others have far too little, a church which still reflects the divisions and injustices of our society more than it does God’s new creation? Does he see us and thunder out a warning that our worship is worthless because our lives do not reflect his care for the poor and oppressed, the new immigrants who make our city their home, the homeless men and women who stand with their cardboard signs day after day on the street corners of Pasadena? Does he see us as a dead stump?

If our hope is only in our ability as the church to make God’s salvation visible, then my classmate may well have been right to despair. But our hope is in the deeper, sturdier, more steadfast roots of God’s promises. And if the judgment of Isaiah has a word for us, then the promise of Isaiah does too. The “dream of God’s lips” is also a dream for us. It’s a dream that God continues to call into being new life from unexpectedly, seemingly dead places. It’s a dream that calls us to participate in what God is doing—to keep watch for and nurture the young shoots of God’s new creation, to look for signs of green poking through old dead wood. Isaiah tells us that the undercurrent of injustice is strong, but the tide of God’s justice is stronger. Isaiah calls us to remember that under the dead stumps of our lives, of our world, there is the possibility of new life growing out of God’s promises.

I heard this story recently from a friend. It’s about a couple of teachers who live and work in one of the poorest and most polluted neighborhoods in Camden, New Jersey. Among other industries, their neighborhood is home to a cement factory, a trash-to-steam incinerator, steel processing plants, and a natural gas power plant. The children they teach play on a playground next to a sewage processing plant and the smell of human waste is always in the air—they cancel recess when too many children begin to vomit. One third of their city is zoned for industry and one square mile out of nine has been designated an environmental Superfund site. In spite of all the industry, unemployment is at 36%. The residents have sought redress for the pollution in the courts, but have yet to receive any justice. [2]

In the midst of this bleak landscape, these two teachers decided to plant a neighborhood garden. They planted over 1,000 flower bulbs, along with flats of broccoli, kale, collards and tomatoes, and they used SuperSoakers to spray the neighborhood with white clover seeds. They invited the kids they teach to help them plan and plant the garden, and they named it Eve’s Garden after a prostitute named Eve who helped them tend it. They call their gardening “practicing resurrection” because they see it as a way to call out new life from a barren place. [3] What these two young teachers are doing won’t change their neighborhood or their city overnight. It won’t right years of injustice. But perhaps it is a new shoot God is sending up, a whisper of the wind of God’s spirit, breathing his dream for Camden. Perhaps it will grow into a mighty tree that will bear fruit in justice and peace. Perhaps it will give witness in the haze of dirty air and injustice to the memory of God’s good creation of our world and to the promise of God’s restoration of all he has made.

We, too, can watch and tend the new shoots of resurrection life in our families, in our churches in our neighborhoods. We, too, can practice the radical hope that God’s faithful promises are ever living, ever sprouting out of barren landscapes. And as the engrafted people of God, we can rest in the knowledge that this “dream of God’s lips” is rooted in God’s undying promises. We can join God in dreaming this dream of a world in which injustice is no more, in which enemies lie down together in peace, in which our world will be saturated with the knowledge of God’s fierce and unwavering love, in which all nations will stream to the holy city of Christ the King.
[1] Walter Brueggemann, “Peacemaking: An Evangelical Possibility,” Church & Society, (Sept/Oct 1990), 9.
[2] Andrea Ferich, “Eve’s Garden,” http://camdenhouse.org/, accessed on 04/27/06.
[3] Kim Mulford, “Women sow seeds of hope in Camden neighborhood,” CourierPost Online (March 12, 2005), available at http://www.courierpostonline.com/columnists/cxmu031205a.htm, accessed on 04/27/06.

Marriage and Martyrdom

2006-02-26T20:04:00.000-08:00

Ever notice how easy it is to take your life for granted? Lately I've been feeling tired of school, impatient to get this stage of life done, to graduate and get married and begin my life with Eric. I'm tired of working all day and studying all evening, of getting up early and staying up late to write yet more papers about yet more books. And I'm tired of missing Eric at every turn, of counting down the months and days until we'll see each other again, of going to bed with a good-night phone call instead of a good-night kiss.

But something happened in the past couple of weeks that brought me and my impatience up short.

Two friends from my small church congregation are both battling life-threatening cancer. Both are young people, under 50. One of them, who was just diagnosed, is the father of four young children including a baby who is at that stage where he can just barely clamber up and down stairs as long as his older sister holds his hands. I watched them practice this last week on my way into the fellowship hall after church, catching my breath with each step as his clumsy baby feet barely made the next stair tread. But his sister clearly knew what she was doing--he didn't miss a single one. Their mother is slender and beautiful and one of those women who parents with grace and creativity and a sense of purposeful calling.

What caught me up short about this is how unexpected it is...a young couple, still in the first half of life, having babies, living life--none of us expect to be facing the possibility of death this early. Somehow, despite plenty of personal experience that should convince me that this is not the case, some part of me thinks I'll live forever--or at least until I'm 80 or 90 and surrounded by grandkids, at the end of full and satisfying life. And as I (impatiently) anticipate marriage, somehow I think that that too will last for decades and decades to come. We don't remember when we fall in love that every successful marriage ends in death--that at the end of this love lies a grief that may be the greatest we ever have to bear.

Here's the strange thing about love...when I think about facing what this couple is facing, I know without a doubt that even harder than accepting my own death would be leaving Eric behind to live his life without me.

Eric is the kind of person who has to live out his convictions--even if that means risking getting hurt or getting himself arrested. Back when we were just getting to know each other, he was reading about Christian non-violence and decided he needed to join an anti-war protest in New York City just before the beginning of the war in Iraq...he told me recently about packing a tear gas kit the night before, writing phone numbers on his arm with his heart in his throat, knowing that it was possible that the high emotions and large crowds might make the police quick to respond with force, that he might end up in jail or worse.

This is one of the things I love best about Eric--he is through and through who he says he is, and he lives what he believes, even when it's costly. We both know that sooner or later this is likely to lead to something more serious than a night in jail or a misdemeanor charge. And this is something he's been ready to accept. But I think what we are both realizing is that marriage makes the cost even higher. He's ready to risk his own life...but risking leaving me is not so easy.

For the past few months I've been studying the history of the Anabaptists, the forebearers of my adopted theological tradition. During the Reformation, they insisted on the right of adults to voluntarily choose baptism (as opposed to being baptized as infants into a state-regulated church), and of the rights of believers to form their own congregations, choose their own pastors, and together read and interpret scripture. Much of what they stood for was incorporated into the American system of religious freedom--separation of church and state, freedom of religion, and freedom of the press.

But for these beliefs--and for living them out--the Anabaptists were tortured and executed in staggering numbers. Most were simple working people--craftspeople and peasants--who could have easily escaped imprisonment, torture and death simply by recanting and returning to the state church. But rather than doing so, hundreds and hundreds of them joyfully went to their deaths, sometimes enduring unspeakable torture (a common procedure was to cut out the prisoner's tongue so that he or she could not preach to the crowd assembled to witness the execution) before they before they were hanged, drowned or burned alive. In many parts of 16th century Europe, becoming an Anabaptist believer was tantamount to signing your own death warrant.

Some of the records we have from this dark period are letters exchanged between imprisoned spouses or written by condemned mothers to their infant children, encouraging them to grow up to be faithful disciples of Jesus, to learn the scriptures and live lives of courage and faith. And I wonder how they did it. How could they bear to leave behind their orphaned children, their widowed spouses? How could they choose death joyfully, knowing how high the cost would be for those they loved?

The best answer I've found so far is that they believed that their lives belonged first to Christ, that their first vows were not to their spouses or children, but to him. In fact, this understanding that commitment to Christ was a higher commitment even than that of spouses was reflected in the way the community spoke about executions--especially in the case of women, the records of their martyrdom refer to their execution as their 'marriage.' Women facing execution spoke with eagerness and longing for their union with Christ, their heavenly bridegroom.

We still have traces of this tradition in the Mennonite church. The liturgy we use for dedicating children asks parents if they are willing to give their children freely to whatever God calls them to in life. Knowing the history of our tradition, this isn't a question asked lightly.

And I wonder if we shouldn't have a similar vow in our marriage ceremony. It's hard enough to trust God with the split-second decisions of other drivers, with the silent unseen growth of cells, with all the myriad things that can go wrong with a human body. But to also hold ourselves open to the possibility that God may call us to choose obedience that leaves the one we love alone...that is even harder.

So I've been thinking these days about the fragility of life, how each breath is a gift of God's sustaining love, how each day of life is precious. And about the cost of following a God whose own life led through imprisonment, torture and execution before it led to resurrection.

I'm still tired of school. But I'm also living these days with a new awareness that each one is cause for deep gratitude. And the things that make me impatient about my life fade in importance in light of the shear grace of the gift of the days I have been given.

And I'm still counting down the months and days until July 29, when Eric and I will be married. But I'm also trying to come to terms with the knowledge that we both belong first to Christ--to hold my hopes and dreams for our future together with open hands, knowing that what God has given us is will not last forever, that one way or another, this love leads to grief and death. And that no matter how fierce our love for each other, it is only a shadow of the love the heavenly bridegroom has for us.

Planning the Imperfect Wedding

2006-01-27T19:43:00.000-08:00

Wedding planning can make you crazy.

I've been engaged for about two months, with six more to go, and I've already been to the edge of bridal meltdown and back a few times. The first rule of wedding planning I discovered is that it's wise to stay away...far away....from bridal magazines. They tend to affect me in the same way as romantic movies. They make me discontent with real life and blind to the everyday ordinary beauty of what I have been given. They make me wish for a life that is void of any real challenges besides those manufactured to create enough plot tension to keep my attention for two hours and give me a sense of relief when, predictably, the perfectly beautiful woman and the perfectly beautiful man get together and walk off together into happily ever after (accompanied by a well-timed swell of music and a perfect sunset). They make me wish I were impossibly skinny and beautiful, as if that is somehow the key to marital bliss.

On the pages of wedding magazines, every woman becomes A Bride - not a three-dimensional person with friendships, a job, intellectual interests, and a life-calling, and who just happens to also be getting married, but a one-dimensional creature who's only goal and focus in life is to plan the Perfect Wedding. I actually read about one woman who quit her job and spent 4 months full-time planning her wedding. A Bride, incidentally, should ideally be free to spend enough money to buy a reliable used car or a semester of graduate classes on a dress she will wear for about 4 hours, and to complete the outfit with a crystal tiara. I, for one, think the tiara is an especially bad idea. If I've learned anything so far in this dating/love/marriage adventure, it is that real love takes an incredible amount of humility. Tiara-wearing tends to be bad for the cultivation of humility, patience, selflessness, and other very un-princess-like qualities which are essential to marriage.

So wedding magazines make me lust for antique horse drawn carriages, three-course candlelit dinners for 300 complete with a string quartet (never mind that I don't even have 300 friends), buckets and buckets of roses, and a dress with enough crystals and beads and lace to put a real princess to shame. They make me want things I can't possibly afford and which, in my saner moments, I know to be thoroughly immoral ways to use money.

This is somewhat shocking to me since I have never been one of those women who have had her wedding all planned out since she was 15. In fact, I wasn't at all sure I would ever have a wedding, or even that I would ever want to have a wedding until fairly recently.

After watching the latest Jane Austen movie, I developed a theory about why all this wedding madness is so hard to resist...I wonder if part of the obsession with planning the perfect wedding comes from the fact that we no longer have formal social occasions other than weddings...when else in a woman's life is there an occasion where crinolines, a tiara and a dress with a three-foot lace train are appropriate apparel? Or when a roomful of people will all pause to admire you waltzing with a handsome young man? Maybe if we had more balls, it would be easier to plan a simple, modest, un-princess-like wedding.

I also think we obsess over weddings because we are anxious about marriage. It's easier to figure out how to coordinate the table napkins with the imported orchids in the bridal bouquet than it is to acknowledge the amazingly terrifying risks we take when we wed our lives and souls to another. And it's much easier to search for the perfect invitations or favors or bridesmaid dresses than it is to face up to my own weaknesses and failings which will inevitably hurt the one who is placing this dizzying amount of faith in me.

My grandmother got married in my grandfather's family's living room, wearing her best dress. I don't think that was unusual for the 1930's - it was the Depression and spending even a fraction of what weddings cost today would have been unthinkable. It was equally unthinkable that a marriage might end in divorce. But nobody these days makes it to marriageable age without having seen some serious betrayal of marital trust up close...and I wonder if the elaborateness of weddings is not inversely related to the amount of anxiety we feel about exposing ourselves to this possibility.

The real danger for me in all this Perfect Wedding madness is that it skews my view of what it means to be married. It promises that marriage can be as carefree, romantic and fairy-tale-like as the glossy photos in Brides Magazine. It promises that if I can only manage to look as breathtakingly beautiful as the models in the 976 pages of wedding dresses, I too will achieve marital bliss and lifelong romance.

As Eric and I have grown closer over the past three years, he has become infinitely more dear to me. I am definitely and without a doubt deeply in love with him and there is no one with whom I would rather live my life. But as we have grown closer we have also become more and more like family. We get on each other's nerves. We say things that we didn't mean to be hurtful, but hurt all the same, and hurt more than we could have predicted because we value each other's care and respect so much. I get upset over small things, like who will wash the dishes or take out the trash, that turn out not to be small at all when you're planning a lifetime together. We have discovered that, despite the fact that we live on opposite coasts and miss each other like crazy between visits, we both still need a break from each other sometimes. And that we don't always feel particularly romantic, and that even then, and maybe especially then, there is value and joy in doing the ordinary tasks of life together.

I think sometimes we forget that romance and weddings lead to becoming family...to living everyday life together and coming to terms with each other's annoying habits and weaknesses and failings. That loving someone is as much about holding onto and longing for the vision of who they will be when they are fully mature as it is about being enamored with who they are now. That nobody wakes up every single morning for 40 or 50 years of marriage and feels perfectly swept away with happiness at being married to their spouse. That real joy in marriage comes only after you've made a commitment to love each other when you don't feel very much like loving each other. And that loving someone well for a life-time means loving them in multi-faceted ways...not only romantically, but also as a friend and a co-laborer in life's work, as a family member.

And family life is rooted in the everyday. It's about washing the dishes and opening the mail and cooking dinner together. It's about learning to live on a budget and to give up some of what you want for what your family needs. It's about caring for and being cared for by friends and neighbors and extended family who are also three-dimensional complex imperfect people, and not just tuxedoed or evening-gowned paper-doll Wedding Guests. It's about being a three-dimensional person yourself, with work and friendship and church commitments to keep, as well as a marriage to nurture.

So I am planning the Imperfect Wedding. There won't be any horse drawn carriages or candlelit dinners for 300. I will not wear a tiara or order buckets and buckets of roses or send out engraved invitations. We're not going to rent silver and china or linen chair covers or a three-tiered chocolate fountain. And we're not going to a Caribbean island for our honeymoon.

We're going to get married in the inner city neighborhood where Eric lived for most of the past four years, surrounded by family and friends. No doubt our ceremony will be punctuated by the loud bass car stereos and squeals of tires that fill his neighborhood on warm summer evenings. Our reception is going to be potluck so we won't have to limit our guest list based on our budget and we're skipping the wedding cake in favor of brownies and cheesecake. Friends and family will help us decorate, arrange the flowers, and serve the food. And we'll head off for our honeymoon in Eric's aging Buick.

Martha Stewart, Emily Post and Bride's Magazine would all heartily disapprove. It will be the perfect beginning to an imperfect marriage.

Newbie

2005-11-11T22:16:00.000-08:00

This is my first post....wow!