Gene Herr: A Deep Well of Life-Giving Hope
by Ellen Awe
Feast of the Martyr Susannah the Deaconess
Anno Domini 2017, December 15
ON JANUARY 1, 2012 at 6 PM, hope took in a quick breath, released everything it had left for this world, and lay ashen and still on a small bed in a nondescript room. I was sitting solitary by my father’s bedside, willing him to be released. Never did I think this task would be mine, as the youngest child and only daughter in the family. It was a beautiful and terrible assignment. At that time, I knew only that our 14-month family battle with brain cancer was over. I needed to wake my mother to tell her that her best friend and loving partner was gone. I had to call my brothers who had just returned to their homes from visits to say a painful goodbye to our father.
In the days that followed there were two services, one Mennonite and one Catholic (my father was both Mennonite and Catholic). Many people shared stories of how my dad had given them encouragement, believed in them, shared books and more books. There were many stories of touched lives. One pastor, whom my father had mentored, lingered long after the first service (the Mennonite vigil). I remember recognizing that he didn’t seem to want to leave, which would mean letting go, acknowledging the finality of this loss. We shared a brief conversation, both of us confirming what a source of light and hope my father had been. There was some comfort knowing that I wasn’t the only one feeling as if I’d lost access to a deep well of life-giving hope.
After the services, the reality of life without my dad sunk in. All of us grieve in our own ways and mine was deep and lingering. I am, as my husband likes to tell me, my father’s child. Caring, restless, idealistic, sensitive, and prone to dreaming like my father. Hopelessly on time (or early) for everything, bursting with the next idea, and riding waves of hope and despair almost as often as the changing weather of Kansas. Although, he was better than I at finding hope and resting in the assurance of his faith.
Overall, things were very gray in the year after my father’s passing, until I came closer to realizing what I was mourning. My dad was, for me, a beacon of hope and a source of love. I was drawn to him like a ship that has lost its way and seeks the friendly beam of a lighthouse. I realized I had depended on the inspiration, humor, and depth of understanding that my dad shared to help me navigate the rough waters of life. His love and faith in me were a constant guiding force and without them, I felt lost. I handled it in all the wrong ways, being snippy and morose and not talking about my sadness to anyone.
Realizing how great the loss had impacted me was a breakthrough. I don’t remember how or when I realized how to move on but I knew there was a way. I resolved to find hope and light again. I turned to quiet times in the outdoors, spiritual retreats, and books. I reread Sheldon Vanauken’s A Severe Mercy
and was comforted by the narrator’s realization that people who die can still work on our behalf. I read Henri Nouwen’s The Return of the Prodigal
and realized that perhaps it was time for me to stop acting as the young prodigal. It was time to seek to become more like the father and give what I had been accustomed to taking.
Once on a retreat, I talked to a priest and asked him, “Am I crazy for feeling like my dad is still present and communicating with me at times?” His reply, “No, you’re not. What would he say to you right now?” I could answer that question. He’d tell me to have hope. It’s been five years and that is still the message when I see my dad in my mind’s eye. A couple of months ago, on a particularly bad day, I came precariously close to firing God. I told God that I had no hope about a particular situation and if it didn’t get better, I was done with God. HA! Hope came showering down, like rain on a parched field. It is just too much a part of me and for that I am grateful.
I think of what my father often asked me, “Do you have hope?” I do. I know I have to keep seeking places and people who affirm this hope: my weekly church service, times with my grace filled mother, the work of places like Eighth Day Institute, and beautiful stories of saints, both ancient and modern. Hope slips through the hard dark places and provides just enough light for us to see the way. Julian of Norwich explains the care of God in with an analogy of a hazelnut: “It lasts and always will, because God loves it, and thus everything has its being through the love of God.” My father’s hope is part of the fabric of my being, as is the love of God. I will last, as will you, my friends. Let’s nurture the hope alive within us.
Ellen Herr Awe
lives in Wichita and teaches for USD 259. She reads as much as possible, tends a little garden and cherishes spending time with her grandson.
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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