compassion

It’s as we pray at the end of the day, our bodies bending toward the ceasing, that Riley remembers loss, that she hears Kevin asking after comfort and peace for grieving loved ones and makes a sound like she’s been struck, a deep, penetrating noise that seems to rise from deep within her, trembling in her vocal cords. I can feel her mounting questions suddenly crowding around, bending closer. It feels, even though she still sits perched on the edge of the sofa somewhere halfway between us, as though her body has moved closer to mine.

In describing Christ’s relationships with people, scripture often says He was moved with compassion, making use of the wild Greek word splagchnizomai, which literally means to be moved in the inward parts, indicating a completely visceral total body response to the suffering and needs of others.  I say something like I feel like I’ve been punched in the gut and mean something similar, although I can’t claim often to have actually experienced the kind of abruptly visceral empathy Jesus felt routinely. I use gut wrenching to describe something that feels emotionally excruciating to me, hardly ever using that term to describe my response to someone else, but going back to its Latin origins, our English word compassion literally means to suffer with, which is close to what splagchnizomai means, except that it also conveys that Jesus was moved to action by the shared experience of our pain.

Splagchnizomai is the sound Riley makes now before the throne of God, where we huddle together in our pajamas, a sound like being thrown down, like being bruised, and I know that at the end of the prayer, when I hug her to say goodnight, she will cling to me, pressing her ear up against the sound of my beating heart.  I know already the feeling of her sudden tears soaking into my shirt, but I am not initially moved to give thanks for her tenderness. No, in fact, so moved am I by my own jadedness instead, that is, the worn out weariness of my body, and yes, even my heart, that most immediately I only wonder why-in-the-world Kevin had to voice his prayers about this out loud in front of her right now, just as we are getting ready to go to sleep.

Live in this world long enough and the human heart develops calluses, numbness to help us stay upright, to help us keep moving, at least to keep us from continually crying out against the shards of this place slicing right into us.  It isn’t that I don’t care, that I don’t feel sadness over this aching loss, but only that I’ve expected it and known it so well already I’ve learned to set aside my feelings. But Jesus wasn’t afraid to weep for Jerusalem, not even to weep in grief over soon-to-be-raised Lazarus. He never let Himself stop feeling the pain of others, never stopped being moved to give Himself up for them. Maybe the jadedness I accept only happens to be a deception that keeps me from loving enough to sacrifice myself. It isn’t good really, isn’t much at all like Christ, the way I’ve let the preponderance of terrible information and gruesome entertainment harden me; it isn’t maturity allowing me to go numb and quiet in the presence of loss, that makes me more moved right this minute to find my way to my pillow. I am thinking suddenly of the disciples who didn’t quite understand, falling asleep in the garden even after Jesus told them that His soul was overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death.

It’s by grace that God saw fit to let me make my home twice over with someone–Himself and another–who hardly thinks about their own pain, who saves the gut wrenching for the suffering of others.

Riley follows us up the stairs, asking her wavering questions, expressing through them and by the tears sliding down her cheeks God’s own rejection of death itself. She can never quite accept that these things happen. It should not be, it should not be, this is the constant comment of that tremor in her voice, of her arms crossed against the aching pain in her middle, of her solid stance in the doorway of our bathroom as we brush our teeth. Even when she falls silent and I finish repeating how little I actually know along with whatever comfort I can think to offer her, she stands there, blinking at us and shifting her weight from foot to foot. She wants answers I can’t give her, some promise I can’t make. She wants to gather up the hurting ones in her empty arms.  I can see all of this as I look at her.

So I think again of Jesus, weeping before those grieving sisters, even knowing that He is the resurrection and the life, even knowing Lazarus will soon walk right out of that grave, and why, except that He co-suffers, feeling their grief and the sting of death wringing out His own tender heart? Outside of Jerusalem, Jesus had wailed, oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often I have longed to gather your children.

“Okay, well, we’re just brushing our teeth, getting ready for bed, you know,” I am saying to Riley around my toothbrush, my voice like shooing arms gently pushing the baby bird toward her own corner of the nest.

Riley stands immovable, her grief like an advancing wave sweeping over our floors and rushing toward our feet.

I smile encouragingly; I wipe away her tears with my thumbs; I sweep her into my arms, patting her back.  She clings tightly, not releasing me even when I try to let go of her.  Toothpaste foam gathers at the corners of my mouth.

So, I repeat, when finally she unlocks her arms from around my waist and I walk back toward the sink, some garbled rejoinder along the lines that it will all be okay, my voice like a hand still lightly patting at her bowed back.

“It’s just hard to leave,” she finally says, as if to say it isn’t that she’s missed what I’m trying to do with my voice, as if to ask, but how does anyone just keep going when someone else has gone and it just shouldn’t ever be so?  We weren’t made for these goodbyes.

Later, I will wish I had thought instead to repeat aloud for her the things the apostle Paul wrote about grieving with hope, what He said about living in response to the resurrection, that because we believe in the death and resurrection of Jesus, we also believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have died in Him.  Instead, she is the one who tells me this, the one always reminding me that those who have left this life are still living now with God.  She is the one always speaking of them still in the present tense as though at any moment they might take a seat again at our table, as she imagines aloud their continuing lives, only now with an otherworldly address.

So as finally she drifts from the room, she anchors herself and me with a simple declaration of her faith.

“I’m glad, Mom, that at least he’s feeling better now. I’m glad now he can remember all the things he had forgotten. That’s good, anyway.  At least that’s good.”