Grey Days
This morning I started and finished reading Kate Bowler’s Everything Happens for a Reason- and Other Lies I’ve Loved (2018) in less than three hours. Yesterday was supposed to be an overnight personal retreat at a nice hotel nearby but ended early with me back at home after numerous hassles that left me feeling more stressed than “retreated”—sigh. So instead, I’m retreating at home, which means indulgently reading books in bed for hours.
Since her recent book release of No Cure for Being Human (2021), I have received many messages from friends: “I just finished listening to this, I think you’d really like this” or “I was thinking of you the whole time,” with links to a podcast featuring the author. I decided to find out what caught my friends’ attention.
Recently, a friend shared how good it felt to scream unabashedly during the rapid plunge on an amusement park’s “Drop of Doom” type ride. She’s had a pretty terrible year and has held a lot in, just to keep going. Another friend told me that her latest art card collages are all of the word “fuck” because it is the only thing she can express after the frustrating year she’s had. I appreciate these stories so much because they are honest. “Life is beautiful, and life is hard,” Kate writes, and it’s true.
As a lonely, heartbroken twenty-something, I remember taking extended solo walks on beaches in Vancouver, talking with God, questioning all kinds of “Christianized” certitudes. One day, it dawned on me that we search for God in—and often try to squeeze God into— black and white reasoning. At the same time, we cruelly attempt to shrink our experiences into black and white rational understandings, ultimately dehumanizing ourselves. The middle ground, the grey, the unanswerable, the unjust, and the uncertain, is part of the human experience— God lived it and knows it. How liberating not to have to find answers to my questions, doubts and uncertainties; if God is at ease in the grey, maybe I can be too.
I lost my taste for certitude, overcoming and “bless me” language long ago. These utterances are, unfortunately, part of many song lyrics, sermons, and ‘wise’ council. Many messages tend to skip over “Holy Saturday”—death and suffering, ironically, being the only human certitude— to leap into “Resurrection Sunday” with its promise of a victorious life (too often equated with prosperity, wellness and happiness).
It can be brutal to sit with the hard stuff of life, but sometimes it’s the only true place to be. Near the end of her brave, funny, and candid book, Kate writes, “Plans are made. Plans come apart. New delights and tragedies pop up in their place. And nothing human or divine will map out this life, this life that has been more painful than I could have imagined. More beautiful than I could have imagined.” She shares her secret, “Don’t skip to the end.”
-Lisa