Author: Brian Brennan

I am a writer and a teacher. I have lived in Philadelphia, Binghamton, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Norfolk, and Northern Virginia. I have sailed on the ocean and flown over the North Pole. I write fiction, poetry, and nonfiction.

Rilke

rilkeThis is from the Duino Elegies, translated by Stephen Mitchell.

I have been thinking (and writing) about happiness, and found myself writing about “things.” When I think of “things,” I mean them, in part, in the way Rilke writes: things that are made, that bear the evidence of creation and intention.  But before I go on, here is The Ninth of the Duino Elegies.

 

The Ninth Elegy
Why, if this interval of being can be spent serenely
in the form of a laurel, slightly darker than all
other green, with tiny waves on the edges
of every leaf (like the smile of a breeze)—: why then
have to be human—and escaping from fate,
Keep longing for fate?…

Oh not because happiness exists,
that too hasty profit snatched from approaching loss.
Not out of curiosity, not as a practice for the heart, which
would exist in the laurel too….

But because truly being here is so much; because everything here
apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way
keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.
Once for each thing. Just once, no more. And we too,
just once. And never again. But to have been
this once, completely, even if only once;
to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.

And so we keep pressing on, trying to achieve it,
trying to hold it firmly in our simple hands,
in our overcrowded gaze, in our speechless heart.
Trying to become it,—Whom can we give it to? We would
hold on to it all, forever… Ah, but what can we take along
into that other realm? Not the art of looking,
which is learned so slowly, and nothing that happened here. Nothing.
The sufferings, then. And above all the heaviness,
and the long experience of love,— just what is wholly
unsayable. But later, among the stars,
what good is it—they are better as they are: unsayable.
For when the traveler returns from the mountain-slopes into the valley,
he brings not some handful of earth, unsayable to others, but instead
some word he has gained, some pure word, the yellow and blue
gentian. Perhaps we are here in order to say: house,
bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window—
at most: column, tower… But to say them, you must understand,
oh to say them more intensely than the Things themselves
ever dreamed of existing. Isn’t that the secret intent
of this taciturn earth, when it forces lovers together,
that inside their boundless emotion all things may shudder with joy?
Threshold: what it means for two lovers
to be wearing down, imperceptibly, the ancient threshold of their door—
they too, after the many who came before them
and before those to come…. lightly.


Here is the time for the sayable, here is its homeland.
Speak and bear witness. More than ever
the Things that we might experience are vanishing, for
what crowds them out and replaces them is an imageless act.
An act under a shell, which easily cracks open as soon as
the business inside outgrows it and seeks new limits.
Between the hammers our heart
endures, just as the tongue does
between the teeth, and despite that,
still is able to praise.

Praise this world to the angel, not the unsayable one,
you can’t impress him with glorious emotion; in the universe
where he feels more powerfully, you are a novice. So show him
something simple which, formed over generations,
lives as our own, near our hand, and within our gaze.
Tell him of Things. He will stand astonished; as you stood
by the rope-maker in Rome or the potter along the Nile.
Show him how happy a Thing can be, how innocent and ours,
how even lamenting grief purely decides to take form,
serves as a Thing, or dies into a Thing—, and blissfully
escapes far beyond the violin: —And these Things,
which live by perishing, know you are praising them; transient
they look to us for deliverance; us, the most transient of all.
They want us to change them, utterly, in our invisible heart,
within—oh endlessly—within us! Whoever we may be at last.

Earth, isn’t this what you want: to arise within us,
invisible? Isn’t it your dream
to be wholly invisible someday?—O Earth: invisible!
What, if not transformation, is your urgent command?
Earth, my dearest, I will. Oh believe me, you no longer
need your springtimes to win me over—one of them,
ah, even one, is already too much for my blood.
Unspeakably I have belonged to you, from the first.
You were always right, and your holiest inspiration
is our intimate companion, Death.

Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor future
grows any smaller…. Superabundant being
wells up in my heart.

The Soundtrack of my Life

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Sky Full of Stars: 

A Remembrance

When my daughter is in the car with me, she makes musical requests. Last year featured a month of Dee-Lite’s “Groove is in the Heart.” Sometime this past winter she settled on ELO’s “Mr. Blue Sky.” Often the second song she requests is Coldplay’s “Sky Full of Stars.” She exclaims “Wow!” when the bass beat kicks in twice in the song. “It goes BOOM.” She laughs loudly as I sing “Boom! Boom! Boom!” to the beat. She doesn’t see me cry. I keep smiling. I keep going, “Boom! Boom! Boom!”

I started listening to this song in the days after my friend, Jennifer Slade, committed suicide. It reminded and still reminds me of her. Jennifer was someone who “light[s] up the path,” as the singer says about the person in the song. She was a brilliant minister: insightful and collaborative; just what a co-worker who had worked with four different ministerial teams in six years needed. She encouraged me to explore my gifts as a minister, and even if I did not choose the path she walked, she helped me think more deeply about the work I do, and to accept it as ministry.

Her death, coming in July of 2014 shortly after her fifty-fifth birthday, shocked me. I drove her home on the night she took her life, and can painfully and clearly recall our conversation on the way. She apologized for asking me to pick her up—her car was in the shop. She said (and I’m paraphrasing here) that one of the drawbacks of living away from home (she lived in Durham, NC), was that she did not have friends. As a minister she was careful about making friends in the congregation. Her work—ministers never have forty hour work weeks—and the circumstances of the year (she and her husband had taken the first steps toward divorce) had made her feel isolated.

I told her that I was always happy to help, that it was my “job.” I felt that as part of the team at our church that we should always have each other’s backs. This was amazingly important to me, because I had been on less than supportive teams at my church. I had been open with her about this, telling her that I had planned to step down from my position, but after working with her and feeling the change that was happening at the church, I looked forward to what we were building. “I’ll stay as long as you are here,” I told her. Besides, I think of my role as a “guy” as a “job,” and part of that job is answering the call. But I said “job.” I did not say, “Are you kidding me? We are friends. You can always call.”

The weeks following Jennifer’s suicide were difficult. I felt dislodged from the world. I argued with my wife and a friend about how I felt and how to respond. I threw myself into healing work at the church. I met with friends who knew about grief first hand, who had survived the Sandy Hook shooting nineteen months before this. I attended services in North Carolina and Norfolk. I saw a therapist. I retreated from the world, and could not retreat from the world; the school year was in the offing—my first full year as principal at my school (my other job). I had a family. And I felt like a shell of a human.

As I listened to this song at astronomical volume in my car, I began to hear Chris Martin’s “you” not as a single specific person, but as a great plural “you.” He wasn’t singing to one person, but to the wider world. Even if there was one particular “you” who tore him apart, he was going to give his heart to the world. In my mind the big bass beat was a heartbeat, a hundred heartbeats, a thousand, a crowd dancing, like the crowds I had danced with in college and grad school. What saves the torn apart heart is a crowd of people, of friends, of love.

Do I think that life is bound to tear us apart? Probably. Do I think that we somehow come back together? Of course. I know that’s true for me. I know that I still shed tears—manly, cathartic tears, but tears nonetheless. I choose to give my heart away, knowing that the risk of sudden, tragic loss or even slow painful loss will not pass. My daughter laughs and says, “Go Boom!” I go “Boom!” I go “Boom.”

 

 

The Way Ahead

The way ahead is all clouds, and has been for almost a day.  Somewhere the sun rises, but the day that has dawned is just another shade of dark. From the horizon line straight to the stars, beyond the stars—defying reason and science as they rise as far as eternity—the clouds form a wall.  They neither block the way nor invite us to some hint of a narrow passage—this gap, this lightening in the darkened whole—they simply wait.

My father emerges from the cabin after checking the charts, and notes that the sky behind us is cloudless. “Too bad we aren’t headed that way,” he muses. He is an old sailor and has seen a thousand skies.  When I ask how this one compares, he shakes his head, “We’ll have to wait and see.” He looks at the sails, which bow out in a beautiful arc to transform the wind into perfect forward motion. “We’ll reef in the main at lunch.” I know that he hates to shorten the sails, especially when we are on a reach with the wind crossing us almost at beam, making an honest six and a half knots, but storms have knocked him down before and he will begrudge speed for caution.

When Ralph comes up for air after sleep, he asks, “What did the forecast say?”  The offshore marine forecast broadcast a few times during the day and the computer generated voice compiles findings with forecasts and locates weather events over undersea features: the Hudson Canyon, the Baltimore Canyon, the Hatteras Canyon.  All forecasts point to what our eyes already tell us; when storms come the radio is worthless.  Only during days of extended reckless calm does the radio offer anything like hope.  Somewhere out there must be some wisps of wind to wend us on our ways.  What we see ahead will turn us amphibian.  How fast it does so, and for how long, is a question for men who cling too hard to their most mammalian selves.

My father quietly calculated all night during our watch. He knows that not everyone possesses our raw stubbornness. Some people, even some sailors, are sensible.  The two other men who sail with us have enough experience and desire to head out on the ocean, but they have no need to hazard the dangerous thrills that awaken both my father and me. Because he is older and wiser than I am, and because it is his boat and his crew, he prepares to do the sensible thing: furl the sails and alter course.  “We are gentlemen sailors,” he acknowledges, resigned to doing the right thing.

I cannot help but think of this now, when clouds blot out another horizon.  My mother, who joined us on dry land in Bermuda, but would never set foot on a boat bent for open ocean, is in a hospital bed.  Doctors order tests to discover what has knocked her down. Answers dissolve in the face of symptoms.  If not this, then what has her down?  My brothers and I settle on this and that prognosis the same way meek sailors settle on forecasts.  But we are not meek sailors, we our father’s sons, and we know the way ahead is cloudy.

My father died when he slipped off the dock at a marina, hit his head, and went under the water.  He had suffered from Parkinson’s disease for a decade, and we watched while he lost the physical ease that had buoyed him on his boats and made him the most reliable hand on board. He slowly changed from a gifted provocateur in conversation to a witness to his sons’ whip cracks of sarcasm and verbal retribution. He hated the stutter that came with his disease. He never told us that he was suffering, and never acknowledged his illness directly.  We knew because our mother kept us informed and because we witnessed him.

My mother hates the idea of loss of control with a greater and more public vehemence than my father ever displayed. She watched illness sap her husband, and before that saw her mother diminish over slow painful years. Fourteen years ago, she survived a harrowing encounter with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Now, living on her own, in a house she bought after my father died, she keeps a copy of Final Exit in her living room. She has set her limits.

I don’t think there is any other course ahead.  The future looms and the possibility of proceeding as gentleman sailors dwindles.  Maybe there will be time enough to furl the sails, and there may yet be some glorious sailing ahead, but the future will not brook a change of course.

 

The Soundtrack of My Life

Break Up Songs                             

    

Some days the only thing that makes me feel better is a really sad song: some earnest expression of hopelessness, with none of the gloriously aggressive exultation of rock and roll. And, no, not the blues, which seems to throw sadness back in the face of grief, although maybe John Lee Hooker’s “I Cover the Waterfront” will do. To be honest, my heart is broken, which, believe me, is no easier at 55 than it was at 35, or, for that matter, 25 or 15. Stupid heart. So cue the Diana Krall and a little Lyle. Here we go.

I put on music all day. I shuffle through my playlist, and thank goodness it contains Stevie Wonder’s “Another Star” (the happiest break up song ever), or my daughter would be very unhappy in the car. I search through old CDs and copy old songs into the new moment. I even dig up performances on YouTube (by the way, Ricki Lee Jones’ “We Belong Together” sounds much better in the studio). One song I keep coming back to is Ani DiFranco’s “You Had Time,” in which she answers the question, “Did they love you, or what?” with “They love what I do. The only one who really loves me is you.” This is as chimerical a statement as anything, because love, or not love, there is the absence—of hope, of answers, of the future, and yeah, finally of a love that makes all those other things possible—and it is the absence that causes the hurt.

Listening to it over and over, I swear I can hear another song. And thinking of it, I blow the lyric, looking for “I bleed you. You bleed me.” Or thinking I’m digging for a Cat Stevens’ song. I’m not. Finally, epiphany overtakes poor memory, and there it is—almost the same tinkly piano opening—just ever so askew in Ani’s song—and the deeply keening refrain. It’s Jimmy Webb’s “All I Know” that Art Garfunkel recorded a million years ago. And between the two songs I hear two different ways of going through this gruesome little patch.

“All I Know” begins with: “I bruise you. You bruise me. We both bruise too easily.” Yeah, I get that these aren’t literal bruises, but seriously? Then it proceeds to: “All my plans have fallen through; all my plans depend on you.” And may I just say “my plans?” This is one of those dead giveaways of a relationship that was doomed from the start. A couple never has “my plans” because the fundamental commitment to being a couple means planning together. The hardest part of living as a long term single man—and I have been a single adult much longer than I have been in a relationship—is ceding the well-worn prerogative of making all the decisions: from bed times to travel; from the playlist to the dinner menu; from this to that and back again. A relationship is all negotiation. Even if one person leads, it had better be because some kind of bargain was intentionally struck. Of course I am confusing healthy relationships with what most of us go through (okay, not you, or you, or you, either), replicating our parents’ habits without will or awareness.

Okay, rant over, back to the song, which builds to a crescendo of “I love you and that’s all I know.” I’m not really sure what the singer hopes for at this moment. Forgive me for the bruises? The bruises and plans don’t matter because I love you? Can I just say, this is the ultimate “guy” move: the only thing that matters is how I feel. Webb’s song drives that point home: “That’s all I know.” Yes, that’s all very nice, young man, but I believe the object of your affection just left the building with your car keys. I hope you have a ride home.

(And maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s just more of an end of the concert song–the singer pleading with his audience, knowing that his art relies on them, and realizing that although this moment may end, another is sure to come. My penchant for reading everything as indicative of the artist’s perpetual struggle with his or her art and audience is my own perplexing burden).

I’m not sure why we (the males of the species) believe that simply pronouncing our deeply held emotions will ever make a dent in the fabric of reality. Or why we persist even after we acknowledge the deeper flaws (yeah, I bruised you, but you bruised me too). And lord knows I have done it, stupidly, automatically, and genuinely. I’ll give myself some credit.

And that’s why I keep listening to Ani’s song. The song comes from the person who is leaving, who doesn’t have an answer, who knows that she is loved, and still, all she has is “an empty head.” She doesn’t have an answer when her partner pleads, “You said you needed time and you had time, and she feels pretty crumby about it. “How can I go home, with nothing to say?” Even home becomes impossible when things end, because home is a place you (sometimes) make with someone else.

So there just isn’t an answer, or at least not the answer I want. As dissappointed as I feel about that turn of events, it’s as akin to being on the ocean rain that won’t stop for four or forty days. Cursing and complaining don’t help, and putting on dry clothes just guarantees another set of wet in the duffle. Fingers swell with brand new whorls—I’m not even myself anymore. But the rain will stop, the sun will return. Stevie, cue the Brazilian band, ah “Another Star.” Yeah, I’m sad, but I’m here.

For now, I embrace the discordant moment in my life, knowing that it will not be a moment, knowing that as it has before, it will pass, and knowing that the right song (or poem, or sandwich, or trip) may not make everything better, but that eventually I will move on and the music (and poetry and sandwich and trip) will be there and that if I’m a little bit lucky, I will share them.

On Great Teachers (and others) Part 2

The hardest part of having great teachers and having accepted their brilliance and sneakiness, is that I expect this same brilliance and sneakiness from everyone. It’s not a conscious expectation, but who am I to deny someone something to which we all aspire.

Oh, that.

Actually, I realize that I have no idea to what other people aspire. And at heart, I suspect that most people don’t know this about themselves either. I would make a list of the ways people get confused about their aspirations, but it would be sanctimonious (even more sanctimonious than the rest of this).

I realize that I spend too much time trying to figure out what today’s teacher’s moment of sneaky brilliance is. Because not everyone is a Socrates. Not everyone is going to share their passionate brilliance about flying buttresses like Michael Cothren. Nonetheless, when working with “authorities”–with people from whom I expect to learn something, I do look for the hidden treasure (and the hidden map).

What is the hidden treasure? My best teachers always had a dual treasure in mind. One was always the subject at hand: Joyce, Woolf, Geology, Baroque Art. The other was always my (or any other student’s) ability to tease out a unique and successful approach to the subject at hand. As a teacher, my favorite moments are witnessing my students’ dawning awareness of their nascent brilliance–watching the lights go on.

What I have learned over time, and it has been a hard lesson, is that many teachers are only interested in the first treasure. Learn the material and advance. And when I write “teachers,” I mean, “people.” Because I think that everyone is a potential teacher.

In my less generous moments, I think that people want to teach everyone else about themselves. In more generous moments I accept that people are always teaching about the world. The lessons may be unintentional and uncontrollable, but there they are, waiting for the student.

I am more troubled by teachers who never want the treasure to be uncovered, or worse. They hand you a map, and when you follow it, you discover not a treasure, not even a new map, but a penalty: an electric eel, an exploding tomato, a severed thumb (wait, that’s my thumb!). Of course there is a lesson here as well, it is a darker lesson, and one I would rather do without. It may be a necessary lesson. Still.

I go on (I can’t go on). The sneaky brilliance (or the brilliant sneakiness) of the world daunts and delights me. There is always something to learn, and, always, another way to get to it.

On Great Teachers (and others) Part 1

I met with one of my professors from Swarthmore last week. In and of itself, I encourage keeping in touch with mentors from the past. They help provide a milepost on the travel. Either you say, “Wow! How far I’ve gone,” or “Damn! This road circled back on itself.” Or any of a hundred other things.

In the middle of our coffee and conversation, Michael (Cothren) bridled about the drive to clarify assessments at Swarthmore: creating rubrics that would direct students to a clear path for academic success. Otherwise known as telling students how to get an “A.” Michael thought that figuring out how to get an “A” was part of the student’s job: “They need to figure out what I want. It’s a life lesson.”

And right there is where the trouble starts. If only all our mentors were wise enough (and sneaky enough) to bury the treasure and and not simply give us a map, but teach us the signs and signals and ways to interpret the world so that we could find the treasure without a map.

I started this vision of the best teacher early, when Fritz Marks (at The Hill School) taught us Platonic Dialogues (We read Euthyphro, Crito, and Meno, as well as large swaths of The Republic). Socrates was always able to ask a question and craftily get his interlocutors to develop their own answers, making their way to the truth by fits and starts and on their own. Of course these dialogues are fiction, however much they may be modeled on something that actually happened.

At Swarthmore I was fortunate enough to have teachers who used similar ploys, making us figure out answers, or surprising us with answers that had been under our noses all along. Among these was Kaori Kitao, who opened her Cinema class with the simplest of questions (What is Cinema?), and which, if one wanted to follow the logic, ended with some fairly complicated ruminations that could have lead into Neo-Platonic visions of art and ideals.

The French critic/philosopher Roland Barthes proposed that there were two kinds of teachers: emcees, great conductors of ideas; and exemplars, great models of thinking. (And, no I cannot find the reference for that). When I recall my best teachers they actually wove these two strands together. I recall being amazed and inspired by their approaches to their subjects. They were clearly brilliant and just as clearly welcoming. I felt as if they were standing on the opposite shore waving their students over. Their brilliance was never inaccessible or inscrutable, but, instead, was not only possible, but probable if only one was willing to do the work. And part of that work is figuring your way across the water.

Thoughts on compassion and the wrong response

At some point shortly after Robin Williams’ suicide, someone angrily commented that suicide was a selfish act, which drew the fairly enlightened and angry response, “No, it’s not. Here’s why.” At least that was part of what lit up my Facebook newsfeed last week. And there was anger and there were enlightened responses about depression, the meaning of depression, suicide, and the meaning of suicide.

Not so strangely, I’ve had a bit of time to think about suicide this past month. I appreciate the discussions about mental health and depression. Clearly, anything that takes the lives of 30,000 Americans each year bears serious thought and discussion. All our lives must have come into contact with several people who made this choice. In my life, I have known more than five and less than ten people who have either succeeded or made truly serious attempts at suicide. It’s not that unusual a number.

And so, I can’t help spending more time about those who the parlance calls survived. The leftovers. What is a good response to suicide? Quite honestly, this time around, among my first blush responses were some less than charitable impulses. I stand with Dylan Thomas: “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” I did not act on these impulses; I had other work to do with people who were struggling as much, more, than I was struggling. Nonetheless, I felt them and tried to manage them, but it was not–is not–an easy task.

I watch people around me take up the cause of suicide prevention. This is a good cause, and an act of unselfish kindness on their part. I understand this also as a way these people work at healing the tear in the universe left behind by the suicide of our bright and generous minister. And this is what we who remain are left to do: work at the tear in the universe.

When the universe is torn abruptly, I can’t imagine a response that does not turn finally towards compassion. I also cannot imagine the possibility of a full throated, “No!” In my case this “No!” was accompanied by many Anglo-Saxon epithets. My father would have quietly said, “This is shitty.” I say, “fuck.” A lot. Mostly in private.

There probably is not, within reason, a wrong response to suicide. But even that “within reason” is a hedge. Surely some Devil’s Night act of savage protest in which the dispossessed, the angry, and the desperate burn a city to the ground is not a reasonable response. Okay, maybe just one fire? But 30,000 fires? One for each suicide in America this year?

Probably not a good response.

Nonetheless, my compassion ends up getting turned toward those who are here, whose work will be to poorly sew back together what has been put asunder. I listen to those who try to make sense of the senseless, to those who rapidly respond: “Fix it, fix it,” to those whose “No’s” bear the added weight of personal struggle with suicide and suicidal thoughts. I even feel compassion toward those who yell and scream, who turn to anger, because I feel that too. I feel a little compassion for me.

What the Greeks got right–when grief has a funky beat

Heading home after work at church today, and part of that work is talking and processing with congregants and staff these days (how could it not be?), and put on Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings’ kickin’ retro funk song, Retreat. And then it hit me, the ancient Greeks got it right when they embodied human emotions and states-of-being into their pantheon.

Here’s a song about a woman scorned. She is challenging her lover to retreat in the face of her fury. Right now, it is kind of the same song that grief is singing to me. Yeah, I know, not, of course not. Grief is not singing to me in the form of Sharon Jones. No, no, no.

But maybe grief is palpable, and I fight against it at my own risk. The song is boisterous and giddy in its challenge: “Raise your white flag high ’cause I’m comin’ in blazin’… And I don’t care if it makes sense to you!” Horns blaring, percussion pounding. Bell tolling. Oh yeah, have fun with this.

Have fun (or funk?) with grief? Really? Tear my shirt! Throw ashes on my head! “Retreat! Retreat! Retreat!” Sharon Jones channels the furies–let it all out. Because this time (and every time?), it won’t make sense. Because today I don’t have to declare victory. There will be time for that later, after this raucous (for me, perhaps not for you my quieter more solemnly disposed friends), exceptional event.

For now, maybe turning the dial to eleven, and letting the sea crest over the walls may be exactly what is needed. If that is what it takes, there it is: “Cause it’s my way baby, and I don’t care none about the rest of you.” Go for it, grief. I’m down. I’m dancing.

The Thirty Thousand Voiced Creature of PNC Park

After and in the middle of the tragedy, the family went to Pittsburgh for a long planned visit with friends. We did not talk at length about it. In point of fact, my friends are from the Danbury area of Connecticut–yes, Newtown. One friend taught at Sandy Hook and was in the school when the shooting happened. What strange good company we made.

So, there we were in our different stages of grief, eating good food, drinking wine, riding carousels, and generally taking time away from the world. It almost worked. Careening along the Phantom’s Revenge at
whatever speed helps (and jarred our bones).

Tuesday night we saw the Pirates play the Dodgers along with 30,000 of our closest friends. The game was close until the Buccos scored four runs in the bottom of the eighth inning to reach the final score of 12-7. The crowd followed the game closely: cheering heartily all the Pittsburgh tallies; groaning sickly at the two errors by two different Pittsburgh third basemen; and booing lustily after Dodger reliever Jamey Wright intentionally plunked Russell Martin and was allowed to remain in the game (it was the third hit batsmen of the game, and the second in a series of retaliations).

Seat by seat, aisle by aisle, and section by section the fans embraced the game. My daughter, Katherine, had no idea that a baseball game could produce more than the esoteric detachment of rooting for our (semi-)beloved home team, the Norfolk Tides. We stayed through the entire 3:39, cheering and clapping and booing with all our friends.

Katherine asked, “When can we go back?”

My friend Brian said, “if I lived near a team, I would go every day.” Amen, brother.

Was it wildly jingoistic? Infinitely meaningless? Utterly unpack-able in some philosophical “opiate of the masses” fashion? Yes, yes, and yes. I’ll get back to grief and confusion (and did, quickly), but for one night (and others now to follow), it was good to get swept up and away.

Struggling with suicide

While I am sure that suicide is difficult in any faith, in Unitarian Universalism it poses some distinct challenges. To begin with, as a faith that does not dictate a specific doctrine or creed, Unitarian Universalism finds cohesiveness around the mutual affirmation of some fairly general principles. As general as those principles are, even in our faith we wrangle about them and how they should be lived and interpreted. The main thing we do is agree together to affirm them.

In the end, that agreement that we make with each other is the main thing that holds us together. This makes Unitarian Universalism a covenantal faith; what holds Unitarian Universalists together is not a belief in god, or in a primary prophetic text, but in the act of making a covenant with each other.

This covenantal action bespeaks a premise that we do not make our faith alone–that it arises out of relationships. If you examine the Unitarian Universalist principles, you will find that they all refer to how we are in the world with each other. Even the fourth principle, which seems on its face to be about truth, insists on a “responsible” search for truth and meaning. Responsible to whom or to what? To each other and to the world? At least.

The theology inherent in the Unitarian Universalist reliance of covenant directly places the mysterious truth, what some would call the divine, into this web of relationships. We enter into these relationships freely, which is to say that we are not compelled by force or threat; there is no damnation to frighten a Unitarian Universalist (or anyone) into compliance. We are always in a set of relationships: families, friends, work, but also to nature, to the all the world around us, to the historical past and future, and,in a special way, to our fellow congregants.

This web of relationships can feel weighty at times. For instance, a cup of coffee enjoyed after worship explodes into the world as the web of relationships flowing from coffee in the cup expands ever outward. It is hard to be in the present moment, because no one thing is unconnected. All our choices become profound decisions. However, the web can also be a safety net–they are the ties that bind us to the world. It is not so bad to be bound to this world.

And so to suicide. Suicide is particularly hard because it severs relationships, and it shows that an individual has lost connection to the vast array of relationships to which she or he belongs. The survivors feel the loss because one part of the great tangle is no longer there. And because part of Unitarian Universalist theology is bound to all these relationships, that theology is called into question by the act of suicide.

No, of course not, one might argue, suicide is an act that belongs entirely to the person who enacts it. It reflects only on that individual and his or her state of being. I understand that perspective, but struggle with it, in some portion because I am a Unitarian Universalist.

One of the great mysteries–what makes the self– is answered not by cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am), but by I am in relationship with the world therefore I am (help me with the Latin, please). This is a fairly radical concept, perhaps more so than we ever fully imagine, because there is no self without the world–the self is contingent on the world. Most would reverse that postulation.

But the world! Insistent and persistent. And then, if only it had been so for my friend, and how could it not have been when she knew all this and knew it more than I ever will? So, I struggle, and stay tangled.