On Hope Versus Expectation

One of the things that Gretchen and I were grappling with toward the end of Griffin’s life was the question of what he was capable of.  Our expectation all along (and affirmed by our pediatrician, his teachers, his counselors) was that he would go to college, graduate, start a career and live independently.  We wrote off his lack of hygiene through junior high and high school as typical adolescent boy behavior.  What 15 year old doesn’t have dirty laundry on his floor, sporadic showers, and the smell of Axe covering a multitude of hygiene sins?

So when Griffin was accepted at several local universities and chose to attend Kennesaw State we thought “plan on track”.  What ensued was a struggle with studying independently.  Griffin had a steady flow of saintly counselors who kept him on track all through high school.  They helped map his study plan, edited his papers and checked in frequently.  College was a different story.  No team of counselors.  Just a marginal student struggling to get to class on a hilly campus with no mom or dad to make sure he was up and going in the morning.  A few C’s and a number of dropped classes made his freshman year an academic failure by any measure.

More distressingly, as we found out near the end of spring term, was the social isolation he was struggling with.  The four roommates he shared his apartment style dorm room with were all in their sophomore years, well rooted socially and disinterested at best with their wheelchair-bound new roommate.   Griffin rushed in the spring and enjoyed himself too much, got drunk and fell out of his chair.  Paramedics were called, school officials got involved and Griffin was deemed a liability risk by the one fraternity chapter that offered him a bid.  This was also our first glimpse into how deep a problem Griffin was having with alcohol.

So we moved him home for sophomore year.  Expecting a fight when we told him our thoughts, we were met with tears of relief.  He poured out how lonely he had been, how he wouldn’t leave his room for days at a time except for food and class and how isolated he felt.  We wept with him.  The move home revealed a few things:

1) How gritty Griffin was.  His classes on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays required him to wake up at 6am.  Gretchen and I took turns driving him to the transit center ten minutes from our house and then he was on buses for the next hour and a half.  He made a strong effort nearly every day.  Wheeling around that campus was no picnic either.  He did it without complaint.

2) How hurting he was.  Conversations about any variety of topics often ended with Griffin in tears.  Tears that revealed his pain, his disappointment in himself.  He wasn’t living up to our expectations and it was soul crushing. We tried hard to comfort him, to express our love for him just as he was but years of lectures on our belief in what he was capable of accomplishing had left our expectations imprinted on his very being.

3) How he was self-medicating.  The extent to which he was using and abusing alcohol gradually unfolded, like a multi-vehicle wreck in slow motion.  There were multiple occasions where he missed his bus because he was getting drunk in a gas station restroom.  There was a trip to the hospital on one such binger where the hospital called us at 1am (Griffin had gone to a Children’s Miracle Network function and told us he would be home at 10 and we simply went to bed as we usually do at 9).  The police had been called to the Quickie Mart because Griffin had gotten drunk in the bathroom after having lost control of his bowels at the Children’s function.  Instead of coming home, he  bought two tall boys and went in to the bathroom to clean up.  Thankfully the police called paramedics instead of arresting him for public intoxication.  I think the bowel mess may have played a part in their policing decision.

Gretchen and I were both mortified.  We felt like failures as parents.  And we braced ourselves for the fact that for the rest of our earthly lives Griffin was going to be our responsibility.  He would be in some way, shape or form in our care until we left this mortal coil.  

In those last three sentences lie the crime I am charged with: every one of those hurts, fears and disappointments were about me, not Griffin.

As I probe the shadow self, I am finding such self-centeredness, such pride and utter arrogance.  My expectations for what Griffin should be able to do were a shallow substitute for what I should have hoped he could do.  My expectations were wrapped up in my own ego, my own picture of who I needed Griffin to be so I could feel successful.  My expectations were rooted in my own need to control.  To instead have trusted in hope would have required faith; faith I did not have.  

I also find arrogance.  I allowed my own hidden envy of others “normal” lives to drive me to act as if my life were normal.  I golfed, I drank, I numbed myself to the pain that I harbored inside. It was a pain I both denied was there and nursed at the same time.  As I look back I ask myself, “how could I have been so careless with so much at stake?”

At the risk of seeming trite, I find solace in this thought: I am, we are, parts of the body of Christ.  And if I am suffering, so God is right along with me.  As I grieve my loss and my failings as a parent, God grieves and struggles along me. Because, to paraphrase Paul, “I am in Him and He is in me.”  This struggle is nowhere near over.  There is so much more to discover about my shadow self, such frightening and ugly things.  I am entering the struggle with self that John of the Cross described "The Dark Night of the Soul."

Similarly am learning that God looks at my shadow self and says, “I love that part of you, too.  Know it, embrace it so that you can ever be aware of it.”  We are not whole if we do not know, probe and accept our shadow self.  God is not whole unless He embraces both the cross and the resurrection.  Darkness and light need each other for without one there is not the other.  

Beyond all that, this week I have been reflecting on my greatest regret in losing Griffin.  It
goes beyond losing my son: his smile, his laugh, his questions and his sly wit.  I miss his presence every day.  My regret also includes what I lost in what he was going to teach me as he grew.  I feel cheated that I will not get to see his growth and his becoming, but mine as well. I am not as whole without him as I would have been with him.  

The whole of me is smaller without Griffin, but whole I am indeed.

Jack Black Face Wash And Job Chapter 37

Some mornings the grief over losing Griffin is nearly unbearable.  My first thought on waking is the sight of him laying lifeless in the ER, Gretchen holding one hand and me holding the other.  His eyes have turned opaque, as if God pulled the shades on the window to his soul because his soul wasn’t there anymore.

The grief wraps itself around me like a hot Georgia summer morning, a warm blanket of humid sadness.  Its grip is gentle but persistent.

I stand in the shower, gazing at the Jack Black face wash on the shelf.  It’s been in the shower for two months with just a tiny bit left.  Griffin loved to use whatever I used.  If I had a new bottle of cologne, he wanted to try it.  If I used a shaving brush and bowl, that’s what Griffin wanted.  And when I began using Jack Black products ages ago, Griffin wanted them, too.  The funny part was Griffin was terrible about washing his face and his special Jack Black Face Wash sat in his shower more as decoration than utility.  When we were cleaning Griffin’s room the week after his passing, I noticed the face wash in his shower.  I use a pump bottle by the sink, but I thought it would be prudent to use his as a back-up in the shower.  And as I got toward the last bits, I stopped using the back-up in the shower. Because when I use that last quarter sized dollop, that bit of Griffin will be gone.

I carried the grief to work with me.  I begin each day in the office with ten minutes of meditation and prayer.  I reminded myself that this grief is only a feeling and feelings come and they go.  That I can choose to hold this feeling in equanimity while it was with me, neither embracing it or pushing it away.

The mystery of Griffin’s death, of my whole past year, is a constant companion.  I think of Job, who spent 36 chapters arguing with his friends and railing against God, pleading for answers to the mystery of his suffering.  And God, ever faithful to Job, finally appears in a whirlwind.  Job is sated not by God’s answers as God offers no answers, only questions.  Questions that reveal who God is, why God is.  Job’s cries aren't fulfilled by answers, but simply by God’s presence.  Because answering Job’s questions would never fulfill him.  What fulfills Job is seeing God and being seen by Him.

I’m not anywhere near Chapter 37 with God.  I find myself more mornings than not wrestling with my questions more than seeking His presence.  The lessons of Job are long term learning.  As Fr. Rohr says, “My experience is that, apart from suffering, failure, humiliation, and pain, none of us will naturally let go of our self-sufficiency.”  With our autonomy we carry the burden of having to self-validate or self-criticize.  “Freedom is when  you know that neither of them matters.”

On Knowing God In The Age Of Trump

The distance we keep from the pain of the world is the distance we keep from God.  And the distance we keep from the pain in our own lives, our own groaning souls is the distance we keep from knowing ourselves—which is God in us.

We cannot hope to know God unless we are willing to know all of his creation.  Because in one sense the sum of all of us is the most complete image and understanding we are going to get of God on this side of the divide.

Which in this fraught time means that the pursuit of God requires us to reach out to the most righteous (or unrighteous) Trump (or Biden) supporter and will ourselves to know them, to feel their pain, their fears, their hopes and their joys.  We must empathize with them, find a way to understand them and agree with their decision based on their lived experience even as we disagree with their logic, their view and their vote.  Only then will we begin to see God.

It means we must see the invisible: the homeless, the poor, the mentally ill.  Those we pass at a pace, we must slow ourselves, sit, ask and understand.  Enter their pain, their hopes, their joys and their sorrows.  Only then will we begin to see God.

We must understand and know our Muslim brothers and sisters, our Buddhist, Taoist, atheist and agnostic friends and families.  Only in knowing, understanding and loving them can we hope to begin to know, love and understand God.

Which brings me back to the beginning.  It begins with our willingness to enter our own pain, our own disappointments, our own groaning souls.  What are our hopes?  What are our dreams?  What is it that ills us?  Only in entering THAT can we begin to see God within us.  And only when we see God within us can we hope to see God in our brothers and sisters.