The Death of the Faith of Everyday Life

“For every gain in deep certitude there is a corresponding growth of spiritual ‘doubt’.  This doubt is by no means opposed to genuine faith, but it mercilessly examines and questions the spurious ‘faith’ of everyday life, the human faith which is nothing but the passive acceptance of conventional opinion.”

        

                                               Thomas Merton

               New Seeds of Contemplation

I began my journey more than 40 years ago with the certainty of the naive.  I had known pain.  My own loneliness as a five-foot one-inch, 97 pound 15 year old is what lead me to religion in the first place.  A simple invitation from a cute girl in algebra and I was being picked up for mass each Sunday at 9:40 (thank you Renee Williamson). I began a “personal relationship with Christ” a year later after a week at Malibu Club in Canada.

My certainty grew with my new found “faith”, both out of my personal experience (the human mind is, after all, hard wired to find evidence to support its existing belief system) and in my understanding of the Bible as the unerring word of God as passed on to me by my Young Life leaders.  Mine was a faith that left no room for doubt.  If I had a question, the Bible had a four square answer with a roof.  Doubt was the antithesis of faith.

Which isn’t to say my journey wasn’t interrupted by a few things over the years.  College, fraternity, the discovery of beer and girls that actually paid attention to me pulled me off course for a few years.  But by junior year I was back on the straight and narrow, leading a Young Life Club of my own at Shorecrest High School, leading bible studies in my fraternity and a few others and even starting an outreach in the Greek System called UW Club.  Each and every passing experience reaffirmed to me the wisdom of my faith and cemented in me the certainty that I was on the narrow road through the eye of the camel (to mix a metaphor).

My view began to change when my friend Stu gave me a copy of “Disappointment with God” by Philip Yancey which lead me to “The Myth of Certainty” by Daniel Taylor.  Both were salves to the nagging doubts that had crept into the anteroom of my faith in the years after I married.  The peace and wholeness that was supposed to come from settling in with the one God had chosen for you never materialized in our 400 square foot apartment.  Only arguments over dirty clothes, unloaded dishwashers and what to watch on television that night followed by passionate apologies and the subtle desperation that comes with the realization that this is what you chose and it wasn’t getting magically better.

Suddenly I understood, intellectually at least, that certainty cheapens faith.  In fact, faith is impossible in the face of certainty.  Faith, by definition, is that which we believe but cannot prove.  Certainty is that which we know without doubt.  Faith says “I believe in God, but can’t prove that He exists.”  That belief is based in a trust of my personal experience.  The best I can offer in proof are anecdotes and analogies.  The ancient Hebrews had the Ark of The Covenant with them, Taylor says, physical proof of God’s existence.  And yet it did not inspire faith or love for God.

Mine was not a popular opinion in my Evangelical community.  I had many heated discussions with friends about whether the Bible was the unerring word of God or if it was merely God’s wisdom as written by holy men, fallible and true all at the same time.  Even then I was beginning to develop the muscle of resisting dualistic thinking, though I didn’t understand it as that at the time.

When Griffin was diagnosed with Spina Bifida I was rocked to my core.  My designs for a lightly blemished, model Christian life were destroyed.  God’s part in my life was similarly displaced.  I cloaked my existential doubts in pseudo-spiritual intellectualism, proclaiming that Griffin’s disability was caused by Sin (with the capital “S”) let loose in the world, like cancer or autism, a cosmic roll of the dice gone bad.  God did not cause this.  I bristled at the notion that God had given me this situation as people tritely observed, “God doesn’t give us more than we can handle.” My trite retort was, “well if Griffin’s wheelchair is God’s gift, I’d like to regift it.  To you.”

Deep down, in the unconscious, I think I was indeed asking why God let this happen to me.  That a God in whom I believed had wounded my son was unforgivable.  I largely shelved my faith for 15 years, wandering about the wilderness, burying the wound to my soul in the seeking of happiness, the acquisition of things and of friends and the pursuit of advancement at work and socially.  In some perverse way, Griffin’s disability was my Ark of the Covenant in reverse: it was proof on wheels that the God I once believed in no longer existed.  But to admit even that was too painful.

On a rainy winter Monday night in Atlanta a voicemail appeared on my phone.  I hadn’t seen the phone ring, which wasn’t unusual as we live in an area we call the “cell hole”.  So I listened to the voicemail.  It was a male nurse at Wellstar Cobb Hospital asking me to call him back.  Griffin was obviously back in the hospital for god knew what reason.   The last time he had done an inpatient stay at Ridgeview he ended up at Wellstar with a 104 degree fever, a UTI and a severe case of diarrhea that made a return to Ridgeview a “medical impossibility” according to the Ridgeview medical director, who had assisted in cleaning the outcome.

So it was not with a small bit of frustration that I called Wellstar back.  This stay at Ridgeview was a bit of a last hope.  Griffin was severely depressed, ignoring his self-care which left us cleaning sheets and disinfecting mattresses as he slept the day away in his own waste.  And only recently had we uncovered the accelerant: Griffin was drinking any alcohol within his wheelchair bound grasp: leftover wine from dinner, errant beers left in the upstairs fridge, and only recently malt liquor he’d buy on his own on the way home from school.  We moved all of the alcohol downstairs and out of his reach, confiscated his driver’s license and insisted he begin attending AA meetings.  And yet and still…he drank the cooking wine stored in a cabinet in the garage and passed out in the kitchen with his shorts down to his knees.  It was time to give Ridgeview another try.

I went about Monday evening chores as I waited on hold on speaker.  I began to warm leftovers, emptied the dishwasher, greeted Gretchen as she arrived home.  I explained with a sigh that I was on hold with Wellstar and Griffin was likely back in the hospital.  She sighed, too, as she went to change out of her nursing scrubs.

The nurse finally answered the phone.  “This is Stephen.”

“Hi, this is Sean Shannon.  You called.”

“Uh, hang on,” Stephen said as I heard paper shuffling.  “Are you Griffin Shannon’s father?” he asked.

“Yes, I am,” I replied.

“We need you to come here as soon as you can.  Do you know where we are?” he said flatly.

“Can you tell me what’s going on?” I asked, my heart rate quickening.  I am no wilting flower when it comes to calls from the hospital with Griffin.  By our last count Griffin was approaching 40 stays and 24 surgeries.  It takes a bit to get me anxious.  This was different.

“We just need you to get here as soon as possible.  Do you need the address?”

“No, we know where it is.”

I knew in that moment he was gone.  I told Gretchen what the nurse had said.  She knew as well.  But neither of us would say it.  In our silence he could still be alive.  In the 25 minutes it took to drive to Wellstar Cobb Hospital he could be alive.  In the walk from the emergency room to the family room, he could be alive.  Neither of us dared spoke lest the breath behind our words extinguish his.  The ER attending physician arrived.

“Your son passed away at…” His words faded into nothingness.  He spoke further about time, circumstance, I don’t really remember.  What I do remember is that my son was dead.  And so was the construct of the God I knew.

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.

Cooling My Own Pooridge--A Status Report

 

We are holding together.  But we’re missing a part of us that nags.  Gretchen looked at us while we sat down for Father’s Day dinner a few months back and sighed, “Well, now we’re four.”  And that pretty much sums it up. We are enough and still short all the same.

Door County 2009

The weekends are the hardest, when there’s more time to think, more space.  I think each of us looks for things to close the space down, whether its projects around the house, binge watching Netflix or burying a nose in a book.  But we each are striving to find the strength to face that space, that void, and grieve. And laugh.  And celebrate our boy. But too often we give in to the distraction.  As C.S. Lewis says in A Grief Observed, “They say an unhappy man wants distractions—something to take him out of himself.   Only a dog-tired man wants an extra blanket on a cold night; he’d rather lie there s

hivering that get up and find one.  It’s easy to see why the lonely become untidy; finally dirty and disgusting.”

I am dog-tired.

I don’t know where exactly Griffin is.  I know he is not the same boy I knew.  Likely he is infinitely wiser than I and more compassionate.  The thought both lightens my load and darkens my heart.  I wish for him peace, and joy, and the wholeness he was robbed of in his brief time with us on earth.  But it stabs me to think he’s changed in any way.  I want my son back and if he’s been transformed I am missing it and it gives me all the more to grieve.

I think the more important question to answer is not where Griffin is but where am I?  Where he is, is all “all guesswork; I’d better keep my breath to cool my own pooridge.”  One cannot be present and distracted in the same moment.  So in those daily moments when I come up for air and find myself present, I am confronted with the challenge of finding compassion for myself.  How do I release my guilt for my failings.  Because I will only be as compassionate with my girls as I am with myself.  And God knows they need my compassion, my presence, my heart and my ear.

Sometimes I think I am drowning.  Composure only comes in glimpses.  Fully formed thoughts only in hindsight.  I am swimming in self-pity and  if I am being honest, I am using that self-pity as an excuse to avoid “cooling my own pooridge”.  My life is a series of distractions interrupted by moments of clarity.  In those moments of clarity I plot and plan to stay present, but an e-mail comes, I check Facebook or the New York Times website and I am carried away from my pain, their pain, and am temporarily numbed to the suffering inside and around me.

So, we are holding together.  Fitfully, yet hopefully as to know the challenge is the first giant step in transformation.  I hope.  

The Belly Of The Whale

I am in the belly of the whale.  It is dark, damp and smelly.  I can’t see my hands and I can’t move more than a few inches.

 

Why am in this belly?  Is it my rebelliousness being punished?  Does God want me to learn something?  Or is it just cosmic fate?  Probably a bit of all three.  The God I know wouldn’t wish this on me.  But as fate has it, I’m here and there’s something to learn.  And that learning is a paradox.

 

My rebelliousness is that I want to change.  I want to change my fitness.  I want to change my mood.  I want to change my children.  I want to change my life.  Hell, I get paid to change minds.

 

God doesn’t want me to change.  He wants to change me.  Subtle but significant differentiation.  I cannot change.  There isn’t enough willpower in the world for me to change myself.  And there isn’t enough wisdom and articulation in the world to change anyone else.

 

So I must surrender.  I must close my eyes and see myself as God sees me.  Stop moving around, changing my circumstances in an effort to change my mood, my life.  And only in surrender and in seeing myself through God’s eyes can I allow Him to change me.

 

And the paradox grows from there.  God’s change isn’t really a change at all.  He wants me to be me.  He created me with talents, gifts and a spirit that is unique in the universe.  He wants me to be that person instead of the construction of ego and effort that I present to the world.  He wants me to accept myself and my circumstances as they are.  Only then will I be changed.

 

And perhaps it’s only in the belly that I can learn this.  I cannot see.  I cannot move.  God has me right where He needs me to be to change me.

 

Lessons From Insults

I have suffered a number of insults to my understanding of myself this past seven months.  My stroke in late September certainly put a dent in my sense of invulnerability.  The collapse of our revenue in Q4 put another dent in me, this time to my sense of invincibility at work.  My confidence in the basic of goodness of people was seriously bruised by being named in a lawsuit in which my actions were described precisely the opposite of how they occurred.  And Griffin’s death indelibly etched in my soul the impermanence of human life.

I have come to understand the utter futility in wasting time on some construct of self.  When I stand in front of the mirror it is supposed to be God looking back at me.  But my ego has projected so much more on the image.  Being fit, successful at work, good family, nice house, great host, funny guest; all constructs of the ego.  They are the scaffolding in my attempt to remodel a beautiful Craftsman into whatever architecture is the style of the moment.  Which is why the scaffolding never comes down.  The ego is constantly remodeling to fit the circumstances.  Perfect family becomes brave family with child with disability.  Young warrior sales manager becomes sage old general manager.  All constructs of my ego projected on to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and conversations with friends in real life.

The lessons of the past year, in this bruised and beaten child of the most Holy called Sean are these.  To lose myself in the most Holy as I was intended to.  Drop any pretense.  That which will not burn is what is truly of value.  And to stand in front of the mirror and contemplate the wonder of He who created us.

“There was a boy named Sean Shannon and he almost deserved it,” to paraphrase C.S. Lewis.  And like Eustace Scrubb I have fallen asleep in the dragon’s cave.  And these insults can either harden me further as I furiously construct a new façade or they can soften me.  As Aslan says to Eustace, “You must let me undress you.”  I must let God tear away the scales and take down the scaffolding.

As mixed metaphors go, this is the best explanation I have for how to respond to my last, painful seven months.