Where was God?

TW: miscarriage, callous treatment

Yesterday, in my last blog post, I wrote about the first three days following Laura's miscarriage.  This post picks up some days later.  The miscarriage happened on a Friday, the reflection from the last blog post was written on the following Sunday, and I'll now write about what happened the next Monday and Tuesday.  The main points of my grieving process after Monday and Tuesday are relatively episodic, and I think they will amount to one more blog post of short reflections. I think that might amount to this week's flood of writing.  The miscarriage might be something I return to in writing and reflection, but the posts this week will cover the bulk of my reflection and experiences since then.

This post deals head-on with the question of where I thought God was through the week after the miscarriage.  I will not lay out an argument of theodicy here, and I want to reiterate my second disclaimer from yesterday:

I will make claims about where I felt God’s presence in the midst of suffering.  In doing so, I am not suggesting that my experience should be normative for everyone who experiences a miscarriage.   I certainly do not wish to imply anything that could be construed as “if you suffer more than I did, your faith is/was not sufficient.”  If something of my experience of God in the midst of suffering is helpful, I will be happy.  If someone has experienced miscarriage or another loss as a time of God’s absence—or if someone makes no reference to God at all in her or his experience—I do not wish to imply that the person has a lesser belief or that he or she have somehow failed in grieving. 

Finally, my experience was my own, and I make no claim that decisions I made would function as a guaranteed universal prescription for others who would seek to lessen their pain.

The Monday after the miscarriage rolled around, and the question on my mind was whether Laura would go back to work or take another day off.  She decided to go back to work, deciding that Friday, Saturday, and Sunday were enough days to recover.  For a few months before the pregnancy Laura was a rather active member on Babycenter.com, which is an online support community for folks trying to get  pregnant, or they are pregnant, or they have children.  It's a place where parents support one another.  The website runs many smaller forums, which can sometimes get specific, but one example of the specificity are the groups one can join of women who are planning to deliver in the same month you may also be delivering.  That way, you have an online support network, information and research source, and cheer-leading squad.  By the time folks moved from the "trying to get pregnant" to the "pregnant" areas of the community, the more-specific groups meant names were recognized and absences were noticed.  Sometimes women left the "expected delivery in Jan 2013" group quietly.  Laura did so as well at some point that weekend.  Babycenter.com also has forums for those who experienced loss, and Laura joined some of those forums.  At least one woman from the previous forum noticed and reached out to Laura.

Monday morning, Laura showed me one of the posts from the miscarriage forum.  A woman had written a little about her own experience, but the bulk of her post was a question:  "Why is it that God will allow folks who will be good parents to miscarry, while children are being born to terrible/abusive/unloving/neglectful parents?"

I don't have an answer to that question, and I didn't attempt to provide her with one as I felt like I was "too close" to the topic to effectively engage it in an online forum.  Still, I was quite happy to see that many of the responses were of a helpful kind, and a few affirmed that yes, you can be angry with God.  At the very least, to admit anger to God (or with God ) is a place of honesty, which is much more helpful than a dishonest front the cuts off the healthy expression of grief.

But the post stayed with me for the rest of the day.  I took the post and looked at it from a variety of perspectives.  Was the question a way for the woman to distance herself from the loss she experienced? ...To couch the matter in a theo/philosophical way to hide her own pain?  What were the implicit theologies she lives with?

But the questions I was asking about her post were symptomatic of something I'm less proud of.

I was coming to a point at which I could say that I had survived the experience, and was now becoming reflective of it.  In other words, For the past few days I had prayed for God's presence, but was not really in a place to notice if God had shown up.   On Monday I began thinking about whether or not God was present, or what my relationship to God was through that time.

[But I do think God was present in the care Laura and I showed for each other.  While we both cared for each other, I bore the brunt on Friday and Saturday, while she cared for me on Sunday.]

Now I was beginning to think about it, and the one thing I knew was that I was not angry with God.  I did not think God owed me a child.  I certainly didn't think God had killed my child.  My theology allows that death is a natural process that God does not necessarily interfere with, but God's role in such tragedy is the task of transforming the circumstances--of seeking and working toward the Good (once again, my task here is not to write a systematic theodicy).

But, oddly enough, theology can often be a point of pride, and it can be so very easy to critique the theology of others to deflect thinking about oneself.  By Tuesday it dawned on me that I might be doing just that. I was comparing this woman's implicit theologies to mine, and finding her's wanting.  Why did she think she deserves a baby?  God is not a cosmic vending machine into which we put prayer and get things we want.  I was  over-analyzing this one woman's post about her own miscarriage in ways that struck me as being rather callous toward her--even though I would never speak to her and appreciated that others were genuinely helping her.  And it became clear to me that what I was doing was finding a way to compare pains in order to lessen my own.

"This hurts, but at least I don't have to untangle bad theology along the way," I thought.  It is common after loss for people to hear others imply that their suffering is their own fault.  The most common form is something like, "Can't you just get over it?  You're making yourself depressed."  My own reaction to this woman's post was a variety of that dismissive sentiment:  if you just changed your theology, you would hurt less.

But that is not how loss works in the immediate.  And the comparison wasn't making me feel better, either.  In retrospect, I'm glad I realized as early as I did how I was reacting to her story, and that I had enough sense not to attempt to speak with with this woman in online forums.  I probably saved us both some additional pain.

The full realization of what I was doing with this woman's story hit me on Tuesday morning, and I was disgusted with myself.  I suspect that many people experience loss as a time when their sense of compassion--or capacity to sit with another in suffering--is compromised, constricted, and lessened.  At least that is how I was experiencing myself in those days.  When the full import hit me I stopped what I was doing and I prayed/confessed:

"God, please do not let my pain create within me a callousness toward others who suffer, especially those who are experiencing the same loss.  Continue to show me how to be a conduit of your love for others."

I have occasionally gone through what I would call mystical experiences (defined as times of awareness of God's presence within, or direct union). For me, those moments the direct experience of God—the description of which varies for many people--most resembled a dark buoyancy.  It felt safe and calm. Before the miscarriage I called it, and continue to call it, "the womb of God."  It is a place where one attempts to drop all walls, all self-deceptions, all excuses, and lay bare one's self before God.

Immediately after my prayer, I felt the familiarity of God's loving direct presence that I knew from earlier experiences.  I'm not sure how long it lasted--seconds or minutes.  But I left the experience with a profound sense of comfort.  The experience was not a promise that pain would go away, only that God was there in the midst of it all and had not abandoned me.  And I think God was pleased that my desire was to turn back to my neighbors in love.

The experience has continued to shape me.  It serves as an example of mountaintop mysticism, an experience like the one Peter, James, and John experienced when they joined Jesus on the mount of transfiguration.  The experience of God directly is so amazing and different from the daily notions we get, seeing through the mirror darkly ( 1Cor 13:12) that there is a desire to try to remain in that experience as long as possible--to hold on to the experience with everything we have.  But I think the practicality of mysticism--a mountaintop experience--is precisely that it prepares one for the 'valleys' of our lives.  The months following the miscarriage were extremely difficult, but this experience became a touchstone to me.

And there were many times that I needed the touchstone.