Wading through some grief over the loss of someone who anchored me at times, sensing the strangeness one feels when sudden loss is fresh and still surreal and suspends you from time, I heard a song titled “Swimming to the Other Side.” With a sense of my friend’s presence along with God’s, the lyrics washed over me and the chorus rhymed with my grief.
We are living ‘neath the great big dipper
We are washed by the very same rain
We are swimming in this stream together
Some in power and some in pain
We can worship this ground we walk on
Cherishing the beings that we live beside
Loving spirits will live forever
We’re all swimming to the other side
Hearing the words, feeling God’s presence, thinking of my friend, I thought about our two different worlds and the common ground bringing us together. Flailing through my grief, unable to forge my random thoughts into coherency, each surfaced long enough for me to grasp them as lessons learned from his life.
Changing contexts, I realized the song was about social justice, a god omitting God or perhaps pushing Him down the list. When I thought the song spiritual, my spirit lifted toward God. When I knew it wasn’t, I grieved all over again.
I thought how God doesn’t want us to order society. He wants to order us, arrange us so we conform to His image. I wondered what I had to give and realized the answer was only what God had given to me. Then it dawned on me if I don’t love myself, boil it down to the simple notion of feeling comfortable in my skin, I cannot begin to love another, even intuit how to love as God first loved me. Elevating within was the truth faithfulness is the long arc of a life.
Christian Wiman writes, “What is this world that we are so at odds with, this beauty by which we are so wounded, and into which God has so utterly gone? Into which, rather than from which: in a grain of grammar, a world of hope.”
Grief mortifies us, converts us, leads us into humility which means we descend from a false ascent. A form of satisfaction never remembering herself, humility never contemplates any idea to consider or to desire significance in any form. Humility is neither selflessness nor unselfishness, but she does forget self. She is the destination into which our hope and our wound find rest. Grief is the time into which God comes closest while we are living.
The golden thread running through my random thoughts was a simple lesson — friendship is the common ground we walk on, the footing for God’s witness when God is present, even when we are unaware of it. These thoughts surfacing evidenced this truth. I realized they were my friend’s witness rising within me, the fruit of our long encounter. This is all witness needs. Omit God from it and all is dust.
Thank you, Jack.
Those who have ears….