Bless the Name, Part One: The Hedge
The young man had not come to pray. He had come because the church was open and his apartment was not a place he could stand to be that afternoon, three weeks after they had buried his father, and the cool dark of the nave asked nothing of him. He slid into a pew near the front with no real intention, the way a man sits down when his legs have simply stopped agreeing to carry him.
That was when he noticed the other man.
He knelt a few pews ahead, nearer the sanctuary. He was older, though not yet old, his hair gone more grey than not, and he was very still. In his hands he held a photograph, the small glossy kind that used to come back in paper envelopes from the drugstore, and he was looking at it the way you look at something you have long since memorized and cannot stop checking anyway. A woman. Three boys. It was hard to tell their ages from behind.
The old man's shoulders moved once. He was weeping.
And he was smiling.
The young man could not make the two things fit together. He had spent three weeks learning the exact weight of grief, the way it sat on the chest and made a liar out of every clock, and nothing in it had ever once resembled whatever was moving now across the old man's face. The tears he understood. The smile frightened him a little.
He should have left it alone. Grief had made him graceless, had worn clean through the part of a man that knows when to look away, and so before he had quite decided to speak he heard his own voice go out across the pews.
"Are you all right?"
The old man turned. He did not seem startled, or caught at anything. He looked at the young man a moment with eyes that were red and perfectly steady, and then he looked back toward the small red lamp burning beside the tabernacle.
"Today is the day I lost them," he said. "All of them. Ten years now." His thumb moved along the edge of the photograph. "I came to say thank you."
"Thank you." The young man heard it come out of him wrong, harder than he had meant. "You come here to thank Him. For that."
"For them," the old man said, gently. "For their being given to me at all. For where they are now." He seemed to hear the other thing folded inside the question, the thing the young man had not quite dared to say, and he did not flinch from it. "You think I am thanking Him for taking them."
The young man said nothing, and the nothing was its own answer.
"My father died three weeks ago." He had not planned to say it. It had been sitting behind his teeth for twenty-one days, and now it came out here, to a stranger, under the red lamp. "Everyone keeps telling me there was a reason. That it was God's will. And I want to believe them, and I cannot, and I do not even know which of those two things is worse." He looked at the old man's dry, wet, smiling face. "How do you do that. How do you sit here and thank anyone."
The old man nodded slowly, the way a man nods at something he has heard before, or perhaps once said himself, a long way back down the road.
"You asked me if I am all right," he said. "That is a longer answer than you are expecting, and it does not begin where you think. It does not begin with the day they died. If I am going to tell you how I can say thank you and mean it, and not be lying to God or to you, then I have to start a long way before the thanks. Back when I had everything, and had not yet been asked to pay a single cent for any of it."
He was quiet for a moment.
"I was a happy man, once," he said. "That is the part no one thinks to warn you is dangerous."
I want to tell you first what it is to be blessed and not even know the word for it.
I had a wife. Her name I will tell you later, if I am able. It still costs me something to say it out loud in a room. I had three sons. I had work that tired me in the good way. I had a faith I would have told you, without a flicker of doubt, was strong.
It was not strong. I understand that now. It had simply never once been tried. There is all the difference in the world between a wall that is strong and a wall that has merely never had anything heavy lean against it, and standing there in the warm middle of my life I could not have told you which of the two I was. I went to Mass. I believed what the Church taught the way I believed the sun would come up in the morning, which is to say I did not truly think about it at all. I only counted on it. God had been good to me, and I was grateful in the loose and easy and frankly cheap way that a man is grateful for a stretch of fine weather.
There is a line in the book of Job I did not understand until very late. The devil says to God, concerning Job, have you not put a hedge around him and around his house and around everything he has? He means it as an accusation. Of course the man loves you. Look how you have fenced him in on every side with good things. Take them away, and see what he says to you then.
I had a hedge. I did not know that I had one. I suppose that is what a hedge is for. You are not meant to notice it. You are meant only to be safe inside it, and to mistake that safety for something you yourself have built, or worse, for the simple ordinary nature of things.
Let me tell you one small thing from inside that hedge, because you are going to need it later, though you cannot possibly know yet why.
On Sundays we drank wine at dinner. Nothing remarkable, a cheap bottle from the shop at the end of the road, but my wife made a small ceremony out of it. She would pour a glass for the two of us and a splash cut with water for the older boys, and we would say grace over it, and my youngest would make the very same joke every single week about being old enough now for a proper glass, and every single week we laughed at it as though we had never once heard it before. It was a good thing. I need you to hear me say that plainly, because everything that comes afterward hangs on it. The wine was good. The table was good. God made the fruit of the vine and the gladness it is meant to give a man, and He meant it for precisely that, for a family laughing together on a Sunday evening with the light going gold in the window.
I did not know yet what I would one day do with a bottle of wine, in a dark kitchen, with no one left in the house to say grace to. I could not have pictured it. If you had sat me down at that same table and described it to me, I would not have believed the man in your description was me. That is the last thing I will tell you about the hedge, and it is the most important. From inside it, you cannot imagine the man you become outside it. You think the good things are simply good, and that you are good yourself for being surrounded by them, and you have no idea, none at all, that a thing can be entirely good and still become the very rope a man hangs himself with, if he reaches for it in the wrong hour, for the wrong reason, in the place where the Giver used to stand.
The old man stopped. Somewhere outside a car went past, its sound rising and thinning and then gone.
"That is where it begins," he said. "Not with the loss. With everything that came before the loss. You have to see the hedge, and love it a little the way I loved it, before I can show you the day it came down."
I will not make you sit through the phone call. There is a mercy in telling it quickly, and in any case I have never once been able to tell it slowly.
I was at work. That is the whole ugly hinge of it, and I have turned it over ten thousand times and it has never worn smooth. I was at work, and they were driving out to meet me, because I could not get away to go to them. A road I had driven a hundred times. A road with nothing wrong with it. The middle of an ordinary afternoon.
The phone rang. A voice I did not know said my name and asked was I sitting down, and I have hated that question ever since, because there is no chair in the world low enough for what comes after it.
All of them. My wife. My three sons. The youngest was nine, and he had a joke he made every Sunday.
They were coming to me, and they did not arrive, and they were never going to arrive again, and I was standing in a bright office with a stapler in my hand and a calendar on the wall with their names in it, in my own handwriting, for things that were now never going to happen.
That is the blow. I will not dress it up for you. You already know its shape. You are carrying your own.
Here is the thing no one tells you about a grief like that, and it is the thing I most need you to understand, because everything else in my story turns on it.
The mind will not sit still inside it. It cannot. It goes looking for a door.
The first door it tried was me. If I had not been working. If I had driven out to them instead. If I had asked them to come an hour later. Or an hour sooner. Or on the Tuesday. I walked through every one of those doors a thousand times, on my knees some nights, and do you know what I found on the other side of each of them?
Nothing. I found that I had done nothing wrong. I was a man who had gone to work on a weekday. There was no sin in it and no failure in it. There was nothing to confess and nothing to forgive, and I want you to hear that, because you have been sitting there trying to find the thing you did to deserve your father's death, and I am telling you now, before we go one step further, that you will not find it. It is not there. That is not how any of this works.
But here is what a grief does when it cannot find a man to blame. It does not stop. It climbs.
There had been another man, of course. There is always another man. Someone had done something on that road, some small and terrible and ordinary thing, and he had done it, and he was as dead as my boys. I could not even hate him properly. I would reach for the hatred and my hand would close on a coffin. He had free will, and he had used it, and it had cost me everything, and then it had cost him everything too, and there was no one left standing at the end of that road for me to scream at.
No one, that is, except the One who had been standing there the whole while. Watching the road. Able, if He is what you say He is, to have moved a single second, a single foot, a single anything, and choosing not to.
I did not curse Him. Not then. I want you to notice that, because later in the telling you will be sure that I did, and I did not. What I did was worse, in its way, and more honest. I filed a charge. I stood in the wreckage of my whole life and I turned, for the first time in my comfortable believing life, and I looked straight at God and I said, explain this. You owe me this much. Explain it, or I am finished.
And there was a verse that came to me in those weeks, unbidden, and I hated it. It was David, over the body of his child. I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me. It sat in me like a swallowed stone. I did not want to go to them someday. I wanted them back at my table on Sunday. I could not yet understand that the verse was not a cruelty at all. It was the first thin thread of the rope God would lower to me, much later, in the dark. But I could not see that then. All I could see was the office and the calendar and the chair that no one could ever sit low enough in.
You already know what people say. You told me some of it yourself, a few minutes ago, without even noticing that you were quoting them.
They came to my house with casseroles and with sentences. There was a reason. It was his time. They are in a better place. Everything happens for a reason. God has a plan, and one day you will understand it. God needed them more than I did. People truly say that last one to a father about his nine-year-old boy. God needed him more than you.
I want to tell you something, and I want you to hold onto it, because it may be the first true thing anyone has said to you in a while. You are right to hate those sentences. The recoil you feel when you hear them is not a failure of your faith. It is nearer to the opposite of that.
Some of them are even true, or have something true buried down inside them, and that is the worst part. A man can take a true thing and use it as a lid, to press down flat over your grief so that he does not have to look at it, so that he can get back to his own dinner. That is not comfort. That is tidying. They were not trying to carry my grief with me. They were trying to make it stop making them uncomfortable, and the quickest way to do that is to explain it, because a thing explained can be set down and walked away from.
Here is what I did not know then, and what saved me later. Go and read the very end of the book of Job. After all of it, after the whirlwind, God turns, and He is angry, and He is not angry at Job. He is angry at Job's friends, the ones who sat down beside him and then could not stop themselves from explaining, who defended God with tidy reasons the whole way through. You have not spoken of me rightly, He tells them, as my servant Job has. The man who raged and demanded and threw every cheap answer back in their faces is the one God says spoke rightly of Him. The comforters with all their reasons are the ones who have to go and beg Job to pray for them.
So when they tell you there was a reason, and something in you goes hard and cold and wants to put them out of the house, do not be ashamed of it. God was on the side of that feeling before you were born.
But I have to be careful here, because I could make myself sound far better than I was.
Refusing their answers is not the same thing as keeping the faith. It would have been the easiest thing in the world, and the most natural, to take all of that rage and simply walk. A great many men do. They are handed a coffin far too small, and they turn around and leave God standing in the road, and I understand them completely. I have never once been able to look down on a single one of them.
I did something else, and I want to be honest that at the time it did not feel like strength. It felt like I did not know how to leave.
I kept going to Mass. I cannot explain it to you except to say that I went the way a man with a shattered leg still somehow drags himself to the hospital, hauling the very thing that hurts toward the one place that might have something to do about it. I sat in the back. I did not sing. Most days I did not pray in any way I would have recognized a year before, with the words in their proper order. What I did was closer to the darkest of the psalms, the ones the pleasant people skip over, where a man tells God to His face that he is drowning and that it is God's own fault and where is He now. Read Psalm 88 sometime. It is right there in the Bible, the whole black length of it, and it never resolves. It simply ends in the dark. And it is a prayer. That is what I need you to see. It is addressed to God from the first word to the last.
Because that is the secret the raging never told on itself. I was furious at God. But I was furious at Him to His face, in His own house. I never once stopped talking to Him. A man who has truly left does not bother to shout. He goes quiet, and he shuts the door. I kept the door open, mostly because I could not find the strength to close it, and it turns out that an open door is the only thing grace has ever needed.
And grace came. Not as answers. Let me be clear with you, He never once answered the charge in those years, not in the way I was demanding it. But a strange and unearned quiet would come over me sometimes after Communion, five minutes of it, sometimes ten, where the drowning simply stopped and I could not have told you why. There was a priest who never tried to explain a single thing to me, who would only sit beside me in the pew afterward and say almost nothing, which was the most eloquent thing anyone did for me in all that time. And there was that small red lamp beside the tabernacle, the very one I was kneeling under when you found me today, that I used to fix my eyes on the way a man gone overboard fixes on a light on the shore. Not because it was pulling him in yet. Because it was the one thing in all that black water that was not moving.
I need you to understand one thing about that stretch of years, because everything that comes after it depends on this, and it is the thing people always get backwards when they hear the rest of my story.
The grace never thinned out. It was there the whole way through. It was there in the very worst of it as much as in the quiet after Communion. At no point, not once, did God stop holding the rope out to me.
Remember that. Hold onto it with both hands. Because there is coming a part of this where it will look for all the world like God let go of me, and I am telling you now, ahead of time, so that you will not believe it when it looks that way. He never let go. What happened is that I stopped reaching. But that is still a way down the road from here.
For a long time, I did reach. Wounded and furious and half-drowned, I reached back for Him. I chose Him and chose Him again and chose Him for as long as I could.
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