Innocence & The Pit
A reflection on loss, memory, and the storms of life.
On a recent afternoon with my 6th grade literature students, it was my turn to read aloud from Marjorie Rawling’s The Yearling. It almost undid me.
The book itself is a coming-of-age tale about a boy named Jody living in the scrub forest of Florida. The particular chapter I read though was about Jody’s dear friend, Fodder-wing, who unexpectedly passes away. Jody goes to visit, and Fodder-wing’s brother, Buck, brings him to the body. Once there, Jody freezes:
“Jody's throat worked. No words came. Fodder-wing seemed made of tallow, like a candle. Suddenly he was familiar. Jody whispered, "Hey." The paralysis broke, having spoken. His throat tightened as though a rope choked it. Fodder-wing's silence was intolerable. Now he understood. This was death. Death was a silence that gave back no answer. Fodder-wing would never speak to him again. He turned and buried his face against Buck's chest. The big arms gripped him. He stood a long time. Buck said, "I knowed you'd hate it fearful."1
There are times when December 2008 comes back like it was yesterday. Reading The Yearling to my students was one of those times.
I was 18 years old, and it was a couple days after Christmas when I got the news that one of my good childhood friends, Tyler, was dead. I was home from college for the break. My sister woke me abruptly that morning with a grave tone. The phone was for me. My friend, Sam, was on the other line, “Sam, what’s going on?” “Tyler’s dead…He’s dead…His mom found him this morning on the floor of their upstairs bathroom.”
Like Jody, I couldn’t make sense of it: “The words had no meaning…But a coldness followed their passing, and a numbness took [Jody]. He was confused…The numbness grew into a paralysis. He felt no sorrow, only a coldness and a faintness. Fodder-wing was neither dead nor alive. He was, simply, nowhere at all.”2
—
Tyler and I grew up in rural Missouri. We attended parochial Catholic school together for 13 years. We played football together all through high school. He played running back and outside linebacker, and he flew around the field like a missile. He was fearless.
Outside of football, we drifted apart in high school. Tyler fell in with a crowd that was always looking for a “good” time. Though in his case, Tyler’s misadventures were more an escape than a good time. He first got into marijuana and heavy drinking, which were gateways to the heavier substances he experimented with during our last two years of high school: cocaine and eventually heroin. The latter finally took his life when he overdosed just after Christmas in 2008.
I remember driving the five minutes down the road that morning to his house. I remember walking up his driveway - the garage door was open. I remember embracing his dad outside the garage and crying with him. I remember sitting in the living room with his family. The atmosphere was lifeless, cold, and distant. The gloom around and inside the house was palpable.
His dad asked me to give the eulogy at the funeral Mass later that week. I said yes right away but without thinking. On my way home I didn’t know what I was going to say, unsure if I had the emotional resolve to stand in front of our community, our friends, his family, and speak blessing into the darkness of that trial.
Later that night, to help prepare, a small group of us friends (who had played ball together) gathered in our basement as we shared stories about Tyler, laughed together, and cried together. While a semblance of what I was going to say started to come together, what’s still the most memorable was his dad’s request that, “We want people to remember that he was a good kid. He had a good heart, and he really loved his younger brother and sister…He was a good kid.”
—
The hardest part came later that week at the wake. It was an open casket. I held it together through the greeting line and even at his casket. My mom stood with me and helped me pray over him.
Tyler’s lifeless body was “like as if you blowed out a candle.”3 Over top his suit he had on his football jersey, with a Rosary around his hands. Though I spoke to him a nick-name we shared together from our football experiences, he’d never speak it back. Everything about that moment felt numb, cold, and faint.
When I walked back out to the foyer of the funeral home, one of our coaches had just arrived. I tried to “bear up,”4 but for whatever reason, when our eyes met, I came undone.
The Lord was hard that day.5 It was one of those rare moments in life when you get a sense of what was felt when “Jesus wept.”6
—
When I think of that experience of brokenness and loss, and when I think about my own brokenness, I’m reminded of “the pit” where Jesus was on the night of his arrest & trial, before his crucifixion. A place of utter darkness and loneliness.
In a recent conversation I had with a good friend, Fr. James, we explored this idea of “being in the pit.” Fr. James’s response: we can’t avoid the pit. If we try to, we’ll miss the opportunity to encounter Jesus, who desires to be with us in our lowest place. The pit is a place of radical vulnerability and intimacy with the Lord.
In Luke’s account of Jesus’s call of the first disciples, He met them at a moment of exhaustion:
“[Jesus] said to Simon, “Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch.” And Simon answered, “Master, we toiled all night and took nothing! But at your word I will let down the nets.” And when they had done this, they enclosed a large number of fish, and their nets were breaking… But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus' knees, saying, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.” For he and all who were with him were astonished at the catch of fish that they had taken, and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. And Jesus said to Simon, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching men.” And when they had brought their boats to land, they left everything and followed him.”7
In the pit, we have a choice. We can either fully surrender to His call to live the life we were always searching for - to live from love. Or we can despair in a myriad of ways and continue to cower in fear.
Death, suffering, and loss are inevitable for every one of us. But how many of us truly attend and attune to the life He wants for us?
Sometimes the pit is the loss of a loved one or a friend. Sometimes it’s a broken marriage or home. Sometimes it’s depression, anxiety, loneliness or isolation. Sometimes it’s the emotional paralysis of fears that we’ve been wrestling with our entire lives because of toxic relational patterns or trauma from childhood. Sometimes it’s all those things at once.
The storms of life will come. In these dark experiences, in the darkest places of our hearts, if we relent, He’ll allow us to “see” and experience our deepest fears and sorrows in relation to what He experienced in His suffering.
—
The storms where Tyler and I grew up in Missouri were at once both terrifying and awe-inspiring. Each spring’s storms included cloud formations with deep, rich colors of dark blue, charcoal gray, and some nearly pitch-black. Every March through June included frequent trips to the basement during tornado warnings. But when a storm came and that particular siren didn’t sound, we’d sit on the front porch and watch the whole thing in spellbound wonder.
We’d watch the storms with my dad, grateful for and satisfied by his calm and peaceful presence amidst the chaos just a few feet away outside the cover of the porch. As I’ve grown older, I’ve seen how Jesus calls, comes to, and is with us amidst the storms of life.
When you’re on the porch in the innocence of youth, you can simply marvel at a storm’s grandeur under the security of your father. When you're older and under the curse of Adam, in the midst of the storms of life, it’s difficult to hear, let alone see, His presence among you, calling you out of your fears and into His love and courage.
You realize that the worst part of the storms aren’t so much what’s happening to you, which is almost always outside of your control, but rather how you interpret and respond to what life brings your way.
The storms inside you can be paralyzing and leave you operating from blind spots and relational toxicities that take years to recover from. I was reminded of this recently when I stumbled across a brief, but thoughtful reflection on personal healing written by Jonathan Dixon (with the Alpha Omega Clinic in northern Virginia).
Reflecting on a line of Kierkegaard’s - Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards - Dixon writes that
“We don’t get over things. We integrate them into our story. Much of the healing process is centered around this task; creating new experiences and ways of interacting with events in the past. By expanding and re-organizing our emotional responses, we open up new possibilities for the future.
Without integration, we tend to get stuck in rigid patterns of coping. The echoes of the past come alive in the present and we are thrown into a survival stance. This then reflects and creates further distress in a cyclical pattern. The limbic system (the part of our brain involved in behavioral and emotional responses) knows no chronology; it doesn’t matter if something happened ten minutes ago or ten years ago, if it’s distressing enough, it’ll send us into fight, flight, or freeze. Having a framework for understanding our experience and the patterns that developed around it help us chart a new path forward.”
Perhaps this is one reason why Jesus bears the wounds of his crucifixion even in his resurrected body. Indeed, John beheld a lamb, as if slain.8
—
This is His mission, to reintegrate us within Himself, the Logos. To re-store us within His story.
We don’t get over things. We integrate them into our story…Without integration…the echoes of the past come alive in the present and we are thrown into a survival stance.
The Lord is nearer to us than we are to ourselves. Amidst the storm He calls.
In distress you called, and I delivered you; I answered you in the secret place of thunder; I tested you at the waters of Meribah. (Psalm 81:7)
He is with us down to the depths.
If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. (Psalm 139:8)
In the depths of our own hearts, in the depths of our own brokenness, He re-integrates us. He re-stories us. He binds up. We don’t get over things…We integrate them into our story.
Remember, they saw His marks. They touched His wounds.9
I find solace in this line from Gaudium et spes: “The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light.” He “fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear. It is not surprising, then, that in Him all the aforementioned truths find their root and attain their crown.”10
—
My experience of The Yearling was filled with wistful, sentimental longing for my own youth, reminding me of the tranquility and slowness of innocence. But the pits of life make us old quickly. What a masterful and paradoxical turn of phrase that Jody thought (before he learned of Fodderwing’s death) “it was good to become old and see the sights and hear the sounds that men saw and hear.”
But the curse lingers in the heart, expressing itself through the sorrowful mysteries of life. If we open ourselves to encounter Him in the pit, he’ll make our hearts a garden again. He’ll restore us to His love and good purposes.
In peace,
Ted
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Rawlings, The Yearling, 242-244.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., 243.
Ibid., 244.
John 11:35.
John 5:1-11.
Rev. 5:6.
John 20:27.
Gaudium et spes, 22.