The True Story Is the One We Are Living

A Mother's Day Sermon

This month’s post is from a sermon I gave at Pilgrim Congregational Church in Bozeman, and is based on John 16:16–33. The text below has been very lightly edited.

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Happy Mother’s Day! Spring is finally here in Montana. Trees are growing new leaves and pale brown lawns are being invaded with a wild green. Florists are out of flowers. Chocolatiers are out of chocolate. Restaurant staff across the country are staggering under the burden of brunch orders—quiches, mimosas, golden waffles smothered with whipped cream.

Today, like many days, I am grateful for my mother, Linda, whose wisdom and humor and resilience and love have been sustaining forces in my life. I am grateful, too, for my grandmothers, mother-in-law, and not a few teachers and mentors along the way. “Mother” is most commonly used as a noun, and to describe a particular relationship, but it’s also a verb.

Even knowing this, I had a difficult Mother’s Day some years ago, the Spring after I’d had my first miscarriage. I’d thought that I was more or less over the loss when Mother’s Day rolled around, making me realize how fresh the grief could feel. I did not know then how much more grief would come in the years that followed, as Kirke and I went on to experience two more failed pregnancies and long stretches of anxious waiting.

Our story is not uncommon, and you could fairly argue that it has reached a happy conclusion—after all, we have two exquisite children. So if you want the tidy version, there it is: there was darkness, and then light. Loss, and then love. Grief, and then joy.

That version might be factual, but it doesn’t always feel true. The children I have punctuate my days with joy; but I sometimes find myself feeling the weight of those old losses, and not quite sure what to do with them. At the same time, I feel this vague cultural expectation to fit those losses into a neat story, to present a version of them in which they serve a purpose. I find this expectation problematic, though, because it implies that we must suffer to experience joy. That we have to be brought low in order to be lifted up. Taken to an extreme, this attitude can lead to the view that a suffering person doesn’t really need help—after all, something good must be around the corner!

I do think grief can prepare us for joyful experiences, but I can't believe that our joyful experiences require grief, or that pain is the toll we pay to get on some smooth and sunny highway. 

And I think I’m with scripture on this one. Today’s text is from a long discourse Jesus delivers toward the end of the Gospel of John. The speech is so long—four whole chapters—that it’s easy to lose sight of its context: Jesus dismisses Judas to “Do quickly what you are going to do” (13:27)—i.e., betray him. Then he gives this long speech, with only a few interruptions by his disciples; then he and his disciples go to a garden, where he’s arrested by a group of soldiers led there by Judas.

So Jesus is depicted as knowing that he is saying goodbye—goodbye for now, anyway. Narratively speaking, it’s a good moment for him to offer some pretty key insights, final words on the divine plan. Which he does. Sort of. And also sort of not. 

On the surface it seems Jesus is offering a straightforward foretelling of what’s to come: he’s going to die and be resurrected. There will be pain and then joy. Loss and then completion. “A little while,” he tells the disciples in verse 16, “and you will no longer see me, and again a little while, and you will see me.”

But Jesus refuses to articulate any sort of earthly time frame here. It’s just a little while of this, a little while of that, with a general trajectory of pain to joy, loss to wholeness. 

“When a woman is in labor,” Jesus says, by way of an illustration, “she has pain… But when her child is born, she no longer remembers the anguish” (v 21). I've long heard it said, with a certain authority, that there's some biological mechanism by which women forget the pain of childbirth. For a long time I believed it, because why else would a person be willing to endure such a difficult physical experience more than once, perhaps many times?

But it turns out that post-labor amnesia is a myth. I certainly didn’t have it, anyway. Recent studies actually indicate that, rather than forget their pain, women tend to recontextualize their childbirth experience, and—if they’re lucky—are able to reframe it in positive ways. The pain doesn’t disappear; instead, their relationship to it changes. This was certainly the case for me. In fact, in the days after my second child was born, I could practically observe this happening: each time I revisited the memory of my labor, it was a more beautiful, more valuable experience. The facts of labor didn’t change, but how I felt about those facts did. 

Let me point out, too, that this doesn’t contradict scripture. Jesus is not saying that women forget the pain of labor: he’s saying that they don’t remember it. That’s different. The Greek word here has to do with whether or not something is, at present, in one's thoughts, not whether or not something could possibly be remembered. 

In Jesus’ account, then, labor pain is not erased by the birth of a child. Maybe we could say that it is replaced. Or recontextualized. It is present, but not immediate. Real, but part of a new and different reality. Extending this metaphor, I’d like to argue that loss and grief do not magically disappear thanks to a divine fixer who comes along to obliterate every bad memory via some new joy.

Actually, I wonder if our wholeness as humans depends somehow on experiencing the grace of renewal and resurrection in our own lives—not, to be clear, because pain earns us pleasure, but because there are factual and demonstrable agonies and injustices in this life. Pain is not going anywhere, but neither, apparently, is the love of God. And experiencing the transformative power of this love is, perhaps, what makes us most fully and truly alive.

Do I think that God eventually wipes every tear? Yes—sometimes. I want to believe it, anyway, because the alternative is too bleak. And how long until then? Jesus tells us, “A little while.” How long is “a little while”? I don’t know. One possible answer is “at least two millennia.” That’s fair. But I can also say that in my own lifetime—which is my microcosm for understanding this world—I've had moments in which my joy seemed complete, and moments in which grief seemed the only reality. A little while of this, a little while of that.

I believe I’m called, as a person of faith, to be a witness to these comings and goings, to hold them in the presence of God, to be on the lookout for grace without deciding the form it has to take.

This is a task that takes heart. I was recently listening to Kate Bowler—an academic, author, and podcaster—interview mental health nurse John Swinton. For context, Bowler was diagnosed with Stage IV cancer in her thirties, and is a funny and fierce advocate for bringing great honesty and love to the experience of suffering. In the podcast, Bowler explains that she is currently moving out of the house where she “lived and almost died.” These are her words:

… Leaving it felt so odd because every cupboard was full of medical supplies and there was one room … where I would quietly give myself these needles and then go take my son out of his crib, but really be hiding my chemotherapy pack. And like, there [were] just so many parts of it that were … such a heartbreaker. But it was also the home I brought my son home to … 

To try and hold these disparate experiences together, Bowler turned to a friend for help. She needed to move on—literally and figuratively—but she knew moving on wasn't as simple as just leaving. So, as Bowler tells it, the friend came to her house and

… we went room by room and told every hard, terrible story of the thing that had been … And then [we] bless[ed] the person who we hoped would come after and then the person that we hope I might yet be.

On the podcast, Swinton then asks Bowler, “And do you feel better for it?” Bowler replies, “I do. Yeah.” But you can hear the fatigue in her voice. Then she admits, “I do feel a bit wrung out.”

It would have been tidier for her to say, “Absolutely. I am so cleansed! Everything fits together now.” But this wouldn’t have been true. 

In this worship series, we are meditating on metamorphosis and emergence—wonderful themes illustrated by way of a caterpillar becoming a butterfly. Today I want to consider a particular element of that transformation: the chrysalis. Until exactly last week, I thought a chrysalis was something that a caterpillar built around itself—a little home it made. Not so. A chrysalis is actually the caterpillar’s own skin, hardened to hold it together while it turns from caterpillar into mush and then into a butterfly. By definition, then, when a butterfly crawls out of that chrysalis and eventually flies away, it is leaving a piece of itself behind.

I can’t speak for the emotional lives of butterflies. But I can imagine, at least, that a butterfly leaving that shell of itself could feel wistful. Or relieved. Or confused. Or that it could pace up and down the stalk on which the empty chrysalis hangs, wondering what happens to this part of itself—this part that was true, real, necessary.

However much we want to honor and celebrate the newness of transformation, I hope we don’t forget how much we are shaped by what we’ve left behind: the lovely, the awful, and everything in between. 

I’ve heard people say that, someday, all our questions will be answered. Maybe they’re right, but even if they are that’s not what’s being promised in this passage. In John 16:23 Jesus says, “On that day you will ask nothing of me.” I used to read this as, "You will make no request of me." The NRSV has a note, though, with an alternate translation: “On that day you will ask me no question.”

“Asking no question” does not mean that all of my questions get answered. It means that I will experience my questions differently. Maybe they simply won’t come to mind in some glorious future. Or maybe they will always be there, but don’t need to be asked anymore. Maybe my eventual joy will make me more capable of having questions but not needing answers. Or maybe my conception of “answers” is all wrong. 

I included the last section of this chapter in the reading for today because I like how the disciples seem to arrive at their a-ha moment: “Now we know,” they exclaim, “that you know all things and do not need to have anyone question you; by this we believe that you came from God” (v 30). But Jesus, rather than applauding them, says, in so many words, “Oh yeah?” 

I can imagine him saying this wearily, but maybe he says it with great tenderness. Or maybe with regret. Or maybe with a chuckle. In any case he goes on to remind them that they’re all about to be “scattered.” Jesus tried to give them wisdom, but the disciples want to latch on to a formula. Jesus tried to point to a pattern that is true but unpredictable, but the disciples want him to commit to a timeline. 

I know I will spend the rest of my life regularly insisting on a timeline, trying to make sense of the gains and losses, the graces and griefs—trying, in other words, to account for all life, my own and our collective lives, as a matter of arithmetic. What I mean is I’ll often be trying to tell a certain kind of story—something neat, with no loose ends, no questions left over.

That may be the story I want to tell, or feel pressured to tell, but it’s not the true story. I want to be clear about something: I do believe in renewal. I do believe that the love of God can transform and heal. I couldn’t stand up  here if I didn’t. But I also think that renewal, transformation, and healing play out in ways we can’t fully account for. 

Put another way, the true story of our lives is not the one we tell, but the one we live. Maybe it doesn’t feel like the best story. Maybe it’s not even the story we want. I think that’s okay. On my best days, I even believe that is—if we give it a chance—a story that God can use to heal and hold us.

Which means that part of a life of faith is holding all these transformations as a mother holds a beloved child: tightly. 

And then she lets go. 

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