Hurricanes, Graves, and the Dark Road

I didn’t post a blog at this time last week. Last week at this time, I was sitting on the couch in my living room – crowded with all the trees I’d brought in from my balcony – listening to Hurricane Dorian howl around the corners of the apartment building and rattle the doors and windows. The power flickered off and on, off and on. The rain came down in sheets.

A feeling of uneasiness had pervaded supermarkets and streets in the preceding days as we wondered how bad it would be and if it was better to stay or go. Everything had been doom and gloom on the news, as I’m sure you heard. As one person told me at church this week, “we were convinced Charleston was going to be wiped off the face of the earth!” Reality was, thankfully, much less dramatic,* and mainly resulted a lot of wind and rain, a few downed trees, and a very long time cooped up in a rather small apartment.

By Friday, when the sun had started shining again, I was about to go crazy if I couldn’t go outside and walk around, but between the felled trees and the traffic coming back in, I didn’t want to go too far. So I drove the two minutes to the cemetery next to my apartment complex.**

It was in pretty good shape for having been blasted by a hurricane the day before. The flowers were strewn everywhere, some of the figurines were knocked over, and a few trees had been blown down. The statue of Jesus had lost a few fingers. But he was still holding out his arms. The engraving of the Lord’s Prayer was still legible. The fountain hadn’t run dry. The sun was still shining; the grass was still green. It was alright. I wandered around, soaking in the sunlight and pondering the inscriptions.

One in particular made me think. It was engraved on a clay bench set near one of the columbariums. “If tears could form a stairway/and memories a lane/I’d climb up into Heaven/and bring you home again.” My first thought was, “if it were that easy to get into Heaven, why not just stay there?” But then I started to think more about the first part of the poem.

The truth is, we do climb up to Heaven through our tears. To receive eternal life, the gospel tells us, requires following Jesus, and I cannot follow Jesus unless I first take up my cross. Never, in the Old Testament or the New, in the gospels or the epistles or the prophecies, never in all his promises does God say the way will be easy, short, or pleasant.*** He says, in fact, that it will be narrow, filled with self-denial, sacrifice, frustration, and suffering. He says it will require everything, leaving nothing untouched. He says it is a way of death. He promises only two things of this dark road: that he will be with us, and that it will be worth it.

When hurricanes come in life, we often don’t have the option to evacuate. We’re stuck, and all we can do is wait and trust and listen to the wind howl and wonder what will be left when the sun comes out again. But as the song says, when “the night is through and the storm is past/everything that could be shaken was shaken/and all that remains is all I ever really had.”

And so we trudge on – not, mind you, because the trudging is in itself good. Not because, as Nietzsche thought, Christianity is a perverted religion titillated with self-inflicted suffering. Not because we think this is all there is or all we deserve, or because it’s adult or sensible to be stoical and subdued. We do not plod along with our shoulders slumped and our heads bowed in resignation. We march with our heads up and our eyes shining. We do not take the dark road because we like darkness. We take it because it is the only path to the only place worth going.

The picture is mine, taken the day after Dorian.

*Less so for the Bahamas, unfortunately – may they remain in our prayers.

**I know some people mind cemeteries. I like them. It’s like having a private park next to your house filled with Scripture verses and silence. Some people are unnerved by the thought of ghosts and demons, but I know what a ghost is, and I know what a demon is, and my house is kept by One who can command them.

***He says that his yoke is easy, but he also says that accepting it will mean enmity with the world and the powers that rule it. Following God does not cause us suffering; we do that to ourselves and to each other.