He's a Grandmother, Perhaps

What is the gift of the ‘messy cry’? In a world, or in a community, in which such things go beyond expectation or comfort?

A colleague of 19 years finishes out his professional responsibilities today with a commencement address. Yesterday was his final Board meeting and last night was the formal-institutional farewell for him and his wife–a time of reflections-recollections offered by faculty, staff, and a very well spoken student on a video (given he could not attend in person). I was one of the faculty colleagues who offered up some words, which were (blessedly, with relief) well received. Emotion. Laughter in the right places. A bit of collegial rib-poking: intellectual virtue? the F/feminine? Potato, po-tah-to. A good day and evening all around, if exhausting and frustrating, sad, bittersweet.

My own grief befuddles me, leaving me uncertain and a little unnerved. Knowing today will be a crowded and overwhelming mess of people, I was sure to say my goodbye and share a hug last night. The messy cry waxed and waned on the way home, but erupted with a bit more force as I debriefed with Brian, then as I wrote to some colleagues about the more official ‘business’ aspects of my work with Board members yesterday. Such a visceral response is way out of proportion for who this colleague is, has been, for me.  Who is David for me, in my soul’s journeying, such that the grief is so pronounced? 

I have kept a care-full distance over the years, respecting the professional boundaries and his role as my supervisor in academic things. We have been professionally quite friendly, sharing in the inanities of academic/vocational life at United with laughter, some cynicism, frustration and celebration too. But I would not call him close, in the ways I know close friends. His dry Texan masculinity prevents the kind of connection I know with other male spirit-friends in my life (thinking Irwin, Brad, for instance). He is inordinately uncomfortable with overt expressions of emotion, so I have kept a tight rein on this large, deep-feeling part of me. I don’t emote at United, by and large, and academic colleagues appreciate it, methinks.

Then Brian said something last night, something that touched a piece of it at least: he’s a grandmother, perhaps. The first image that came to my awareness was a drum circle, strangely enough. The steady beat that holds the center, around which all other drummers weave their rhythms in and out, is called the Grandmother Beat. David has certainly been a steady beat at the heart of United for a very long time. His leadership style and his spiritual work sacrificed much so to insure United’s stability, or if not that, then more security than it had before he arrived.

That’s not what Brian was saying, though. He was suggesting that David touches the life-strand of my paternal grandmother, Ruth Berger Hess. I’m not quite sure how to name how that is true, but I feel the truth of it all the same.

My Grandma Ruth is a complicated figure in my storyline–a scriptural literalist who grew increasingly rigid in her faith as she aged; an absolute rock around which her family revolved. She was the masculine in my family line (while my Grandpa Ben stewarded the F/feminine). Fierce. Loving. Unbending. Overbearing. And for me, emotionally unreachable. Her faith expression meant that she bonded well with my sister, if not with me. My father informed me toward the end of her life that she thought I hated her. Or at least did not love her. I wrote her a card of affection, but there was always this emotional distance between us, perhaps born of familiarity or similarity that made her uncomfortable. (I wasn’t self-reflective enough at that age to have much feeling about it…) [Ruth Berger Hess, with her eldest son, Karl, both of blessed memory].

My uncle and my father have both noted how much I am like my grandmother, if not in these faith-family ways. Grandma Ruth was a young woman with will, and an autonomy deeply impacted by an overbearing German-American father. She developed close friendships, even toward the end of her life. She was the first woman writer of my family line, writing a weekly family letter (with three mimeographed-copies) for over forty years. But she was a woman with a powerful agency in her own indirect way(s). She always found a way to pursue her ends, even if it was indirect and situationally adept, plausibly acceptable for the system in which she lived, served, loved. She was a force to be reckoned with, unsure what to do when her granddaughter demonstrated similar force.

About five years ago, the grief I have for how little emotional access I had with her surfaced in some intensity. (She died in the mid-80’s, after a beautiful day of a doctor’s appointment, a hug of her son–my father–lunch with a friend, getting her hair done, dinner, then a post-dinner nap-heart attack). Decades after her death, I began to express my own lament at how little I knew her. How complicated my relationship was with her. My deep appreciation for her, even as we were not emotionally close, in my sense of things. Blessedly, one of her best friends in life, Yvonne Becker, was still living up in Troy. I arranged to visit with her and recorded our lengthy conversation on my phone. I learned more about Grandma’s and my similarities, but also how connected my own path of Spirit has been with the friendships my grandmother sustained for so long. The largest bit being how overwhelming life in the Spirit can be in today’s congregational, fear-driven churches. Godde wants to offer so much more than our currently configured communities know how to receive, withstand, sustain.

David does touch a lot of this emotional weather in my soul’s journeying. He and I have little overt emotion expressed between us. We are vastly different in the Spirit that yet holds our path in a oneness I can feel, sense. We belong together in this faith family, yet struggle to understand or see one another as we are. And to have so little access to the emotional expressions underlying such belonging creates a sense of sadness or yearning in me. Intensely, at times, aware of the spirited-belonging yet also the lived separations of personality, narrative, familiarity.

Departure into leadership of another seminary doesn’t alter any of this, really, which is why my own grief befuddles, I guess. I will miss the competence and articulate leadership he brought into my professional world, but the professional world of United is such a small fraction of my sacred work that it won’t be a huge loss for my spirit. [I care about United, but not as he does, did, does. Part of our differentiation...]. I suppose I had some dreams of working on an intellectual-project of some kind with David, demonstrating how to live and love in ecclesial difference. I grieve the sense of easy-access to that kind of possibility, perhaps. Particularly as his new role will surely be all-consuming of his time, focus.

In the end, David’s movement into leadership at Asbury won’t dramatically alter my own sacred work in the world, though I will miss the steady heartbeat of what he brought to United. [I will say that I crafted my summer course differently, recognizing that there was no longer an institutional need to hold a center-bridge across differences. I felt much freer to just do what I do as who I am, letting the both/and commitment go, just as United has let it go...] David's lack of proximity won’t alter the immediacy of text-access and the occasional nudge in to see how Spirit is tending his spirit. I may have even more access or availability to the writings and speaking-leadership contributions he makes, given I do care for him in the way that I do. I will wind up prioritizing my time to receive those things, missing the regular informal connections we had with proximity.

Brian was perceptive to sense that the emotional-visceral griefwork does touch into my paternal grandmother storyline. I will always want and need more emotional expression than any dry Texan man could imagine for himself. I wouldn’t want David to change that in the slightest, of course, and my heart is always big for the intensity of Spirit-spirit friendship borne in faithful human connection. I will always yearn for more than David knows how to express. Grandma Ruth in spades.