Only mercy (part 2)
On heartbreak during Holy Week
This is part two of three of a long essay—part 1 is here.
There was a time in my life, some months after graduating from college, when I’d cry upon receiving communion. It never progressed into open weeping—I tried hard to fight that—but each Sunday for weeks on end, I’d spill what I hoped were quiet, imperceptible tears somewhere between returning to my pew and the end of the last communion hymn. I had no real sense of what was happening and no words to even gesture at it. If we covered the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist in confirmation class, I’d long forgotten about it—Jesus in, with, and under the elements was not on my conscious mind. If pressed to offer an explanation for what I was experiencing, I might have arrived at something like I was ‘remembering’ Jesus’s life and death, which is to say that I would have said I was thinking about it and emotionally overwhelmed by the thought. But truthfully, I wasn’t thinking about Jesus. I was thinking about my own shitty life.
After four hard years at a college I expected to love but in the end deeply hated, I’d taken a year-long AmeriCorps position, getting paid $900 a month for menial office work billed to idealistic 22-year-olds like me as a transformative service opportunity. Food stamp eligibility had been touted as a perk of the job. We weren’t supposed to call it a job, though; we were supposed to call it a ‘year of service.’ I didn’t like what I was doing, but I didn’t know what else I wanted to do with my life, and I figured I was at least buying myself time to figure it out. I once assumed that I’d pursue graduate school immediately after college—school being one of the few things I’d ever been exceptional at—but the prospect had started to make me recoil, and my undergrad transcript suggested that I might not be that good at it anymore in any case. After getting rejected from a handful of ‘real’ jobs earlier in my senior year, I’d narrowed my post-college plans down to programs like AmeriCorps without a compelling reason; it was just what some of my friends were doing. I moved to Minneapolis simply because it was convenient, the closest big city to my small college town, and I knew enough people moving there to not have to live with strangers. I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t love it, and I didn’t know what to make of that—or whether to make anything of it at all.
I was drinking a lot then, even by the standards of my less-than-abstemious social circles, which were mostly comprised of people with whom I did almost nothing but drink. I started wondering if what increasingly seemed to be an inability to control my alcohol intake was cause for concern, and I usually took to the internet to reassure myself that I was fine. Some nights, I’d sit cross-legged on my bed with my computer on my lap, Googling ‘am I an alcoholic quiz’ while nursing a beer. I’d click through the resulting links to take a quiz or two, but always rejected the results as inaccurate if they told me anything besides a definitive no. I spent an embarrassing amount of time scrolling through the social media of a man who had rejected me, trying to decipher within the smattering of posts the reason for his rejection, which I feared was my own fundamental unlovability, something odious and off-putting about me that everyone but me could see.
My college boyfriend and I had broken up a few months earlier, near the end of our senior year. This time it seemed final, though I’d thought and said that more than once before; there had been so many last times. For the first time since we met, we weren’t speaking (in retrospect, perhaps the reason this ending actually stuck), but I often wished otherwise. Sometimes I felt like I regretted the break-up entirely, even though it had always been my decision and never his, which is to say that he was always at my mercy, and I was usually merciless.
We each maintained the agreed-upon silence, but I still found myself dwelling on what-ifs about our relationship despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that I had always been the one to hand down the judgment. I spent the many empty, mindless hours at the job I wasn’t supposed to call a job imagining what might have been different had I chosen otherwise. He was more accomplished than me, with a clearer sense of the trajectory in which his life was moving. He had moved back to Chicago, where he’d grown up, a city I knew I loved. I could have followed him there. His future seemed certain. If anchored to his, mine could have been, too.
I’d think about how much I wanted that certainty, but that thought was invariably interrupted by the memory our miserable final months together: the endless cycle of breaking up and reconciling, crying and yelling, then crying about yelling as we promised we wouldn’t yell like that anymore, the sheepish announcements to our friends each time we broke up, each time we got back together. I wondered if it might not be better this way. It seemed like we had been spared some worse fate, which is to say that maybe it was ultimately a mercy that we weren’t together. I think it might have been.
All of this is to say that I wasn’t thinking about Jesus, not really. I was thinking about my listlessness, my lackluster love life, my apparent lack of willpower around alcohol. Not Jesus, but the shape of a life I feared was turning out smaller, sadder, and more aimless than I’d ever envisioned. But Jesus didn’t seem to mind. He got through to me anyway. I didn’t know it then, but that’s why I was crying.
* * *
I cried in church that Holy Week, too. On Maundy Thursday, I gave a sermon that I’d hastily rewritten the day before, abandoning the version I’d spent two weeks working on for one that didn’t read as quite so trite. I teared up while writing it but remained composed while preaching, at least until the end, when my throat tightened, my voice cracked, and my cheeks flushed as I thought about how embarrassed I was that a break-up I was so insistent on seeing as minor had induced a public cry. I wondered if something—or someone—was trying to reach me. Jesus, perhaps.
If that’s the case, he was more successful during communion. I was already feeling raw and tender, but when I eyed my dad in the communion line, I choked up. I tried to suppress tears, but the closer he got, the harder it became. I was fully crying soon enough. I couldn’t name what, precisely, made me cry, and I still can’t. There are, I am continually forced to concede, experiences that transcend language, that refuse to be neatly parsed and semantically pinned down—a maddening reality for a writer, a person who (to borrow a phrase from Didion) has been “trained since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information [is] control.”1 Reading, as in absorbing information, has always been the means by which I grasp at control. It’s sometimes effective, but normally not: What of the things that resist being reduced down to mere ‘information’ to begin with? Control proves elusive, and illusive, there. I think, maybe, that too is its own kind of mercy, for something to take hold in us, wholly independent of us, beyond the reaches of language or logic.
When I think about that moment now, I think about its beauty: the image of my dad, among my very favorite people in the world, kneeling at the rail, palms open, expectantly waiting. But even more, I think about its transcendence: the power in the physical act of handing my dad the bread as I looked him in the eye and told him it was the body of Christ, broken for him. It wasn’t my power, and it didn’t originate within me, but it was working through me nonetheless. Neither was it my gift to give, but it was mine to receive all the same—this gift of presence, of pure grace, for him and also for me, from a power whose mercy we are all at the hands of, a power that always meets us with mercy.
There is no democracy in any love relation, but in Christ there is always mercy. There was mercy in being forced to enter Holy Week as sad as I was—and as ashamed as I was of that sadness. There was mercy in not being able to hide. Each day pulled me outside of myself, drawing my gaze away from my navel and fixing it on the cross, the ultimate mercy. The cross did not erase or negate my pain, but nor did it add to my shame or admonish me for being consumed by suffering that paled in comparison to the suffering of the one hanging upon it. What it did was enable me—for what was maybe the first time in my life—to look at the cross and see the God of the universe as the one hanging upon it, to believe that he knew something of my small suffering and shame because he had taken it on. He had taken all of ours on, no small thing at all.
The suffering of the cross is not the suffering of a break-up that you sensed you needed but did not one, yet there is something of one in the other. To say that we have something in common with God is an outrageous claim, but that is the point of the cross. Simcha Fisher writes:
There is suffering, and there is suffering, but there is only one man who suffered for the purpose of public consumption, as it were…. Jesus’ suffering is universal; it is for everyone. And at the same time, it is personal. It is for each of us as individuals, and it means what it must in our specific lives. The cross is for us to use, to co-opt, to identify with, to look to, to cling to, to use however we can so that we do not fall into the netherworld. That is what it’s for.2
There is no democracy in the cross. There could hardly be anything less just, less egalitarian about an innocent man dying for a guilty one, the only human being who has not sinned dying for the sins of the masses across time and space, a perfect Creator dying for an imperfect creation. There could hardly be anything more merciful.
* * *
I have a long history of taking a long time to move on. I mean that in every possible sense of the phrase but perhaps especially romantically. After that summer-long relationship in my mid-twenties ended, I wallowed in my sadness over it for eight full months, more than double the length of time that we’d dated. I know now that I was keeping my sadness alive through my incessant fixation on precisely where things had gone wrong, but I didn’t know that then. It took entering a new relationship with someone else for me to feel over it, though that one ended, too, so I was just asking the same obsessive questions of someone else soon enough.
He ended that final conversation—the one I kept dragging out—by suggesting the possibility of friendship somewhere down the line. He thought he would be open to that, he said. “I don’t want to not know you,” he told me. But when I texted him six weeks later—reasoning that was far enough down the proverbial line and hoping the timing didn’t seem as calculated as it was, that my syntax didn’t seem as belabored over as it was—he did not seem open to that possibility after all. His messages back to me were polite but distant, no room left within them for the renegotiation I imagined.
I thought about his earlier insistence that he didn’t want to not know me. For weeks, I had clung to that double-negative as proof of the possibility that he might later rescind the break-up, but now it seemed more like prevarication. Had he changed his mind? Had he never meant what he said? Had he believed he meant it when he said it, only to realize later that he didn’t? Who knows? Who cares? Questions like these thankfully no longer hold the allure they once did. They are the sorts of questions the dejected party might ask themselves in the aftermath of a love relation ending, in the absence of democracy, until eventually they stop asking them at all.
What it came down to, I figure now, was this: I was sad when he broke up with me and sad when he didn’t respond to my text with the enthusiasm I hoped for. But I don’t think that I ever wanted to be with him as much as I wanted him to want to be with me—or, for that matter, that I was genuinely seeking friendship so much as proof that I was still on his mind. I wanted him to regret the break-up as much as I regretted it, for him to undo the decision that I so desperately wished I could have rendered null with some imagined veto power. But I didn’t have that power. He didn’t have that regret. Somehow, that was a mercy, too.
Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, 2005.
Simcha Fisher, “The cross is meant to be co-opted,” https://www.simchafisher.com/2022/06/13/the-cross-is-meant-to-be-co-opted
Brilliant and beautiful, my brilliant and beautiful friend! I love your writing so much.
Oh how many of those “am I an alcoholic” quizzes I took with a drink in one hand. Beautiful piece.