Unmoored
Over Christmas, I read the historical fantasy novel Babel by RF Kuang. In it, a young boy is removed from his home in Canton, China and taken to London after his family died in a plague. Kuang describes how he was feeling as: “The word loss was inadequate. Loss just meant a lack, meant something was missing, but it did not encompass the totality of this severance, this terrifying un-anchoring from all that he’d ever known.” This depiction stopped me in my tracks because it so intimately portrayed what it felt like to lose my husband. Kuang is right in this sense that the word loss does not even begin to cover what happens when you lose the closest person to you, someone who was connected to every aspect of your life. It is a “severance,” an “un-anchoring.” For months I felt unmoored. If I am being honest with myself, still today, over three years later, I can still feel unmoored. My house is different without his presence, my car stays dirty longer because he was always the clean one, there is no longer a parenting partner to tap in when my patience has run dry. I don’t have someone to ask if the outfit looks good or someone else to enjoy my cooking. A bottle of wine takes much longer to finish and all of a sudden I had to figure out how to be the fun parent. I do not think I have seen more than five movies in the last three years because he always loved movies more than I did. I can go entire evenings without speaking out loud. I still find myself reaching for my phone to text him something I find funny.
Most of these examples are superficial changes. Deep in my soul, nothing was the same. The person who understood me best was gone and I felt unknown. The person who got my humor was no longer there and I felt unaccepted. The person who called me beautiful was not here and I felt unattractive. The person who called just because he had free time was not calling and I felt unlikable. The person who read his Bible in the mornings just down from where I was reading mine was dead and I felt un-communed.
I think I felt a lot like what any Judahites still following after the Lord felt when God’s presence left the temple as Ezekiel describes in Ezekiel 10. Ever since the Israelites left Egypt centuries before, God’s presence had been with them. He went ahead of them as a pillar of cloud during the day and a pillar of fire at night when they traveled to Sinai. His presence dwelt in the tabernacle as they wandered for forty years and then made their way into the promised land. When the Israelites settled into their new home, the tribes were set up around the tabernacle so that God’s presence remained in the center. Once Solomon built the temple, God dwelled there among his people as he promised he would to Moses, David, and Solomon, as long as the people followed his commands. After a few hundred years of Israel worshiping other gods and living like the nations around them instead of how God called them to live, God’s presence finally leaves and would never return to the temple. Not until Jesus close to four hundred years later.
Ezekiel, a priest called by God to prophesy to his people, saw a vision of God’s presence leaving. As a priest he would have been educated in Israel’s history and law, would have spent time in the temple, would have helped with the sacrifices given to this God who had been with them since the beginning. Ezekiel’s entire life was mediating between God and his people. The center of his world was a God who resided in Israel. And now, God had taken his residence elsewhere. The person whose presence gave every aspect of Ezekiel’s life purpose was gone. I can imagine that unmoored described Ezekiel well. And yet, unmooring was not the end of Israel’s story and it is not the end of mine.
God’s presence would return in the form of the divine Son who left his earthly throne and became a needy infant. His presence would stay as Christ through his death and resurrection and then would come as the Spirit after Jesus’s ascension. God’s people have become his temple and his presence is always with us. He will never leave or forsake.
In Christ and through the Spirit, I am not unmoored. I am not unknown or unaccepted or unattractive or unlikable or un-communed. Instead, I am intimately known, completely accepted, made attractive, delighted in, and in constant communion with the Lord my God. He holds fast even when everything I know on earth is flipped upside down. When everything changes, God remains the same and remains present. His arms are open wide in my grief and he is a strong tower in chaos. Yes, I have experienced loss too great for that word, but the true anchor of my soul was not my late husband. It is the triune God who is always with me.
Your Sister,