I have to be honest. This is the hardest thing Nouwen says, and I am not sure I believe it yet.
He is writing to his father, six months after his mother’s death, and he builds a careful argument — rooted in John 16:7, in the words of Jesus to his disciples on the night before the cross — that his mother’s departure is, in some mysterious way, good for them. He says it plainly, and he knows how it sounds: It is good for us that she left us, and to the extent that we do not accept this we have not yet fully understood the meaning of her life.
I have read that sentence many times since December 22. I have not yet been able to say it without resistance.
Because sixty years is not an abstraction. It is a particular woman in a particular life — a woman who loved without condition and without calculation, who carried the gospel into a country most people had never heard of and then to Ecuador and South Africa and then to thirty years’ worth of residence halls, and who gave decades of herself to young women who needed someone to believe in them before they could believe in themselves. A woman whose life verse was John 13:35 — By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another — not because she had chosen an inspiring motto but because she had organized her entire existence around it, from the vacation Bible school she started on her own road as a child to the social media posts she wrote in the final weeks of her life.
And then there is this: her last Sunday in church, before any of us knew about the cancer, she was organizing a book club for the ladies of the congregation. She was not winding down. She was not settling accounts or tying up loose ends. She was beginning something. There was nothing in her that was finished. There was nothing in her that was ready to be done.
And yet.
Jesus said it was expedient — that word means to the advantage of. He said the disciples would receive something through his going that his staying could not give them. And Nouwen says his mother’s going has opened in him dimensions of life and love and eternity that her presence, as beautiful as it was, had kept just out of reach.
I am not able to say that yet. But I am willing to sit with the possibility that what Nouwen discovered, I am also in the early pages of discovering. That the loss is real. And that what is being born in the loss is also real.
And that Carol — who organized a Bible school as a child and was organizing a book club the Sunday before her world changed, who never in sixty years gave me less than everything she had — may still have something left to give.
Abba Father, I do not yet have the faith for this. But I am willing to be brought to it.