My son has Asperger’s syndrome, a highly functioning form of autism, which, among other challenges, causes him to see the world in black and white with little room for ambiguities. His questions about life can be poorly timed and somewhat awkward, but they are also piercing and get right to the heart of whatever issue is on his mind.
When my son meets someone for the first time, before anything else he usually asks, “How long will you be staying?” To most people it comes across as an awkward attempt to engage in conversation about the length of their visit. To some, it may seem like he is ready for them to leave before their visit even begins. Few understand that this is a question that goes straight to the center of what is really important to my son: “How long will you be in my life, and would it, therefore, be safe for me to open my heart and world up to you? Will I be safe? Will I get hurt?”
Before he is willing to open up his world to a stranger, my son wants to know that he will not feel the pain of leaving. If someone is only going to be around for a few days or weeks, he will probably not remember the person’s name and possibly won’t recognize the individual’s face from one day to the next.
To me, this says less about my son — who is just responding to the world as best as he can — and more about the fears that are at the root of much of the pain of loss that we all experience. I think there are many of us who wish it were as easy as this: to be able to enter into relationships knowing exactly how much to put out there and how much to hold back.
In his book Can You Drink the Cup?, Henri Nouwen shares the story of Gordie Henry, a boy with Down syndrome and a core member of their community. He writes, “Once [Gordie] said to me, ‘What is good about our life is that you make so many friends. What is hard about our life is that so many friends leave.’”1 The observation was simple. The friends who come into his life are a treasure. But their parting hurts deeply. Gordie recognized the paradox that is the embrace of joy and sorrow. There is, however, no paradox in my son’s question, “How long will you be staying?” For my son, it either hurts or it does not. His question says, “I either want it because it will be good for me, or I do not want it because it will be bad.”
The life Gordie had lived in the Daybreak community was one in which people would come from all over the world to live with him for various lengths of time. My son has lived a very similar life, with people coming into our community, when we lived in Nepal and now in the States, for varying lengths of time: staff members staying for a great variety of time, Servant Team members and interns coming for four months, visiting staff for a week or so, and a multitude of visitors coming into and out of our home and community.
Sooner or later for both Gordie and my son, many of their friends had to leave. Sometimes it was a marriage or continuing education; some for financial reasons or the end of their commitment with the community. Some were discerning their vocations and seeking new direction for their lives, and some simply discovered that community life was not for them. Meanwhile, these two stayed and felt the intense pain of friends leaving.
How can any of us bear this kind of loss in a healthy way? How can we continue to open our lives up to others when we fear either that they may leave us when we need them most or that we may have to leave and cause them great pain?
It is difficult, to say the least, and we make many mistakes along the way. The only answer apart from emotional detachment and other unhealthy defensive mechanisms is in open and honest dialogue with one another in an environment that is, first and foremost, safe for both the one leaving and the one staying.
This kind of safety is difficult to achieve.
In WMF as a community, we have a shared belief that we are the beloved sons and daughters of God and that our value as individuals comes directly and only from God and not from what we do, fail to do, achieve or fail to achieve. Even so, many of us still have a hard time viewing ourselves apart from what we offer the community and find it difficult to give ourselves the grace we need when we fail. That also translates into our relationships with others.
When we express the loss of someone in our community primarily through language that speaks of what they do and the functional hole they will leave rather than who they are and what they mean to us emotionally and relationally, it communicates a core belief that their value to us is not primarily in who they are but in what they do.
A second issue affecting the achievement of safety within community is our self-awareness in the process of experiencing loss and grief. We often only associate grief with death. But grief is not limited to the death of one close to us. Any significant loss in our lives triggers an emotional response. The key is to be aware of those losses and how they are affecting us, so that we can grieve that loss in a healthy way.
Grief is cumulative in our lives. We often suffer grief over more than one loss at a time, and the effects of this add up. The problem is that our culture does not give us permission to grieve well. Our culture interprets loss as something that comes in and disrupts our “normal” lives rather than as part of a normal life. Our models have taught us to avoid grieving our losses through denial, blaming, rationalizations, avoidance (I am personally an expert at this one) and even addictions.
Yet we all face many losses in our lives. Peter Scazzero writes: “the result of denying and minimizing our wounds over many years is that we become less and less human.”2 Our defenses to avoid the pain of loss cause us to be less “human” — less safe. Someone who is avoiding his or her grief over the loss of a community member is not a safe person with whom to share our own grief. A person in our community who can’t respect, instead of blaming or judging, the difficult decision of someone who left in the past is not someone who can be trusted to share your own questions and doubts about staying.
Turning toward our pain and facing it are counterintuitive. The way to life, however, is through death to ego and self-preservation. The way to hope is through facing our pain. This is what grief is essentially. It is facing our losses for what they are.
My own son’s response to the possibility of loss is to avoid it in the first place. In his world of black and white, good and bad, this is probably best. But most of us cannot live in a world governed by those kinds of rules. Instead, we live in a world of paradox, where the very thing that is the most good about our lives can also cause us the most pain. It’s like Gordie said, “What is good about our life is that you make so many friends. What is hard about our life is that so many friends leave.”
In Bread for the Journey, Nouwen reflects:
“Every time we make the decision to love someone, we open ourselves to great suffering, because those we most love cause us not only great joy but also great pain. The greatest pain comes from leaving … the pain of leaving can tear us apart.
“Still, if we want to avoid the suffering of leaving, we will never experience the joy of loving. And love is stronger than fear, life stronger than death, hope stronger than despair. We have to trust that the risk of loving is always worth taking.”3
ENDNOTES
1 Henri Nouwen, Can You Drink the Cup? (Notre Dame: Ave Maria, 1996), p. 85.
2 Peter Scazzero, Emotionally Healthy Spirituality (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2006), p. 139.
3 Henri Nouwen, Bread for the Journey (New York: HarperCollins, 1997) p. 291.
Silas (who prefers to keep his real first name a secret) did a Servant Team with WMF in 1996 and served in Kathmandu, Nepal, from 1997 until 2008 with his wife and four children. Silas now serves as the Coordinator of Community Care in the US office.