Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [71]
This is not about whether we should use a grave blanket or how often we visit the cemetery: this is about the eternal condition, about the souls of our children. It is cruel to assume that we can state our views on this of all issues and if it strikes at the core of another parent, if it hurts them in their consideration of their chances for heavenly reunion, well, they always have the delete key.
Among us are the weak. Weak and weary, hoping and desperate. Trodden by death and despair, they need acceptance on the most important spiritual issues from you who have offered your hands and your ears when they worried over less consequential things. For me, this discussion is not about religion. It is about grace. It is about looking at my son’s face, at the blush in his cheek and the few freckles that remained. It is reading his words and finding, I hope, the charity, humility, loyalty, and love that might be the requisites of any heaven. I close no doors that might lead him to eternal protection, that might lead me one day to his side. And I honestly believe that if we are not enlightened by the death of our children to the frailty of man, we will never be enlightened. And if we do not respond with compassion to that frailty, we have failed a very easy test.
The dialogue was full of pain, even among the believers. There were those who had had faith that God could have intervened and saved their child, but that for some unknown reason God did not. Their faith was given the most pitiless test, and some felt immense anger. It is not surprising that Job—whose children were taken from him in a test by God provoked by Satan—found his way into many of our online discussions. We are not Job, I wrote, though the wind took away our child. These deaths cannot be tests of our faith. The level of malevolence or ambivalence from a god that this conclusion requires is unthinkable. We may each, like Job, face questions of faith, including facing questions of our own pride. The lucky among us come to a complete and comforting faith. It is hard not to wish for us all the peace that comes with that acceptance.
I never accepted a God who might have chosen to intervene in the death of my boy but did not, who could have decided to stop the invisible wind that killed my son, but decided to do nothing. I listened to the Bill Moyers PBS series Genesis in which someone stated that what was not admirable could not be God’s motivation. The response was that we don’t have a God we want, we have the God we have. Both were right, maybe. God did not cause our children to die and did not wish them pain or suffering, and it was not that—this time and not another—he allowed such a terrible thing to happen. I came to understand and accept a God willing to stand back and not intervene in accident, disease, violence. It may not be the God we want—certainly it is not the God we now want—but it is the God we have, a God who lets man’s actions and the balances of nature take their course whatever the earthly consequences.
It was so in the Bible when God did not stop his beloved David from murdering Uriah because of David’s lust for Uriah’s wife, Bathsheba. Where greed or jealousy results in murder, where the lack of moderation results in accidents, when nature is cruel and God does not intervene, we must not be surprised. The causes of grief have always been part of life. The love of God is very different from a promise of protection from tragedy or pain, as perhaps all love, which is so tender, must be. Whether or not our God weeps at man’s calamities, I do not know, but I believe in the promise of neither intervention nor protection but only of salvation and enlightenment.
I would speak to Wade of all that happened. Although I knew him well enough to know what he would say in response, he did not speak to me. As the weather got cold and