Choosing My Birthright
On the eve of my birthday, and after the dust has begun to settle from our cross-country move, I find myself sitting with some realities I wish were not real. They’re like the boxes shoved in the spare room of the house; I can pretend everything is unpacked until I walk past the door which stands ajar but refuses to open fully for all the uncategorized crap just inside.
My strategies for avoiding these truths are subtle. I excel at focusing on other rooms of the house as it were; organizing and reorganizing those comfortable realities I like to keep on display. I love my children, my spouse, my new home. And when the painful realities of the last year begin to surface—and indeed when the trauma of 2018 disturbs layers of sediment dating back to 1998— I would rather turn on the television. I flip channels aimlessly, searching for some story or song or image to replace the ones I wish weren’t in my head.
But I know that this approach to life is not sustainable. Eventually, the debris of my unacknowledged grief will spill into the hallway and make it hard to maintain a safe path for walking. Eventually, my strategies for coping will become not so subtle and people will get hurt.
And it’s strange because even though I am committed to suppressing, I simultaneously need to reminisce. To retain each memory as fully as possible. To memorize each face that I love so that I will never forget it. A few nights ago I spent about an hour looking through old pictures, thanking God for each person in my life and hoping desperately that I won’t lose them.
This seeming contradiction—of willful forgetting and careful memorizing—reminds me that at the end of the day, reality begs to be known. I can stuff it in the spare room but subconsciously I will still go looking for it. My brother committed suicide. He is gone, and it hurts, and I miss him. This reality is more than I can manage— but I am not called to manage it. I am called to love, and to live my life even when it is painful. I am called to stay alive to the grief that, properly applied, animates and energizes my commitment to the people around me.
Sometimes we need to suppress or delay the conversation about our traumas. Many of us have survived to adulthood because our minds instinctually protected us from realities that we weren’t ready to face fully. This, in my opinion, is a mercy of God; one of the ways He protects the vulnerable when others do not or cannot. But it is equally God’s mercy that allows the memories to come flooding back—sometimes in heavy waves, other times in a slow trickle—so that we can acknowledge the reality of our stories and find healing.
“Healing,” of course, is a loaded word. I used to think it meant the removal of all pain. And sometimes, blessedly, it is that. But then how do you heal from a permanent loss? How do you regenerate tissue that you watched go into the ground? I think our pain in the wake of tragedy is part of our humanity. So maybe healing leads to more pain, not less. Maybe healing means learning how to lament.
In his sermon yesterday, our pastor alluded to the story of Esau from the Old Testament, challenging us to “choose our birthright over a hot bowl of stew.” What I realized in that moment is that the stew was an attractive alternative for a reason. Not unlike television, really. We can embrace the fullness of reality with all the love and lament it requires of us, or we can distract ourselves with something more palatable.
But this year for my birthday I want to have the courage to choose my birthright— to stay alive to my own story and to the people I love, no matter what it entails. I want to receive God’s invitation to remember the past and name its evil, making peace with pain as part of life on this side of eternity. This is my birthright. It is to be formed more fully into the image of a God whose very body tells the story of betrayal and abandonment, of death and resurrection.