The Unpredictable Faithfulness of God
My grandfather passed away last night.
His bones became brittle, and his breath became faint. The light in his eyes flickered like the embers of a bonfire that won’t give, partly fighting to continue existing or begging to be extinguished.
This man is etched in my memories as one of laughter and lore. Recounting stories, sometimes a grouch but always quick to give my cousins and me a few pesos to run across the street for some chips or a palate payaso (a chocolate-covered marshmallow with gum drop eyes and smile meant to resemble a clown).
I’ve heard of my people’s parents or grandparents passing lately. Three café owners I see weekly, a friend’s grandfather in Zimbabwe, and last night, Pope Francis.
I find this unsettling – does one ever get “used” to death? Whether from age, sickness, catastrophe or any which way this vagrant comes.
We can run, hide, or try and ignore it, yet death assuredly comes. As the late Joan Didion reminds us:
“Despite our preparation, indeed, despite our age, [death] dislodges things deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us and that may cut free memories and feelings that we had thought gone to ground long ago1.”
Weirdly, or providentially, we have just come out of holy week. The time when Jesus, the God Man, himself walked toward his impending doom.
That old Dylan Thomas poem talks about raging against death, but it seems like Christ went limping, weeping, and sorrowing toward death. Groaning and pleading for it to pass and the last time I Facetimed my grandpa, I think I saw that look, his soul going quietly yet grimacing toward the light.
Maybe the scandal of easter is not that Jesus went with a cheer or a spring in his step, perhaps not even valiantly, but he entered into the ever-looming abyss with us.
And then came Sunday, not with paisley eggs and bunnies but with hope and disbelief.
Until creation’s final Sunday, we will grieve, weep, recount memories, we will wait with some groaning and possible confusion, and despite death, we will find ourselves again and again in need of the “unpredictable faithfulness of God2”
Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, (London: Fourth Estate, 2012), 31.
Andy Squyres, “God is Unpredictable,” in Poet Priest: Volume 1, 46.