catapult magazine

out of respect for the families involved with the tragedy discussed in this thread, norbert asked that we delete it. thank you to all those who shared his grief and responded to help him. your concern was truly an example of loving community.

are you looking for answers, norb? i don’t have any. i think we must despair for an answer to a non-believer’s death because it’s all we can do.

maybe we can find some comfort in CS Lewis’ picture of an infinitely wise God who will judge us according to what we were given, who perhaps wants to welcome Mallory with open arms for being Christ-like in spite of a family who did not teach her the love of the Savior. but still we despair for an answer that is not falsehood at worst or speculation at best.

maybe all i can do is cry with you and maybe that’s all you can do with Mallory’s cousin and boyfriend and best friend and parents. maybe they need someone who can say, “I don’t know any better than you do how to make it all go away.” because we have compelling reasons to despair just like we have compelling reasons to hope.

i feel like hope should triumph somehow, but can’t see any better than you can how it will in this situation. or maybe i just can’t see how the profound hope of the Gospel can comfort those in crisis who don’t know Christ. maybe all we can do is pray, as unsatisfactory as that sounds when we say it. pray for the peace that surpasses all understanding to descend from a God who is uncomprehendable goodness, who is love itself.

all this to say: i don’t know. ask alex. what can we learn from one whose mind is not cluttered yet with contradictions?

I, too, am crying with you and praying for you.

I remember being encouraged by a friend’s attitude when her husband of a little more than a year died in a car accident. Despite her grief, she reminded us and herself that his life was all a gift of grace anyway, that God was kind enough to give him to her in the first place and that she musn’t now curse Him for allowing her husband to be taken away. Yet, sometimes this Calvinist way of seeing the world seems the ugliest sort of optimism. When Calvin walked around, he was constantly amazed that walls didn’t cave in on people, that the world didn’t come to an end, though it very well should and could. For him, every good thing, every moment of life, was amazing and to be celebrated. But is this just a self-induced illusion?

I recently read a contemporary French philosophy book that said the world is just the world, in all its ugliness and beauty, and all our focusing on the good things won’t make it a good world, only the world we choose to see. I felt terrible after reading this book. It made me feel like the world just is, and it’s only up to us to make it appear as we want it to appear. I felt hopeless because I know that, when the world is only up to us, when we try to have any control, any say in the matter, we screw it up. So, there’s no comfort in control. But we don’t want to give our control up to fate or to mere coincidence either. We are not comforted by chalking ten deaths up to a foggy morning mixed with too many cars at the wrong place and wrong time. We want to be able to say and do the right things at the right moments. But that’s even beyond our control.

So maybe Calvin was on to something. If we can’t control our world, then we can only decide to love and thank God or to hate Him. I certainly don’t know what to say about the sense of death for Christians or non-Christians, but I have to be ok with that, I suppose, if I truly believe that God has the first and last word about this world.

I don’t know that there is much to say, at least not with words. Or maybe not with reasonable, logical words. there are things inside us that don’t make sense. They have to come out somehow, some way. Draw, cry, paint, pray, sing, lament, write, raise your hands to the heavens and scream.

The only comfort i can find in the face of something so horrible is that I believe that my God is okay with me screaming at him sometime, just like my dad is. And I suppose that God does with me what I do with my daughter when she is upset, he holds me.

Sometimes I wonder if the unchurched, in such a situation, do not recognize that there must be a god. But if they do, it always seems they either turn toward him, or turn further away.

It is a mystery, this death stuff. It makes me cry.

Is this Mr. Nonhof from school. I was just wondering because I just read what you typed about Mallory. Please reply to me as soon as possible.

Yeah it’s me. Please write to my e-mail address if you have questions about what I wrote ok? I don’t want to clog this site up with a personal conversation.

Thanks not telling. If you don’t feel comfortable doing that, please write me an anonymous letter and slide it under my door or something.

Nonnie out.
cnonhof@yahoo.com

death is a sour grape…best served crushed up in a bottle