Don’t know nothin’ bout nothin’: Grief, Oblivion and Armadillos

Don’t know nothin’ bout nothin’: Grief, Oblivion and Armadillos

 

“Sorrow makes us all children again —destroys all differences of intellect. The wisest knows nothing.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

[I’ve been left in a state of not knowing by these odd mystical experiences and also by grief.  After our mother’s death, three years ago, I blogged through my grief and then turned the blog posts into a book on grief. The essay is taken from that book which will be out in the spring with Abingdon Press.]

 

Don’t know nothin’ bout nothin’

            In 1842, Ralph Waldo Emerson lost his five-year-old son Waldo to scarlatina. Waldo died on January 27th, the date of our mother’s death. A few days later Emerson began journaling about his son’s death and his own grief. He wrote, “Sorrow makes us all children again —destroys all differences of intellect. The wisest knows nothing.”[i]

            Of all the things I have read about grief lately, those words ring the truest. As Dad likes to say lately, “We don’t know nothin’ ‘bout nothin’.” Maybe this is one of the greatest gifts of sorrow; it strips us of our ordinary and often wrong-headed confidence in our own knowledge. Grief doesn’t render us dimwitted; it helps us see at last what was true all along. Oddly, there may be no more “advantageous” position for the spiritual life than knowing nothing.

            This morning before school, the girls were yelling from the bathroom. They had spotted an armadillo digging in the dirt just outside the window. Len and I ran to the bathroom to watch this astonishingly dense armadillo shuffling around in the dead leaves and digging its little holes. If the window had been open, we could have touched it, but the armadillo did not notice us. We love armadillos, but they are stupid creatures. They have these tiny little heads and tiny brains without much room for activity. And, on top of that, their vision is lousy. There we all were with our faces pressed to the window just a few feet from this armadillo. But the armadillo noticed nothing. Nothing. Nada. Dense, stupid, near senseless armadillo.

            Maybe that’s us with our tiny little brains and astonishingly poor vision. God and the saints and the angels and the heavenly hosts are just an arms-length away, close enough to touch. We see and hear nothing, but just keep shuffling around in the leaves, digging our little holes. They look on, astonished that we could be so oblivious—and they love us still.

 

[from Miles, When the One You Love Is Gone: Finding Hope and Healing in the Pilgrimage of Grief (Abingdon Press, 2012).]

 

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[i] Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Heart of Emerson’s Journals, ed. Bliss Perry (Riverside Press, 1926), 173. 

I Don’t Know

When I was 12, I had a friend who could say only three words: “I don’t know.” Riding my bike home from school, I would stop by the nursing home to visit Mrs. Feemster. She was always in her room because a stroke had not only wrecked her speech but also left her bedfast. I would tell her about my day, and she would listen sympathetically to anything I wanted to say for as long as I wanted to say it; this is the great advantage of bedfast friends.

Whatever I asked her, whatever I told her, she always replied, “I don’t know.” If I told her about the good things that had happened in my day, Mrs. Feemster would respond to me in a cheerful voice, “I don’t know.” When I told her about a bad day, Mrs. Feemster would still say “I don’t know,” but in a sad voice. And whether I said good things or bad things or nothing at all, she liked to pat my hand and watch my face with soft eyes. I counted her as a good friend

After a few months, my brother told me that I was a fool if I believed Mrs. Feemster was my friend; Mrs. Feemster didn’t even know who I was. It was a blow. So I went to talk with Mrs. Feemster about it. I told her what my brother had said and asked, “Mrs. Feemster do you know who I am? Are we friends?” I expected her to say, “I don’t know.” But Mrs. Feemster looked at me and said nothing for a long time. Then she smiled and said very slowly, each word separated by the effort it took to get them out, “I … love . . . you . . . Beka.” I was so excited. “Really?” I asked. She patted my hand and smiled again, “I don’t know.”

This is my life – as a mother, a wife, a professor, and a Christian. My words are inadequate. I can’t get things right. I don’t know. I muddle along. And, then, every now and again, by God’s grace or an opening in my heart or some other strange circumstance, I stumble on the right answer, the truth, the fitting thing to say. The rest of the time, it’s just an everyday slog through my own ignorance.

Like Mrs. Feemster, most days I just don’t have the words.

This is the problem of my life … and this blog, especially when I try to write about ecstatic religious experience. I’ve committed myself to write lots of words about something for which I have no words.

I’m not the first to discover this problem. Many first person accounts of ecstatic experiences open with the lament – “I have no words” – and then keep on going. Words don’t seem to be wanting.

Scholars of mysticism have claimed that ineffability (aka incommunicability or having no words) is a primary characteristic at the heart of ecstatic religious experience. We just don’t have words. Philosopher Peter Appleby calls this the “ineffability thesis” and goes on to say that it’s wrong. In the end he claims that the problem isn’t so much that mystics have no words, but that they have nothing to say.*

Well, that’s a comfort. I don’t have words or I have nothing to say. Either option leaves me in an awkward position … or maybe not. Maybe having no words and having nothing to say is a perfect place from which to start talking.

So, I begin this blog with the confession that anything I say here about religious experience – or about any other part of life– will be inadequate. And, really, that’s all right. This shared inadequacy puts all our words in the right light, a humbling light … a light that keeps on blinking over every last thing we say, “I’ve got it wrong. I have nothing to say. I don’t know.” But we keep on talking.

Isaac of Stella, a twelfth century British theologian who spent his life as a Cistercian monk in France, wrote about this problem with human language about God: “We say what we can when we want to speak about the Ineffable One about whom nothing can be said in the proper sense.”**

What?! We say what we can when we want to speak about the One about whom nothing can be said.

Is that going to be good enough?

I don’t know.

Notes:

*Peter Appleby, “Mysticism and Ineffability,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 11 (1980): 143-66.

**Quoted in Bernard and Patricia Ferris McGinn’s Early Christian Mystics: The Divine Vision of the Spiritual Masters (Crossroads, 2003), 11.