The Visitation

God.

I've been thinking about God more or less continuously for the past four months and trying to write about the subject for weeks now. It's always a complex and fraught subject for me, but these days my thoughts are tangled, an intractable knot of a hundred fine gold chains balled up at the bottom of a jewelry box.

Where is God? What is God? Is there a God? If so, where the fuck was He on April 3?

I was raised in a liberal Protestant household where the existence of God was assumed and Christianity was the framework for everything. How I subsequently lost my faith is a long and complicated story, but it was already gone by the time the labor and delivery nurse asked me if I wanted her to call a clergy member. Or, I thought it was. But every time I think I've reached a place of peace with the absence of God, I realize that I am clinging to some aspect or vestige of my earlier, unthinking belief. I think I've reached the ground, and then the floor gives way underneath me.

When the nurse asked me the question I said sure, and I gave her the name of the church where I am (still) a member. My membership for the last four or five years has involved writing a check for $100 so I don't get kicked off the rolls, and sometimes flipping through the newsletter that comes in the mail. Still, in grief you tend to fall back on deeply ingrained habits. My thinking was as follows: someone dies, you call the minister. Very sophisticated.

Laurie, one of the assistant pastors at the church, came within an hour ("During Easter week!", my mom exclaimed, impressed, as if God himself had showed.). I think we might have prayed, but I really don't remember. Which is not to say that Laurie wasn't a help, or that David, another minister who came the next day, didn't offer any comfort, because she was and he did, though perhaps more just by their human compassion than anything.

Later, I got a few notes and books from my relatives that conveyed a deep concern that I would blame God for what happened. The same people told me that the only way to consolation and peace was through Him. I read the dust jackets and then I put those books on a high, high shelf.

In my early twenties I worked at Westminster/John Knox Press, which is the publishing arm of the Presbyterian Church USA. While I was there we published a book about God and the Holocaust which put forth the idea of a God who was completely loving but less than omniscient. Basically, God was not able to stop the Holocaust, because God made us and then set us free to do what our violent and brutal or weak and misguided or selfish and nasty hearts require, but he sure was sad about it. It was an example, to me, of the mental gymnastics required to keep believing if you are not so stupid and callous as to believe that God wanted those millions of innocent people to die for some mysterious plan of his own. But as these things go I thought it was probably the best anyone could come up with, and I adopted the stance as my own.

But when my son died, for the first time, I glimpsed, not a world in which a sorrowful, half-strength God let me down, but a world without God. God, I saw, was invented, by human beings, to explain things like what happened to me. I felt the full power and force of Nature, heartless, brutal and inevitable, working against me, and God was not there. Sometimes in a New-Agey, squishy, intellectually fuzzy way, I realized, I had conflated the two. God, however, is not Nature, and Nature is not God. The idea of God softens, personalizes and attributes love and compassion to a fundamentally ruthless process.

Many times since, though, I have wished that I still had my faith. My sister-in-law tells me that she knows Balthazar is with God, and that he's OK. It's just the rest of us, she says, who are sad. I wish I could believe it. I wish I could believe that my beloved grandfather is up in Heaven, holding Balthazar in his arms. That my aunt Ellen and my aunt Barbara and grandmother Elsie and grandmother Clara and great-aunt Annamae are gathered around him.

I can't.

But then the bees came.


I don't believe in signs. A rainbow, a bird perched outside the window, these are not messages to me from my dead son, they're just natural phenomena. A certain tiny stunted pink parrot tulip that came up this year reminded me of him, but the flower was tiny and stunted because we never replanted our bulbs and in this, the seventh year they've come up, they don't have the strength to produce large, healthy blooms. I don't consider that flower a sign, it was just a connection I made. That's what I do: I make connections. It's what all writers do. The fact that I had such a thought may have been a message to me that I was still alive, but it was not from Balthazar.


We've lived in our house for almost eight years, but for some reason it was this summer that we came home from the gym one afternoon to find a swarm in the box hedge by our front door. Scout bees invaded our kitchen, finding a chink somewhere in the wooden cladding. A beekeeper my husband contacted said they were looking for a place to start a hive. Our kitchen did not seem to be the ideal location, for them or for us. Once all 15,000 bees were inside, to get rid of them we'd have to kill them. But we liked the bees. We didn't want to hurt them. Luckily, Portland is chock-full of beekeepers, and people who want to keep bees. At nine o'clock in the evening, eight hours after we first noticed them, the beekeeper and three assistants were in our front yard, coaxing the queen into a container. Most of the bees followed; those that didn't would die. The person at the top of the 150-person waiting list would get to keep them, and they would make honey, and pollinate, just somewhere else.

They are a visitation, I thought, uncharacteristically, the minute I saw them.

In Christianity, the Visitation is when Mary, who was pregnant with Jesus, visited her cousin Elizabeth, who was pregnant with John the Baptist. When they embraced, the fetal John the Baptist leapt in the womb in recognition of his Savior.

Like Mary to Elizabeth, the bees came to me. Like her, they are the mediators between me, a mortal, and in my case, not God but Nature. They came to give me a message. They came to say that there is a reason that Balthazar died that is larger than my understanding. It is not because he was too perfect for this world. It is not because I have bad karma or because my fire sign clashes with the black water dragon or because I believe in abortion and full equality for gays and lesbians. There isn't a purpose, to teach me something or to prevent some future evil, but there is a reason. I just don't know what it is.

One other thing I realized. Whether I believe in God or not is in some ways beside the point. I look at the world through the lens of Christianity, and I always will. The narratives make evocative connections. And connections are what I do. Still.