Life from the Shadows

In Disconnection, the Gospel and Modern Art, I describe how Jesus gives his promise in the face of the opposite, and it always brings life.  In this blog, I will share how Jesus’ promise to meet me in the opposite hit home in our miscarriages.  This summer, the story surfaced again and was used to comfort others at home and in Africa.  I hope it encourages you in your anger and loss and shadows all around. 

It was hard for us to have children.  I was getting my Masters of Art in Studio at Adelphi University while we waded through two years of infertility.  We had a lot of uncertainty in our lives and it showed in my body.  Despite that, I finally got pregnant!  Almost as soon as we got the good news, we got the bad news.  The doctor was too abrupt and clinical and suggested I “get it out” with a D&C.  I was worried about scarring.  I wanted to miscarry naturally.  I didn’t.  After six weeks, my doctor was worried about infection.  I was confused and mad and sad that my body wasn’t working the way I hoped - not in pregnancy, not even in miscarriage.  I was so angry at myself.  I needed comfort; all I could give myself was condemnation.  I was numb over losing the baby.  Sean cried easily.  I just got mad.  We needed to grieve together but we couldn’t.  I had some resentments against him that I was trying to get rid of on my own.  It wasn’t working. 

Imagine if I brought those patterns into parenting? How they would have eroded our marriage further?  My own worth?  Instead, the Lord brought death.

“The Scream is not the last word.  But, in its articulation of pain and suffering, in its diagnosis of our human condition—a condition that must be killed and then recreated, not merely improved upon—it must be the first word we hear.”[4] 

I was trying to maintain a positive self-image, trying to stave off the self-hatred that had fueled my eating disorder, trying to “let go” of the wounds in our marriage.  I was trying.  The more I tried, the angrier I got.  The miscarriage brought death.  The next year there was another that threw us into marriage counseling.  My anger scared me; it scared Sean.  I needed help.  God brought me to the place where I was willing to get it.  No amount of “just do this” or “just let go” would help.  Jesus killed my efforts.  He used grief to do it.  He put an end to my isolation.  He connected me with wise counselors, help with funding them, and 12-step rooms to walk through forgiveness and cleanse me of resentments.  He provided Christians who came alongside Sean and me, his forgiven addicts who know this kind of death… and life in light of it.  This pattern of death-to-life made me a Christian.  It is also the way Jesus works in our hearts over and over to free us.  I knew this, but I needed to know it again… in this place of grief and loss.  I was trying to avoid this death, this giving up, this admission. Jesus overcame me with his grace.  I will always need him to do this.

Martin Luther called Christians, “at the same time righteous and sinners.”  I love the righteous part.  I don’t like the “sinner” or the “at the same time” part, as my story shows!  But it is the truth.  And my heart fills with gratitude, hope and comfort as I share my story (one of many!) of the grace of Jesus in my place of need. 

“Since God has to impute [give] righteousness we must be sinners.  It would make no sense for him to impute righteousness if we were already wholly or partially righteous or even had some hope of becoming so according to our legal schemes.  It would make no sense for God to forgive sins if we weren’t actually sinners… Before the divine tribunal no saints, but only sinners can stand!  Justification by unconditional decree means a complete break with thinking in terms of the legal schemes and process.  The most vital enemy of the grace of God, Luther insists throughout his commentary, is not so much the so-called godless sinner, but precisely the ‘righteous’ who think in terms of the legal process, an ‘intrinsic’ moral progress which renders grace fictional and gradually unnecessary.  ‘For if justification is by the law, Christ died to no avail (Gal.2:21).’”[5]

By the term, “legal scheme” or “legal progress”, Lutheran theologian, Gerhard Forde, simply means the good things we try to do to improve ourselves—our efforts to follow the 10 Commandments or any “should” in the Bible (or any “should” in the world—like avoiding GMO foods).  It is the effort I make to try to avoid that place of death, of needing rescue.  I may have similar desires after that place of death, but they come from a totally different place.  They come from Jesus’ grace in total lostness, from his help through my resistance, from his overcoming my good efforts and showing me a totally new way.  A way into death, not preventing it.  Death brings us to Jesus.  Jesus brings us to life.

My drawing professor at the time of my first miscarriage, Brooks Fredericks, asked us to make a fifty-hour drawing as our final project.  I had just visited the Brooklyn Museum of Art.  I had a moment after the visit where I stood under the cherry trees in front of the museum to hide from the sun.  I stared at their shadows surrounding my feet on the sidewalk.  I was immersed in dappled grays.  It spoke to me.  I wanted to make a “walkable drawing.”  As I drew with charcoal in one hand and eraser in the other, the drawing kept expanding.  I lived in shadows.  They reminded me of sonograms.  I drew during those six weeks where I waited to miscarry but didn’t.

Shadows, 2009, Kate Norris, charcoal on paper, 48” x 120”

Shadows installed. It was fun to have my class walk across it.

The installation for my class came and went and I packed away my drawing (still in my closet!) without realizing the personal significance until years later.  The Lord stored away my grief in heavy-weight paper and charcoal until it was safe to let it surface.  Sean and I were comforted beyond what I could have imagined.  With the help of counseling, 12-steps, and grace-filled Christians, we had learned to grieve together.  We had died to figuring things out on our own, to projecting a fun-easy-going image.  I had learned to own the fact that I had needs and how to share them.  I had peers who could support me in vulnerability.  We discovered intimacy through weakness, not through strength.  Though we had lost three children to miscarriage, I was less afraid of sadness.  I was not alone in it.  I was free to feel.

I revisited this drawing five years after drawing it.  I was doing a Clinical Pastoral Internship with the Rev. Mike Wurschmidt at Shepherd’s Heart Church for the homeless and veterans in Pittsburgh.  He asked me to share my life story through my art.  I included Shadows.  As I looked at it, the shadows mixed with sonograms, I remembered how mad I was at myself during that first miscarriage.  I remembered how numb I felt.  I had worried if I was even capable of connecting to a child.  Yet, here I was, years later, in the hands of a Savior who brings life from the dead, and who loves me.  I had compassion for myself, for my confused body. 

As I explained that time of life to my Clinical Pastoral team, I looked anew at my shadow drawing.  I realized I was not as numb at the time as I thought.  I was standing in an sonogram, trying to reach our baby.  Compassion could see this.  Jesus saw.  Now I do too.  My heart could feel the great sadness, and still does, but relishes the connection too.  With our baby.  With myself.  With the Lord.  With Sean.  With our two miracle living daughters.  With our three babies in heaven who ministered so powerfully to us.

Art was a gift to me.  With it, I waded into the opposite of Jesus’ promised resurrection.  I found the cross in those charcoal shadows beneath my feet.  I could not muster comfort.  I could not stop my anger.  I could not “let go” of old hurts on my own.  There was a real death.  The full weight of grief and shock, preserved on paper.  I needed a real savior.  He came.

Lutheran theologian, Steven Paulson, describes how God works through the opposite to strengthen our faith.  When we wade into evil and brokenness and ask “why?”  Paulson asserts this about God: “He [God] is certifying the promise by its direct opposite… These two, gospel and tribulation/suffering, go hand in hand as promise and guarantee.”[6]  He looks at why God hardened Pharoah’s heart against the Jewish slaves in Exodus 10:20,27; 11:10 and why Jesus didn’t stop his disciples from betraying him at the Last Supper in John 13. Paulson explains that God uses the opposite of his promise to make our faith certain.  When we ask, “Why evil?  Why is this happening to me?” God is proving how faithful to us he is:

“[‘Why Evil?’ How can this have happened to me?]—we actually address God’s elect people as God himself does: “Don’t be frightened at Pharoah’s hardness, for even that itself is my work and I have it in hand, I who am setting you free; I shall only use it to do many signs and declare my majesty to help your faith.”  Pharaoh’s evil, his hardening, is to help your faith.”[7] 

This is the testimony of every Christian who has been comforted by the Lord.  If we don’t have a genuine story of comfort, that simply means we are in the midst of the wrestling, in the midst of the grief, the opposite, the tomb.  Jesus will not forsake you.  That is why the Scriptures were written down, so we would have story after story of God being faithful to his people.  That is why I am writing now.  I will need to hear this again.  I hope you will tell me.

My charcoal shadows, our miscarriages, the familiar weight of grief became real again this summer.  At home, friends and family are dealing with the quiet pain of infertility or the shock of miscarriage.  It is an honor to join them in the tomb and call on Jesus to resurrect, however that would be best for them.  It makes it real that we are not in control.  However, the One Who Is loves us so.

This story also travelled to Kenya with Sean.  He went with a team from the Anglican Diocese of New England and Love Unveiled Ministries to Uganda and Kenya.  On his last day of ministry—sick and exhausted from weeks of travel and pouring out—Sean preached at a church in Mlolongo, Kenya.  He preached on Jesus’ parable of the Lost Coin found in Luke 15:8-10.  As he asked the congregation, “Have you ever lost something of great value to you?” a woman caught eyes with him and nodded.  Sean shared how the lost coin could do nothing to help its lostness.  It was incapable of moral improvement or “legal scheme” or partnering with God or becoming more holy.  It was truly dead in its lostness. It needed someone to seek and find it.  Jesus is the old woman in the story who does just that to us. 

The pastoral team that took Sean through the town

After the service, the pastor insisted that Sean visit a parishioner’s house.  They walked over raw sewage and past heaps of garbage.  They arrived at the woman’s house, the woman Sean had noticed in the church service.  Her name is Mary.  Her husband, Daniel, was home.  He was not a Christian and would not attend church.  Their 6-month-old child had recently died.  He was angry.  At God too.  Sean began, “I only know some of what you are going through.  But I can tell you that with Jesus, death is not the end.  He gives resurrection.  In heaven, and in comfort here…”  As he shared our story of grief and comfort through our miscarriages, Daniel listened.  At the end, the pastor declared that God had sent this “mzungu” (which means “white man”) thousands of miles to come and tell him about Jesus.  He asked Daniel, “Are you ready to believe in Jesus?”  Daniel nodded.  They prayed.  Their child is safe in heaven; one day Daniel and Mary will be too.

Daniel and Mary with Sean

I dedicate this piece those who are “in the shadows,” and of course, to Daniel and Mary.  We are with you.

“Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life.  Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live.” (John 11:25)

Footnotes

[1] Dan Siedell, Who’s Afraid of Modern Art? (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2015), 9-10.

[2] Quoted from Tojner, Munch in His Own Words by Dan Siedell, Who’s Afraid, 9.

[3] Siedell, Who’s Afraid, 11.

[4] Siedell, Who’s Afraid, 22.

[5] Gerhard O. Forde, Justification by Faith: A Matter of Death and Life (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1990), 30-31.

[6] Steven Paulson, Luther’s Outlaw God Volume 1: Hiddenness, Evil, and Predestination (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2018), 241.

[7] Paulson, Outlaw God Vol. 1, 241.

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