On Writing a Book Amidst Advent, Death, and a New Baby

This Advent is a strange one. With a funeral just behind and a birth just ahead, and an 8-months pregnant me slowing radically down by the day, the usual rounds of things I do to signpost Advent have fallen by the wayside. Of course, there are always candles lit and carols softly lilting in the background, and to Lilian’s and my immense and daily enjoyment, we now have a Christmas (‘cough’, I mean Advent) tree glimmering in the corner. But I feel more that I am sinking deeply into the Advent twilight, rather than journeying toward the light. But I’ve begun to think that’s no bad thing, especially as I have returned to the writing of my book.

You think you know what you’re going to write when you start a book.

At least, I did when I began this one. You’ve heard me mention it a dozen times and I’ve had it in my head and heart for years: Beauty Never Lies, my story about how God met me in the midst of mental illness and loneliness and disappointment with moments of beauty that transformed my faith by helping me to discover a good and beautiful God working to heal me right in the midst of my darkness.

I thought I was ready to write this especially because I came to the writing fresh from five years of theological study that had finally, blessedly, helped me to untangle and begin to find healing from the hard, questioning years before it. I discovered the term ‘theodicy’ (a word describing the way we defend God’s goodness in a broken and suffering world) and knew it was the subject I had been circling in the defining questions of my faith, knew that this wrestling with God in the silence of pain had been my work since I was diagnosed with a mental illness at seventeen and watched it reach into and unravel every corner of my identity. Why do we suffer? Where is God in the midst of it? How can we still believe he’s good when the world he’s created has gone so horribly wrong?

I’d asked the questions and come to my conclusions. It wasn’t exactly that I had concrete answers to the ancient and impossible questions of theodicy, but rather that I felt that I had learned, in a deep and radical way, that God answers us not merely with explanations, but with Himself. That he reaches out to us in a suffering world through the hands of the good and the beautiful, through laughter and touch, starlight and music. I felt that I finally understood the countless small moments of wonder, of presence, of a hope that came to me beyond that touch of darkness, helping me to believe in love throughout the dark years of my doubt. And I had the theological chops to finally say what I wanted to about it.

So after we moved to a new part of England, settled into our home, and got life in order, I began to craft the book during our family holiday to Denmark in October (my husband is half Danish) when we stayed in a little cabin on the coast. In the mornings, Thomas would whisk our little daughter down to the nearby shore to play while I wrote as hard as I could. I sat at the cabin table, watching the red sun cast her rays across the bay, catching the tops of the firs. I watched the wild swans dip and sway in the icy water. I wrote feverishly. There was a dramatic edge to what I created as I sought to contrast the darkness I had known with the loveliness that invaded it. I wanted to write something that crashed into my reader’s world like sunrise and music, like a fairy tale with all the satisfactions of a happy ending.

And there was nothing wrong in that desire. But though I didn’t fully realise it, I was writing about the past, writing from the far side of a dark and suffering season, with the light of prayers answered full on my face.

A week later, we returned home and received a phone call. My husband’s precious mother, a woman of warmth and faith like few I have ever met, a woman in her prime years with young grandchildren and decades of memories yet to make, had been told her cancer was terminal. Of course, at first, we were business like about it, thrust into the busyness of back and forth travel between our home in England and the Netherlands, where she lived. We thought there was time, we talked with the family of treatment options and we operated, still, as if normalcy reigned. And then her condition deteriorated. We saw, first hand, the dreadful ravages of disease in the human body, the aggressive cancer, the pain, the way it steals, little by little, speech and ease, movement and consciousness. We watched from afar after we returned to England until the day came when we knew we needed to start driving if we wanted to say goodbye. From the day we found out her cancer would be terminal to the day she died, it was only four weeks.

My husband, an Anglican priest, led and preached at her funeral, and I witnessed the way that a life suffused by faith can transform even death. Susette’s profound love for God and her family, her unshakable trust in his goodness reached out to take our hands as we sojourned together for a week after she passed. But when they lowered her coffin into the grave and I stood amongst her children, held the granddaughter that would never know her, stood under a grey sky next to the son who once had been her baby and watched her body taken irrevocably from us, I wept.

And when we woke the next day, everything finished, the long, long silence of sorrow settled in around us. We faced, not the immediacy and drama of first loss, but the years which must be reckoned anew in her absence, the countless moments in which her loss will sit like a new wound, opened afresh with each of the sweet, family events to which she will never come. We came home to England, and exhaustion, pervasive and deadening, caught up with us and made normal life feel almost undoable. We all caught colds. Our nights were a bit disturbed. We were grateful for each other, we had hope, but we were also walking in that wide, grey country that comes to the inmost parts of the human heart in the midst of sorrow. A quiet, waiting place.

I sit, now, in my home office, trying once more to pick up the threads of this book. The words I wrote a month before ring tinny to my ears. They aren’t untrue, but in the maze and fog of our current loss, I am reminded afresh what it means to walk in darkness, to ask, and hear no defining answer to the aching questions that so mercilessly attend the loss of what we love.  Why did she have to die? Why did she have to suffer so deeply, be so destroyed physically? Why must such a luminous life cease from the earth when countless others cast shadow?

I am reminded again why I so vehemently oppose the answering of suffering by systems of theological assertion. There is no adequate explanation given in the cold voice of reason to answer our intimate experience of a loved one whose body disintegrates before us. I am reminded again why I so deeply believe that God does answer us, but in the language of presence, in the givenness of his own frail, human Son, in his hands, clothed in countless tangible moments of beauty. He is here, not crashing in with light that makes our tear-sore eyes ache, or with demands that we believe in a list of assertions, he is here, like a star whose tender light cannot be dimmed by a legion of darkness. He is here, like the swell of new buds after winter. He is here like a lullaby sung in the night to a fretful child. He is here… like the stir and stretch of a child in the womb. My womb.

For as the old questions about God’s love and the reality of pain echo afresh in my mind, my second child, a son, stirs in my belly. A child will be born to us, a child whose coming gave my mother-in-law great joy. The gift of life, that undeniable embodiment of new hope in a new and innocent baby, is coming to us. We are watchful, quiet, as we await him. His birth is less than a month away, and we’ve drawn in close to prepare for him as energy wanes and Christmas draws near. And I am struck today as I write to realise that this final month of waiting for our son, keeping vigil with his grandmother, takes place in the hush and stillness of Advent, that season of twilight, where the light that will finally prevail has been seen by people who yet… ‘dwell in darkness’.

Never in my life have I been so viscerally aware of the tension between the darkness in which we are tangled and caught, and the hope that leads us forward out of it. Advent can be a tantalising and difficult season, difficult to keep with any regularity because we feel either drawn irresistibly forward into celebration, or else, mired in the kind of sadness that freezes our feet and bows our heads. Yet this tension, this strange middle place is where we wait for the kingdom to come, these are the shadowlands where the light is growing, this is the quiet space into which Beauty speaks it’s truth.

But it’s a fragile, and often hidden beauty, and that’s what I’d almost forgotten.

Fragile like a baby in the womb. The little son to come especially makes me marvel; death at my back and birth before me, and in my own body, the rustles and thumps of tiny hands and feet, the dance of a little one whose hope-bringing life puts me daily in mind of the baby born in Bethlehem two millennia before. In bearing this strange beauty, I am aware of the way hope yearns to be born in my heart.

Rarely have I known such exhaustion as I do this year, heart and body worn out with emotion and pregnancy and all the gathered weariness of a broken world. Yet never have I known such a strange brightening of my heart amidst it at the words of old Advent poems, at the echoed, aching beauty of Isaiah passages read in the half light of the mornings, the plucky shimmer of Christmas tree lights, or the sweetness of the two little ones, one inside me, one dancing circles round the Christmas tree outside, whose existence defies the power of death. These intimate, quiet beauties are speaking truth to me in a daily way, drawing me forward into effort and hope, into joy.

Beauty, reaching out to me in countless tiny moments of light or laughter, quiet or human touch, knocks upon the door of my heart and I am made aware that God is here, asking to enter the darkest room of my sadness not as a conqueror but as a child come to heal. He is so tender, and redemption is such an intimate, personal business.

Beauty in the hidden places. Beauty like a seed planted in the soil of our yearning. Beauty like a precious babe, grown great in the womb, reaching toward birth. This is the hidden beauty that has transformed my life again and again, and as I walk once more in the starlight of its grace, I begin to be ready to write that book after all. Today I’m scratching out my story in the half light of Advent, looking toward the light, writing about the beauty that comes, fragile and indomitable, to the hidden places. To real-time loss and ordinary discouragement and ongoing exhaustion. I’m writing about seeds and new babies, luminous moments, and the secret places where God invades and light grows in defiance of shadow.

And I think the babe in my womb might just be leaping for joy as the Christ child comes afresh to my heart…