Is That All There Is? Nope.
I love podcasts. I listen to them all the time - in the car, in the shower, when folding laundry, when answering emails, when cooking... They make me so happy. Sometimes I even talk back to them, which I realize is quite bizarre. What is interesting is that podcasts make me so happy, and yet, I have repeatedly been told by many individuals who happen to walk by or catch me in the act of listening to a podcast that the podcasts that I listen to are incredibly disturbing and sad (and no, I don’t listen to Morbid, or any of the other true crime or forensics podcasts). I mostly listen to podcasts about two topics: world events and grief - two subjects that I concede are most often described as disturbing and sad.
My favorite podcast find in the past couple of years is a podcast called All There Is with Anderson Cooper. It’s a podcast that he started when he began dealing with his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt’s, apartment full of belongings after her death at age 95. As he went through her things, he found himself facing not only the grief of losing his mother, but he also found all of her memories of his father, Wyatt, who died of a sudden heart attack when Anderson was 10, and also all of the memories of his brother, Carter, who committed suicide by falling to his death in front of their mother, when he was 23 years old. In the two seasons of this podcast, Anderson invites a series of guests, some famous and some not, to discuss the great losses in their lives and openly share what they have learned from their encounters and journeys with grief. Every episode makes me weep, but the wisdom and humanity shared in each episode is so very profound.
One of the most important learnings that I have gleaned from listening to folks share their stories of moving through profound grief is an idea shared by filmmaker Kirsten Johnson in episode 5 of the first season. She explains in the episode that it is never too late to get to know someone better, even after they are gone. Even after death, she claims our relationships can grow, evolve and change. You can tell how much this episode impacts Anderson Cooper as he refers to it often in later episodes. You can hear him processing the realization that even though the person we love is gone, between our memories and belongings, other people’s memories and possessions that relate to the person, and through our own exploration, we can get to know a deceased person better. Even after death, we can understand our relationship to someone better, and through the memories and thoughts of them that we carry with us, our relationship with them can still impact our lives.
One of Anderson Cooper’s guests this season is psychotherapist Francis Weller, author of the book The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief. My favorite quote from this book is one that says, “Grief and love are sisters, woven together from the beginning. Their kinship reminds us that there is no love that does not contain loss and no loss that is not a reminder of the love we carry for what we once held close.” I find this notion so beautiful. In the many years that I ran grief groups on a regular basis I would often say, “Grief is beautiful because it is arguably the only proof we have that the love we shared with another person was real, because of the painful hole it leaves in our hearts after they are gone.”
We don’t talk a lot about the beauty and utility of grief in our Christian tradition. I mean sure, on Good Friday we kind of allow ourselves to climb down into the trenches of grief and sorrow, but we do so knowing what awaits us a few days later. And sure, we’ve all heard a good message spoken at a funeral service that helped us feel better because it named aloud how awful loss can make us feel and how God is with us in those moments. But grief is not the place we go to often in telling the story of Jesus’ life and ministry - a story that we prefer to tell in terms of mystery, hope, liberation and fulfillment.
It is because of this, that I want us to take a new look at the text today from the first chapter of Mark (Mark 1:29-39). In this text, Jesus, James and John leave the Synagogue and enter the house of Simon and Andrew, where they find Simon’s mother-in-law who is very ill. Jesus cures her, and they start bringing others to this house to be cured. The text says that by later, the whole city was gathered around the door. Jesus cures many people, but it’s clear that he wants to keep this kind of secret – instructing the demons he casts out to not say who he is.
In the morning, Jesus goes out while it’s still dark to pray and the others go hunting for him. They tell him that everyone has been looking for him and Jesus says, it’s time to move on to the next town, and share the message there, because that is what I came to do. Jesus didn’t want to become holed up in a house, where more and more people came to him seeking to be cured. He wasn’t looking for this basic transactional relationship – come see me, and I’ll fix you and then you go out and tell people so that more people come. Jesus wanted the Gospel to physically move from place to place. He wanted to go to the people throughout the land, not for all of them to come to him to have some need met.
When I read this text, I think about how disappointed the people in that one town must have been to learn that Jesus had moved on to the next place. I picture folks who had heard about this miracle worker healing ailments and casting out demons and arriving a few hours too late after Jesus had moved on. I imagine that was hard. Disappointing. I imagine that there was grief in that community after he left.
So I think about my favorite grief podcast. And I think about how relationships can persist, even deepen after loss of physical presence. I think about how grief and loss do not represent the end of relationship.
The fact that Jesus had a traveling ministry probably created a lot of grief. The presence of God is with you, in the flesh, and then it’s gone. But the stories, the legendary stories that were generated through these encounters are some of the greatest substance of our faith. They are what we have, what we read to better understand God and teach us how to be God’s people. The stories alone do, in fact, deepen or relationship with God and help us to know the person of Christ better. Just like with a beloved relative who has departed, the absence of the physical presence of Christ with us, and with this community back then, did not and does not prevent us from exploring and deepening our relationship with God. The stories that the community in that town told, the stories we still tell today, even if they originate from a place of grief at the physical absence of God, are the catalyst for the deepening of our faith. Absence not only makes the heart grow fonder, but absence also invites us to lean into the stories, to conversations and memory sharing, and for doing the personal work to better understand our relationship to God through Christ.
The nomadic ministry of Jesus tells us that God does not merely seek a transactional relationship with us. God doesn’t want us to tell the stories of our faith so that we can all just go and get our needs met. God invites us into the mystery of seeking relationship without necessarily seeing for ourselves. God invites us to discover how relationships and understandings can and do deepen apart from seeing and touching for ourselves.
God is always moving around us – and sometimes we feel the immanent presence of God and sometimes it feels as though God has moved on to a place a little way down the road. But regardless of whether we are at the door of the house where Christ is staying or not, the opportunity to seek to know God better is always there for us. Sometimes the grief of feeling farther apart from God is the exact catalyst for us to know God better through leaning into the stories of our faith to find a new closeness.
Anderson Cooper’s podcast is named “All There Is,” because as his mom grew older, outliving many as she made it to 95, she found great humor in the song from the 1960s by Peggy Lee that asked the question, “Is That All There Is?” This from a woman who lived a very full and public life from the time she was a child. Is that all there is? The answer is no. The story of our faith is one that says, “No. Absence. Loss. Death. That’s never the end of the story. That’s never all there is. There is always more.” Always.
Amen.
