By Anna Blaedel
When the heat of late summer was starting to show signs of fading, and twilight’s shadows shifted their descent into earlier evening, a dear friend who only ever reads non-fiction recommended I read a particular novel. I was, and am, immersed in the last months–the final stretch–of trying to write my dissertation into completion. I was, and am, immersed in dense theory, and academic texts of theology and philosophy. But, under the full, blue, harvest moon I was also immersed in a personal rupture, experiencing a devastating loss after years of losing what I thought I could not live without.
I learned many years ago, during a stretch of life weighted by loss, that having a piece of fiction going was a strategy of survival. For as long as I can remember, I have found at least as much, and often far more, sacred wisdom, spiritual grounding, and transformative accompaniment in poetry and stories than in theological texts or authorized canons of scripture. (No surprise, parables and psalms and poetry are often where I turn, within the canon.) When life feels inhospitable, books have been my escape. Stories are how I reorient, return to my center, find my way through. Stories help me make meaning of painful experiences I would rather hand back, integrating rupture and loss into a larger story, and integrating my story into our larger, collective story. And poets help me keep feeling, alive to grief, and open to joy’s possibility.
So, thanks to my friend, I walked to my local bookstore and bought a copy of the novel, Alix E. Harrow’s The Once and Future Witches, a gorgeous tale of three wayward sisters who have lost more than they know how to live without, including their connection with each other. Their story is set once upon a time, in New Salem in 1893, after “the plague and the purges,” when “the witches were burned and the night belonged to men with torches and crosses.” (ix) Their context was one of chaos, crisis, and collapse; religious persecution, economic exploitation, and political repression, emboldened and inseparably entangled, resulting in mass violence and preventable death. The sisters find themselves in an old and often repeated story, where palpable precarity fuels fear, which feeds distrust, which deepens division, which accelerates destruction, which stokes the impulse to turn against each other, hoard resources, assign blame, lash out, justify retaliation, and inflict ruinous punishment. We recognize this as the story of dominance: oppressive forces rewrite themselves as righteous, control masquerades as care, safety is recast through the facade of protection and threat of punishment, and anyone trying to find a different story is demonized — an enemy, even evil.
The sisters repeat a question that becomes a refrain in their story, as well as in mine: “What is lost, that can’t be found?”
I want to pause here, for a word of caution and clarification, because the stakes can be a matter of life and death: this refrain is not meant to trivialize loss. A single loss can shatter the whole world, teaches both the Talmud and the Quran. (We can save a whole world by sparing a single life, these sacred scriptures also maintain.) Anyone who has lost a beloved knows how irretrievable and eternal loss can be. Nothing, post-rupture, is the same as before. Entire worlds and futures are foreclosed, and some possibilities will never be found again. Minimizing loss only intensifies it. So does forcing forgiveness, or reconciliation. Rushing from rupture to repair prevents the very re-membering that makes healing possible.
Genocidal regimes of violence, occupation, and death work tirelessly to erase accounts of irretrievable loss. Stolen lands and massacred peoples, entire bloodlines lost through Indian Removal and the Middle Passage, the Holocaust and the Nakba, the wanton destruction of Palestinian life currently carried out by the Israeli military, with bombs made by and paid for by the USA. It is no accident which stories, which lives, and which lineages are banned from books, burned at stakes, denied despite all evidence, whitewashed or pinkwashed, prohibited from public spaces, and criminalized in public spheres.
And. It is also no accident that the very stories, lives, and lineages that know devastating loss are the ones that call us to remember, reconnect, return, and retrieve what has been lost. Reading my novel, in the middle of a sleepless night, I found one sister “thought survival was a selfish thing, a circle drawn tight around your heart. She thought the more people you let inside that circle the more ways the world had to hurt you, the more ways you could fail them and be failed in turn. But what if it’s the opposite,” she began to wonder, and expanding your heart means “there are more people to catch you when you fall?”(321) There is no going back, or undoing. But we are still writing the story, and we can choose to write stories that unfold differently.
M Jacqui Alexander frames the violence of colonization–past, present, and unfolding–as disconnection. Disconnection from each other, from the earth, from enfleshed life, from the Sacred. “It took five hundred years, at least in this hemisphere, to solidify the division of things that belong together,” she writes, “but it need not take us another five hundred years to move ourselves out of this existential impasse.” Remembering sacred wisdoms, reconnecting with each other, returning to the earth, recreating ourselves within community, rewriting dominant stories, and repatterning our relations with care: “simply put,” she insists, “there is no other work to do.” This is how we find what has been lost, and how we find our way after losing what we cannot live without. We can widen and strengthen the webs, and catch each other and be caught when we fall.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, having been mentored by M Jacqui Alexander, talks about this as a practice of being present. Being in the present moment, Gumbs offers, means: everyone is here. When we are present, we have access to everyone in every moment that’s ever existed. Space and time–life–unfolds nonlinearly, queerly, entangled. Alfred North Whitehead described this as, “In a certain sense everything is everywhere at all times.” He also called God “the tender care that nothing be lost.” Whitehead was not claiming that God can save us from loss, nor that we can escape loss’s inevitability. But. And. There is nothing more sacred than the tender care that tries. Sacred connection is the capacity to care–about loss,and about each other in and through it, and possibilities that haunt pasts and futures and the here, now, everywhere, everyone, present. And, thus to mobilize and bear witness and call for a permanent ceasefire and insist that when we say “never again” we mean “never again for anyone.”
What is lost, that can’t be found? As Gumbs remembers and reminds, we are connected by the love that has generated us, and energy is not bound by space or time, and so neither is our tender care. We belong to each other, and, as the (Audre) Lorde wrote, “Tomorrow belongs to those of us who conceive of it as belonging to everyone: who lend the best of ourselves to it, and with joy.” Lending the best of ourselves, remembering the love that connects and constitutes us, we become–in a world shattered by loss–a story of finding the tender care that nothing be lost.
Anna Blaedel (they/them) is co-director and co-founder at enfleshed, where they tend to the theopoetic intersections of spiritual, academic, and activist engagement. Anna chaplains University of Iowa students, and is a doctoral candidate in Theological and Philosophical Studies at Drew University’s Graduate Division on Religion. Waking before dawn, lingering in poetry, being an aunt, retreating to the woods or their basement woodshop, tending the garden, sharing silence, and feeding people delicious food are some of Anna’s favorite things.