The Slow Way: Epiphany and the Transformative Power of Grief

What Joseph & Mary's journey to Egypt can teach us about lamenting a changing faith. (And a review of Erin H. Moon's book I've Got Questions)

for the frantic strivers, the serial doers, and weary achievers

The last album Rich Mullins ever worked on was a series of songs about the life of Jesus. The album was only recorded as rough demos on tape, though many musicians worked together after Mullins’ death in 1998 to produce “The Jesus Record,” bringing life to his crackling vocals, and also performing them in more produced versions of the songs.

As we near the end of Epiphany, I’ve had the first verse of Mullins’ song “My Deliverer,” running through my mind.

Joseph took his wife and her child

and they went to Africa

to escape the rage of a deadly King

There along the banks of the Nile

Jesus listened to the song

that the captive children used to sing

They were singing

My deliverer is coming, my deliverer is standing by

My deliverer is coming, my deliverer is standing by

I’ve chosen to write this series on Epiphany because I find myself drawn to the under-appreciated seasons of the Church calendar, and curious about what they hold for us. I tend to think that Epiphany is the least-loved season in the Church (if you don’t count Ordinary Time, which one can’t help but under-appreciate, what with “ordinary” in its name). But, of course, Epiphany is the season of revelation, the season of open eyed transformation. It’s a season that peeks into the few stories we have of Jesus’s early life, and invites us to use our imaginations.

When I listened to this last record of Rich Mullins’ in 1998, I was moved to consider Jesus’s early life, something I had never really taken time to do as a 19 year old. Among the things I reimagined was the reality of Matthew 2:13-15, which describes Mary and Joseph’s flight with their baby to Egypt as refugees. “My Deliverer” mesmerized me, allowed me to wonder about how dangerous and strange it would have been for Jesus and his parents to start over in a country, culture, and language they didn’t know. Rich’s album invited me to see Jesus as a human, and his parents as real people—a young couple terrified for their son—and, I’m sure, for themselves. (Btw, I recently rediscovered this piece I wrote about Rich’s music 12 years ago, and it might give you a little sense of what his music has meant throughout my life.)

Here are some questions I really wish this passage would answer: How long did it take for Joseph and Mary to get the all-clear that Herod was dead, that it was safe to go home? How old was Jesus by then? What was that journey back home like for their family? How did Nazareth receive them when they returned?

I really wish the stories of scripture answered these questions, mostly because I would really like some more guidance on how to make impossible choices, on how to grieve. The Gospels don’t tell us about the grief of Jesus’s parents, about their relational and physical losses in that season, or even about their loneliness in a culture where they didn’t belong.

Though this story isn’t traditionally read during Epiphany, it’s one that does some important work of breaking through the warm and cozy vibes of Jesus’s birth stories, insisting that we consider the grief and anxiety that arrived with his birth. The only angels in this story aren’t singing in the sky, they’re just showing up in Joseph’s dreams, telling him to run, now. The affirmation of the shepherds’ story is absent; the Magi have gone on to their homes. In other words, maternity/paternity leave is over, and it's time to live their reality. There’s an angry king coming after them, and they are on the run.

What does grief, fear, and anxiety have to do with Epiphany?

I just finished reading Erin Hicks Moon’s new book I’ve Got Questions: The Spiritual Practice of Having it Out With God, a book that acts as a kind of guide for those who find their faith evolving, who feel out of sorts with the questions, doubts, and disillusionment with American Christianity’s obsession with power.

Erin’s book is gentle, funny, irreverent, and deeply committed to the core of Jesus’s teachings, and as she says in her dedication, “a gospel so rich and real, it made all the false versions easier to kill.” She walks readers through the painful realizations that often cause the unraveling of faith, and then insists that those who are working through a dark night of the soul allow themselves to lament.

Lament, she tells us, is a necessary part of the process. Before we can ever make peace with the beliefs we’ve left behind, aka the “bullhonkey, and malarkey,” (Erin is a fellow Texas Panhandle gal and I’m obsessed), we first have to grieve what we’ve left behind. She tells us we can do it. “Our history of faith is crowded with pioneers who lit their own matches and tried again with God,” she writes. Her quotable lines are legion: “What good is a religion uninspected? What good are questions left unprosecuted? What is the point of a faith that does nothing, means nothing, changes nothing, resurrects nothing?”

“The only thing that will kill you is pretending everything is okay when it’s not.”

Yes, and amen. So how do we choose to move from doubt, frustration, and even rage at the Church, and choose to try again with God? First, she says, we have to grieve.

“Grief is a heart-wrenchingly painful problem for the brain to solve, and grieving necessitates learning to live in the world with the absence of someone you love deeply, who is ingrained in your understanding of the world.” She applies this to the loss of faith as many of us once knew it: the loss of spiritual leaders we can trust to advocate for what’s best for our neighbors, the loss of spiritual leaders we can trust to adhere to the sexual ethics they preach, the loss of mentors who taught us to love our neighbors as ourselves—but who vote for and endorse something that doesn’t look like love at all.

The grief of realizing that the Christianity you believed in doesn’t really look like the Christianity Jesus preached is a long and arduous process. It’s painful. It requires saying things out loud that don’t make people feel good. It looks like, in my case, being invited to speak in my hometown by the Catholics and the Episcopalians (even the Church of Christers!), but never the church that raised me. It requires having unspoken theological differences between you and the people you love the most. But it also means freedom.

Erin quotes John Green who says, “Grief doesn’t change you [...] it reveals you.” What did Mary’s grief reveal about her in the midst of giving birth as a unwed, young woman, alone without her mother, in a town (Bethlehem) where only her husband knew people? What did her grief look like as she held the realities of angels' hallelujahs, fancy Magi gifts, the fear of Herod’s rage at her son’s existence, and the very real possibility of Postpartum Depression. (Yes, friends, if it happened to us, it probably happened to her too.)

Grief, grief, grief. It always intermingles with the sweetness. Mary and Joseph took Jesus and headed out on a path to Egypt, not knowing if they’d ever be back, holding the possibility that they may never know the life they planned or hoped for. They made a choice based on reality (the Magi’s warning about Herod), and faith (the angel’s appearance in a dream).

So many of our decisions hold those two realities. So many of our life choices require we trust both the sturdy reality of facts, and the squishy intervention of God.

We don’t know what Egypt was like for Mary, Joseph, and Jesus. Did Mary have any other children during that season? Did she make friends? Did she and Joseph learn the language of the Egyptians? All we know is that the next verse chooses not to give us details, or a timeline. Only that the angel shows up again when it’s time to go home.

Lament is like that in-between time in Egypt. A reversal of the story of Exodus. Jesus, the one who came to rescue the Jewish people and the Gentiles, spending his first years of life with the ones outside the fold.

For all of us who have walked or who are walking the path of in-between faith — no longer subscribing to the beliefs we were first given, but longing to find our way to a faith strong enough to survive the rest of our lives — this refugee story is a gift.

Whatever that season looked like for Jesus or his parents. No matter how his time as a refugee shaped his understanding of what it meant to love God or his neighbor, Jesus experienced the in-between space of lament and grief.

And however we find ourselves right now in the “deconstruction” or reconstruction of our faith, in the process of seeing our beliefs dissolve or transform before our very eyes, Erin reminds us that “when you make space for the vulnerability of being comfortable in love, instead of standing in what you hope and pray is your rightness, you might be surprised who finds relief in you. You might be surprised when peace settles into your soil. You might be surprised what happens when love spreads over everything, settling into the cracks and crevices of who you are, and you begin to understand what John meant when he said, ‘perfect love drives out fear’ (1 John 4:18 NIV).

We might find ourselves “risking [our] whole life on something as deranged as being right about Love.” Whatever that season of grief looked like for Mary and Joseph, whatever their fears were for the way Jesus would be shaped by those years of uncertainty, they would eventually find themselves exactly where they were meant to be—risking their whole lives on being right about Love.

A Slow Practice

Is there a part of your life where you are “in-between” — whether you find yourself in a season of grieving a death, the loss of a friendship, or perhaps, the loss of your faith as you once knew it? You may even be grieving the loss of a place, reestablishing roots in a city or town where you’re not sure you belong. Today, I want us to recognize that lament is an important part of this season of Epiphany. We have to let go of old things before we can fully receive new revelation, transformation. To move forward with our own epiphanies, we often need to lament all that we’ve lost.

Here’s a small practice, that might help us move toward good lament. In his book The Wild Edge of Sorrow, Francis Weller shares a poem by Pesha Gertler as an example of how grief transforms us. I’d like for us to read through this poem with slow attention, allowing ourselves to notice everything that comes up for us as we consider the grief we carry with us.

Read through this poem once. Then pause and take some time to reflect, listening for the voice of the Spirit. Then read through it a second time.

The Healing Time

Finally on my way to yes

I bump into

all the places

where I said no

to my life

all the untended wounds

the red and purple scars

those hieroglyphs of pain

carved into my skin and bones,

those coded messages

that send me down

the wrong street

again and again

where I find them,

the old wounds

the old misdirections

and I lift them

one by one

close to my heart

and I say holy

holy.

- from Claiming The Spirit Within

After you take time to listen to how God might be nudging you through this poem, allow yourself to list some of those scars you’re carrying with you. What makes them holy? If they aren’t yet holy, how might they someday become something you cherish?

Close with this prayer:

Lord, my grief is with me. And so are you. May I learn to live at peace with both. Amen.

A List of Things:

• Hey Texas Panhandle folks! I’ll be speaking at St. Ann’s in Canyon Sunday and Monday, Feb 23-24 at 6:30 pm, sharing about the Beatitudes as a guide into the season of Lent. I’d love for you to join us.

• If you ask my opinion, you should go buy Erin Hicks Moon’s book here. It’s worth your time.

• Speaking of books! Have you gotten a copy of Blessed Are The Rest of Us: How Limits and Longing Make Us Whole? You should get it here! Or find the audiobook version (I read it!) at Audible.