Where the Dead People Sit

Job begins his first speech in dramatic fashion: “Let the day perish in which I was born…”  He wishes that he had never lived rather than to experience the Radical Loss that now shapes his life.  That seems to be a typical response to the experience of Radical Loss.

In his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl writes about the “first phase” of adjustment for inmates in the Nazi concentration camps.

The thought of suicide was entertained by nearly everyone, if only for a brief time.  It was born of the hopelessness of the situation, the constant danger of death looming over us daily and hourly, and the closeness of the deaths suffered by many of the others.  From personal convictions…I made myself a firm promise, on my first evening in camp, that I would not “run into the wire.”  This was a phrase used in camp to describe the most popular method of suicide—touching the electrically charged barbed-wire fence.  It was not entirely difficult for me to make this decision.  There was little point in committing suicide, since, for the average inmate, life expectation, calculating objectively and counting all likely chances, was very poor.  He could not with any assurance expect to be among the small percentage of men who survived all the selections.  The prisoner of Auschwitz, in the first phase of shock, did not fear death.  Even the gas chambers lost their horrors for him after the first few days—after all, they spared him the act of committing suicide. (Frankl, pages 27-28)

After seven days of silence, Job explodes with a horrifying curse upon his whole existence, beginning with the day of his birth.  Radical loss is disorienting, dislocating and destabilizing.  In the midst of loss, I might lose any sense of who I am and what place I still have in the universe.  I would not describe my loss of my own father as in some sense “radical” (as compared to the Holocaust, for example).  But I do know that I had to develop a new and different sense of my own identity in the wake of that loss.  I was no longer the son of a living father.  I had lost what a friend referred to as “the generational buffer between me and mortality.”  I was one upon whom fell the shadow of death—not in any transferred sense, but firsthand and without shield or filter.  For a while, I didn’t recognize the person I had become.

We organize our sense of self in large part through the map of relationships that we make with our lives.  You and I are embedded in a network of connections to other people, and we see ourselves in large part by looking at our place in that network.  I am a spouse, a parent, a child (of God and of my parents), a sibling, an in-law, a church member, a pastor, a friend, a colleague, and a citizen.  All those labels really describe relationships to others that help to give me a sense of who I am.  When one or more of those relationships is disrupted, my sense of myself is also disrupted and must be reorganized if I am to go on in some healthy way.

My first pastoral call was to a small, open-country parish in northwestern Iowa.  We had great fun teasing each other about how everyone always sat in exactly the same spot each and every Sunday for worship.  After a year of serving there, I could close my eyes and describe where everyone sat.  During one such conversation, I asked, “What about the spaces that no one ever fills?  Why doesn’t anyone ever sit in the empty spaces?”  The group puzzled over that for a while.  Then one of the wise old saints made a profound observation: “That’s where the dead people sit.”

No one said anything for a few moments after that stunning insight.  In those empty places sat parents, spouses, friends and neighbors who had died in the past—sometimes decades in the past.  It wasn’t that anyone saw ghosts, regardless of the current craze for such things.  Rather, the community changed very little over time.  So the relationship web remained in place and intact, even when individuals in that web died.  Their places were maintained in the unconscious seating chart of that congregation.  Only very slowly did some of those places fill in with new people.  Thus those who had lost someone had time to reorganize a sense of themselves and to live into a different seating chart.