Maxwell Institute Podcast #171: How Does God Grieve?

Rosalynde Welch: We've all heard the question and we've probably asked it ourselves, why did this terrible thing have to happen in my life? It's a universal cry from the heart. President Henry B. Eyring taught, with all the differences in our lives, we have at least one challenge in common. We all must deal with adversity. A brave man I knew wept and cried out in his physical suffering to those who ministered to him. I have always tried to be good. How could this happen?

Today on the podcast, I'm talking with Dr. Mary Eyring, Associate Professor of English at Brigham Young University. Dr. Eyring studies early American literature, and her research has immersed her in the physical and spiritual suffering of ordinary women and men, who, like the man Elder Eyring spoke of, reached their breaking point, but had to go on. In our conversation, we turn to the work of theologian Sarah Bachelard, author of a short book titled Experiencing God in a Time of Crisis. We talked about how to move forward when a crisis, whether sudden or slow motion, causes spiritual collapse and how the pattern of the atonement can give us something to hold on to. In the second half of the show, Dr. Eyring shares a very personal account of her mother's long journey through early onset dementia. As it happened, her dear mother died soon after we recorded this conversation. And so, this was one of Mary's last opportunities to speak publicly about her mother while she was still living. I'm incredibly grateful to have learned a little more about this brave woman. And we send our heartfelt support to Dr. Eyring and her entire family. Your mother's memory is a blessing.

Hello, Mary Eyring, and welcome to the Maxwell Institute Podcast.

Mary Eyring: Thank you so much for having me.

Welch: Today, we are going to be talking about some heavy topics. We'll be talking about grief and crisis and suffering, the valley of the shadow of death that most of us walk through at some point in our life. Listeners know that we always start our podcast with a piece of scholarship that speaks to us, not only as scholars, but also as disciples. And so, today we're gonna be talking about a short book, a very short book, really just a little slip of a thing, but a beautiful little book by an Anglican theologian named Sarah Bachelard. And the name of this little book is Experiencing God in a Time of Crisis. So Mary, briefly tell us a little bit about Sarah Bachelard's book and why it speaks to you, why it's been powerful in your life.

Eyring: Yeah, I came across this book when Sarah Bachelard was a guest on the Faith and Imagination podcast that the BYU Humanities Center does. That's hosted by Matt Wickman and he invited Sarah Bachelard on, I think during what felt like to me, sort of the bottom of the pandemic. She was there to talk about this book and some other scholarship and just her reflections about God and crisis. And those were themes that seemed really resonant to me at that moment. And they connected to my scholarship in ways that were really instructive for me. I liked a couple of things immediately about this book, which is just a series of three meditations.

And it opened up to me a way of thinking about God in the first place that was so revelatory for me because Sarah Bachelard's idea is that the God that we think of most of the time, just when life is humming along and going the way we want it to, is just an idea. And it's usually a pretty passive and comforting idea. This tends to be a God who confirms us in the things we already think and the things we already want to do that comforts us and assures us. But the problem is: that's probably not God at all. That's probably mostly me or a projection of me. That's our own voice. By contrast, the God that we experience in crisis, the God who calls to us and to whom we respond is much more likely to unsettle us than to comfort us and is much more likely to stretch us than just to confirm us in the identity that we already have. And that idea was powerful to me because I was studying, I studied the Puritans, so I was studying people who were always stretched and who were always called upon to stretch, and I was feeling stretched in my own life. And the idea that I could think of these moments of crisis as windows of revelation into the character of a God who was other than me. and who was asking me to do exactly the opposite things that I wanted to do in my life and was upending my life in ways that felt catastrophic to me was ultimately very, very comforting. I would actually say I found a lot of solace in that idea. And as you say, the book's very short. I read it really quickly and really enjoyed the interview and have just since thought about those ideas a lot in my life and in my scholarship.

Welch: So, a crisis could be a lot of different things in our lives. And I think Bachelard opens the door for us to apply these ideas in a lot of different situations. It could be a family crisis where our family falls apart. It could be a health crisis. It could be a faith crisis. It could be the loss of one's reputation. There's lots of different life circumstances that can precipitate the kind of crisis that she has in mind. But what they all share in common, just as you've been saying, Mary, is that they knock down the beautiful life that we thought that we had, and they force us to build up again from the beginning, from the foundation. And so in that way, something like a death is often kind of the central metaphor, and sometimes, of course, the actual precipitating event of a crisis, when we contemplate a kind of death of ourself, the death of our stories, the death of our expectations, the death of our self-image, right? We, a crisis forces us to die in some ways to ourself. And so she uses the three days of Christ's atonement, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, as a kind of template to guide us through these most profound crises. So walk us through, if you would, this three-day journey that she takes us on.

Eyring: Yeah, so she's referring here to the Easter triduum where on Friday, we understand the rupture, the loss, the horrible event that makes it impossible for us to ever resume again our lives on the same plane of existence. So it's the shattering of, as you say, the story that we told. That's just a fact that we all make meaning by way of narrative and story. And we have ideas about who we are and why things are and what we do and why they have meaning. And Friday is a day that represents the giving way of that story, the story that we've been telling ourselves. proves to be inadequate in the face of some event, it fails us in some way. And so the crisis is when sort of the ground gives out beneath you. And Sunday, of course, is the day of redemption. It's the day of a kind of wholeness and a newer, bigger story that accommodates what was lacking in the story that we used to tell ourselves and it accommodates. the grief and the tragedy that we felt. But between those two, Friday and Sunday, so the loss of one way of living and the assumption of a new form of life, there is a period of emptiness, of silence. And in the tradition, this is sometimes called Holy Saturday and it can be seen as just a day where we've had to abandon the old way and the old way that we used to live and our old thoughts about things, but we don't yet have anything else to replace it with. And that can seem bleak or hopeful. It can be a day of pregnant silence, a day of expectation, but it's a day where you sit and you wait and most of us find ourselves in a lot of these cycles of crisis and for some of us Saturday is most of the crisis it you know, it's It's a day where it's not clear yet What what life can look like again or what meaning can look like again? And so it is a day that really tests us especially as Christian disciples to to sit patiently and to have faith and to trust that somehow things can be made better.

Welch: Yeah, I think one of the crucial tasks of that Saturday, and of course, you know, these days are sort of symbolic periods of time and it might take us weeks, it might take us months, sometimes it might take us years to make our way through Friday and Saturday and come to Sunday. But one of the tasks of Saturday, it seems to me, is a kind of acceptance that the loss has really occurred, whatever it might be. I know, I don't think I'm alone in often experiencing a really powerful sense of denial when a big loss has occurred and a belief that we can go back to the way it was, right? If we can just fix something, we can get back to the way it was. It takes a while for that old story to, even after it's been knocked down, for it to get swept away. And for a while, we're wanting to go back and we're kind of desperately… figuring out how we can make it the way it was before. But it seems like part of what we need to do Saturday is to forgive and to accept what life has given us and to understand as those, I think about Jesus's disciples, right? That long, long Sabbath Saturday sitting in their homes and what that time must have been like. And I imagine they must have gone through this period of powerful denial that he didn't really die and really he's still alive in there and coming to the understanding that no, he did die. And then of course, we see why that moment of forgiveness and acceptance is so powerful because the resurrection would lose its power if Christ had not really died. So there's a beauty that can come on the other side of that acceptance. It's really, really hard to get there.

Eyring: Yeah, that's right.

Welch: So, Bachelard talks a little bit about her own experience in this book. And she experienced a profound crisis. For her, it had to do with the kind of destruction of her professional reputation, everything that she had worked for professionally for years. The rug had been pulled out from under her, and she felt like she had no future professionally. And she talks about, One morning she speaks very descriptively about sitting on the edge of Darling Harbor. What a great name. Darling Harbor in Australia where she's from. So tell us a little bit about what Bachelard herself experienced in her life.

Eyring: So she speaks about opening up some space for herself in that moment when she's sitting there for just contemplative prayer. So she tried, you know, to sort of turn away from herself and be still and open and receptive enough that she could find some way through this horrible event for her, and that she came to realization through that prayer that what her desire for professional success had really been was a story she was telling herself about her separateness from other people. And maybe even her superiority in some way to other people, that it was important for her to distinguish herself professionally. It hadn't really at heart been about just achieving things professionally, attaining some position or some knowledge or some mastery. It had been about setting herself apart from her peers and that wasn't a story anyone but her had about herself. That wasn't an expectation anyone would have or want of her to set herself apart in this way. And that as she was able to recognize the ego in the story that had been driving her professional motivations, she was able to release it and see herself as she says, as just a creature among creatures, just wounded like everybody else, scared like everybody else, disappointed like everybody else, imperfect, and that gave her both a deeper sense of her own professional identity, who she really was, but also a very deep sense of communion and fellowship with other people, that it allowed her to feel a unity with God's children who were all struggling in some way. And to me that does seem like the grace of crisis. And it's, there are less poetic ways to say it maybe, but it's impossible to be very smug after the kinds of crises that I've endured and I think that a lot of people have endured because I think somewhere in the old story that we tell ourselves before certain kinds of crises is well, that can never happen to me. And I don't know why that would be. I exercise or my children are too wonderful or my relationships are too strong or I work too hard. That just couldn't happen to me. And what the crisis does is it says, no, you are a parent like everyone else. You are a daughter like everyone else. You are so much like everyone else that a lot of in that letting go of the old story, it allows for so much compassion and so much empathy and so much vulnerability to all of God's broken and wounded creatures. And that, I think, is absolutely one of the most redemptive things about crisis is that we resume life again on common ground with other people who have been knocked down the way we have. And possibilities there for discipleship are so rich, so much richer than if we lived in our smaller stories, in which we're safer and more stable and more protected.

Welch: So one can imagine a number of different ways that we might get from Friday to Sunday. We have to exist during that Saturday and we have to do something with our bodies and our time. And you can imagine somebody might throw themself into exercise or nature or into journaling or scripture reading. But for Bachelard, her method, her way forward is through prayer, through contemplative prayer. So tell us a little bit about Bachelard's prayer life and how prayer functions for her.

Eyring: I was taken by this. She has a very conscious practice in her prayer of trying to achieve a kind of unselfhood, a poverty of the self, where rather than becoming distracted by our inner monologue or inner voices, she sees prayer as an opportunity to truly be silent and to truly be still and to be open over a long period of time to God's revelation of himself, to the discovery of God. And I think to her mind, if I understand her correctly, this is important because God is actually hard, even for those who know him well, to miss, or to misunderstand. You know, Samuel had to be taught what it was to hear the voice of the Lord and how to respond to it. And even Jesus' disciples who spent so much time with him didn't recognize him when they saw the risen Lord. She talks about how important it is to kind of train ourselves through this process to hear the voice that's outside of us and that's over us, God's voice, and that being able to maintain a spiritual practice like this where we're really open to God in prayer means that we actually live very provisionally. That instead of coming to God with a list of petitions, things we need, if we come to God saying, I don't know which way is up. I don't know, I don't even, I don't even know what the crisis is here. Help me and teach me means that we live very responsively but we live in a way that's much less self-possessed and much less stable and much less fixed and sure that through a practice of really seeking God in prayer. what we agree to do, what we consent to do, is to be very, very flexible and very humble, very self-denying and open to the possibility that very difficult things might be asked of us. And so that for her has become a kind of practice that's important because as you say, Rosalynde, Our tendency is to immediately try to reach for another story, whatever story can make what has happened to us meaningful again. And sometimes those stories are quite shallow and they're just as brittle as the old stories. And so the beauty of the truer story, God revealing himself to us in crisis is first that he does give us a bigger story, a truer story, a truer sense of who we really are and what our lives mean and can be. But that because we're just approaching God and we're just in the process of becoming like him, that new story eventually has to give way too. I mean, it's not as if we can arrive after a crisis at another fixed epiphany that can then be like a sturdy framework. It's just the nature of this mortal life is we'll undergo crisis after crisis, but a practice of contemplative prayer can make those crises less devastating to us because we've kind of learned that we can have faith, there'll be a moment of waiting and silence, but God can reveal something to us and then he can reveal more and more to us, but we sort of have to constantly be willing to let go of what it is we thought we knew or our own agenda and our own ego so that it can constantly expand into whatever the eternal potential is that we can't see right now.

Welch: You know, my first interview in this season of the podcast was with my colleague Kim Matheson, and we were talking specifically about prayer. And there's a moment from that conversation that I'll never forget, based on an insight from the article we were discussing. But we were talking about what prayer is. And when you get down on your knees, sometimes you might come before the Lord with… it's usually not as crude as a laundry list of demands, right? But still, we come with our agenda. We're praying for somebody or we're praying for something. And we kneel down at our beds and we take in that first breath before we say a word. And the author of this article that we were reading together pointed out that breath is the first moment of prayer and breath is also the first gift that God gives Adam in the Garden of Eden when he puts the breath of life into his nostrils. So there's a way in which when we take that first breath of prayer, God has already granted what we've come before him to ask. He's put that breath in our nostrils. And by granting our petition, that first even unspoken petition before we say a word, there's a way in which we can let everything else melt away. We can let the agenda melt away because God has already given us what we asked for. He gave us breath. And that series of things that we wanted, that we came before Him to petition and ask for, I think we're willing to be more provisional about it. Just as you said, God has already answered our prayer. We can detach from those outcomes that we had in mind and be willing to live in that space of grace and of uncertainty, just as you said.

Eyring: Mm-hmm.

Welch: Yeah, I think that's exactly right. When we recognize what God has done for us, we can trust Him and crises will come for all of us and we'll sit in our Saturdays. But knowing, just as you say, all He's done for us gives, I think, a sense of greater calmness and an expectation to what must be coming next.

I really loved Dr. Eyring's point that crises can show us our interconnection with each other. It's not only that we can now relate to others who have suffered as we have, although that's part of it, it's more that crisis has a way of puncturing the illusions of ego. The hidden story I might believe is that in order to matter to God, my life has to be extra special. Above the grubbiness of ordinary troubles. Crisis frees us from the burden of being special and offers the relief of simply resting in God's love in the company of other ordinary creatures. And from there, we really can begin to join God in His extraordinary work of love. If you listen to the end of our conversation, Mary suggests a better question for a time of crisis. As natural as it is to ask, how could this happen, a better question might be, how is God grieving in this situation? Grieving as God grieves, not as our anxious and frightened human minds want to, can lead us through the valley of the shadow of death into a larger and truer life.

Well, Mary, shifting gears just a little bit now, let's talk a little bit about your own research and your own life, which in a beautiful way you've intertwined in a new book that you're writing. You've written in this new book about your own experience navigating a very long and slow moving crisis that has kind of become an entire season of your life at this point, and it has to do with your mother. Will you tell us a little bit about your mother's story?

Eyring: Yeah, absolutely. When I was a senior in high school, so more than 20 years ago, we started noticing that my mom, who had always been very carefree and spontaneous, was maybe seeming a little more carefree and a little bit more spontaneous than we were used to. We started to recognize some of the symptoms of something like maybe early onset Alzheimer's and she resisted getting a diagnosis and I can absolutely understand that. She just preferred very much what we've been talking about here to trust the Lord. And she just leaned into whatever was ahead which turned out to be a very, very slow progressing memory loss or dementia or something like that. And over the last two decades, she has slowly lost the ability to walk and to talk. And now she's very sick. And most of her, as we knew her, most of what we knew is gone. And… This is an experience many people will be familiar with, any kind of chronic illness or caring for someone who has a chronic affliction of any kind. So not even necessarily physical illness, but just anything like this knows that we tend, I think, to be a little impatient in the face of crisis. And we almost kind of just want...the rupture and then the healing and the meaning and the restoration or whatever. And what situations like this have forced me and many, many people in my situation to do is just to sort of relax into the crisis. I don't, you know, it wasn't obvious when Friday became Saturday, but we're somewhere sort of between and it's. It's been as painful as these things always are for people who go through them, but there's something that's been really powerful about sitting at an abyss for so long. So she's just right up at the edge of death, but she hasn't died. And she has very much surprised doctors and nurses who've been helping us for the last decade. Her disease isn't following any kind of a normal path prognosis. And so there's a lot of uncertainty there, but it really has allowed us to be really thoughtful. We've had plenty of time to be able to contemplate her life and her death. And I wrote about that. It's sort of unconventional move for an academic monograph, but I'm writing about the Puritans. So people who lived mostly in the 17th century in New England. And I'm writing about grief. There's been a lot written about Puritans and their grief, but most of it is sort of centered around death. So they experienced a lot of death. There was collective and individual and catastrophic and expected. And I think this experience with my mother made me think a little bit about all of the grief around things other than death. And because as you suggest, you know, death, or earlier on in this conversation, you point out, you know, death is a limit event that often is the precipitating event of a crisis or a metaphor for crisis. And this experience with my mom primed me to look for afflictions that were a little bit less visible and a little more chronic and ongoing, and that just sort of had to be lived with. And the kinds of pains that that people don't memorialize and move on from, that don't exist as memory, but that exist as a very slowly unfolding present all the time. And that plays tricks with time a little bit because suffering was in the past, but it's also in the present and it's also in the future. And it just gave me a way to think about, I would maybe contemplative grief that has been meaningful for me personally and really eye-opening in terms of my scholarship.

Welch: One thing that mothers do is they watch their children and they are a kind of constant witness to our lives, especially when we're young. Even in the years that we ourselves can't remember, our mother was there and she saw us and she watched us. And it strikes me, Mary, that one of the many losses that you must have experienced is the loss of her memories of you. Herself as a kind of guarantee that you exist and that you were born and that you've lived because she was there to watch you. Have you felt that loss of your mother's reflective memories on you and your life?

Eyring: That's a really interesting question. And in a way, of course, yeah, I think that's exactly right. And then in another way, there's just so much mystery about this. There's so much mystery to me about her mind and her soul right now. And I hear people who reach for some kind of meaning or explanation and they'll say things like, oh, I'm sure she's...aware of you or they'll say I'm sure she's proud of you and I'm not so sure, you know, I'm not so sure she's not able to talk and so I don't know, I don't know what she's aware of and I don't know how, I don't know what she's going through. I can't imagine what she's going through and that's… I don't say that idiomatically. I can imagine a lot of things because I'm a literary scholar. So I'm actually good at imagining things and I can't imagine that. It is an absolute mystery to me where she can be right now, where her soul can be right now. Just, I think that will be an enormous revelation for me to find out what the last two decades have been like for her. But I certainly… I certainly still feel witnessed by her. I just, it's plausible for me, I don't say this to imply that I have any sure sense of her situation than I do, but I can imagine some level of consent, of her consent in this situation. She was such a righteous person that I can imagine that, that it's possible that if she wanted to be gone, she could, or be somewhere else, she could be somewhere else. I imagine, and I just imagine this, but I imagine that she still wants to be here, that her ministry as a mother and as a wife and probably even as a member of the church isn't finished and that she's being allowed to continue it somehow. And so even though she can't share her... experience of me or of my children or of my siblings or my father with me, it still feels very much as if she is a witness to our lives in ways that are really still formative for me and for my kids.

Welch: You know, you're really, you're making me think so much here. We, as members of the church, we're so blessed with the expansive and just absolute flood of light and knowledge that Joseph revealed, in particular about what happens after death. So we actually can put together a pretty detailed idea of what life is like after death. And it turns out actually it's...It's a lot like this life now, it turns out, more than anything else. But what you're pointing to is that there still remains this mystery at the heart of existence. And that is this transition when our selves are in this kind of liminal or transition state on the edge of the abyss, as you say. And we don't know anything about that. And that's sad and scary, as you point out. But it's also kind of pregnant with beautiful possibilities that you've just explored for us, that there may be these other ways in which she is continuing to know you and to be with you and to be in solidarity with you, beyond the limits of normal everyday experience and reveal truth to this point. Yeah. Mary, you wrote something in your book that has really, really stuck with me. You know, this, as you said, this has been a long standing condition in your life and of course in your mother's life. And there's been a lot of water under the bridge and you've done a lot of living. And so you've experienced, you haven't been stuck in a state of perpetual acute mourning. You couldn't, right? You had to go on with your life and wonderful, joyful things happened and hard things happened. And there's a way in which the grief that you feel about your mother has been a part of all of that. You wrote this, grief is a volatile substance that mixes with other feelings in the air. I thought that was so insightful that grief can give a different flavor or a different color to other emotions that we experience, a kind of hybrid experience when we have a chronic experience of grief. And so, as you alluded to earlier, you've actually made this a subject of your scholarship, of your scholarly study of the Puritans. So tell us a little bit about the ways in which you've observed grief persisting over time.

Eyring: Oh, that's a great question. I think that one of the ways, this is going back to Bachelard now, that being contemplative or trying to be sort of thoughtful in a practiced way about the experiences in our lives can help us to recognize as you say, and maybe I said that in the book, that's a good line, maybe it can help us to see the way that emotions and that feelings mix and that we can respect threats, smaller and more subtle threads of emotion and experience, even in the face of events that would seem like they would totalize them. So I think what's happened. with the Puritans a little bit, maybe I felt this in my own life too, is that I think there's this assumption that because they experienced hardship on such a dramatic scale, they must have been desensitized in some sense to the smaller tragedies. So they must have had a sort of flatter emotional register because they had been schooled by such horrific experiences. And one of the assumptions that people can make, for example, is, well, if you have so many children die, then either, you know, then after a while, what's one more death? Or what would something as small as a miscarriage be? I mean, it probably wouldn't even register as a tragedy. And I doubted that just as a humanist and took that doubt to the scholarship where I found. really poignant and powerful things that the Puritans, who had indeed left homes in England and then watched their beloved England roiled by civil war and had planted settlements in really inhospitable conditions and had waged wars, many of them of their own making, with indigenous people and had at some points in some periods of settlement. had so much death they couldn't even bury the dead. The ground was too hard, they were too ill themselves. And in the face of all of that, I was really surprised to go and to find in their own diaries and especially in the poetry of Anne Bradstreet, which I really love, beautiful little elegies for lost grandchild who had a very short life and Anne Bradstreet had plenty to grieve, but she grieved that fleeting short life as if it were precious and as if that grief was painful and she mourned it. And then in another poem after her home in Andover, which she built at some expense, I mean emotional expense in the conditions of settlement, when it burned to the ground. she wrote about missing her kitchen table. And the idea of somebody who could grieve on the one hand, so much loss and so much death and war, and then could just be very, very sad about a very young baby or a kitchen table that she had worked at all day, every day and into the night. made the Puritans come alive to me, and it made the complexity of their humanity come alive to me. And I think it's made me more attentive to my own experience, that it's absolutely the case that a mood of grief can tinge the palate of our emotional experience in ways that don't dominate it usually, and don't have to dominate it, but that it can be there, and it's begun to seem to me a grace. to see in other people the whisper of grief behind all of just the outward activity of their daily lives, to just sort of see mostly people who are carrying on and achieving things and functioning, and then to see a very, very quiet, hidden sorrow somewhere. And the prophet Job, you know, says in the Old Testament, Oh, that my grief were thoroughly weighed. And I love that idea. And I use that phrase in my book to say, I'm just trying to thoroughly weigh the sorrow of people because I think some of their sorrows over stillbirth or over chronic illness have been ignored because we're so interested in the larger calamities. And so I've tried to develop a practice in my scholarship of being attentive and sensitive to small afflictions.

Welch: That really speaks to me. In my own life and my family story, I lost a brother when I was a teenager, my little brother died of cancer. So as you can imagine, that was kind of the dominating experience of my growing up years and continues to be really, really formative for us as a family. But I recognize that so much. It's been over 30 years now. And yet, still, I want people to know about my brother. And I want his loss to be acknowledged. And early on in that grieving process, and I know this is something that a lot of people experience, there is actually a reluctance to move on, a reluctance to move through that acute phase because you don't want your beloved to be forgotten. And you don't want people to think that you can just get over it. And so for you as an observer to recognize their grief and say, I know you've gone on with your life. You've gone on to do amazing things. But I see your loss. And it is witnessed. And it is known. And your beloved is remembered, even if you don't know their name. That's really, really powerful. So I think you're doing, I think you're doing spiritual work with your scholarship.

Eyring: I have felt an obligation to the people that I study because I study literature, but I study literature during a period where it was nonfiction. And so I have felt an obligation to the writers and to the people that I'm studying to. to treat them kindly and to see them the way I would want to be seen. And that hasn't been always chic in Puritan studies. They tended to overreact sometimes and they were very imperfect people like we all were, but I was so cognizant when I was writing this book that these were real lives that had been conducted with dignity and purpose, and that most of these people had tried as hard as they possibly could to live worthy lives. And I have felt a lot of, I have felt a spiritual connection to the subject matter of this book.

Welch: So as we're moving here towards the end of our interview, Mary, let's talk a little bit more about that Sunday. As we've talked about, it's not a rewind, right? You don't get to Sunday by rewinding to Friday. It's going to look different. And we're going to come out the other side not unscarred. We're going to be changed permanently by what we've gone through. So from what you've experienced, what you've read and learned in the books, in the archives, what is the right kind of hope for healing that we should hold out?

Eyring: That's a really good question. As you say, it won't be the case that we simply resume life again. It will be a bigger life that we find in the aftermath of crisis. And one of the illustrations that I look at when I think about a question like this is Job again. And the story ends with Job experiencing again the things he had at the beginning of the story. So he has new servants and animals and children. It's possible, I think, to read the story and say, oh, well, he was compensated with interest. And any of us who have lived any kind of tragedy know that is not the case, that all of the beautiful things that have happened, for example, since your brother haven't, have done nothing to erase that loss, but rather you live a life now that accommodates the loss. And Bachelors talks about rather than the restoration of Sunday, the reintegration of Sunday. It won't be the case that we will just receive again, whatever it was that was taken from us, but. we will be able to integrate into our lives the loss, the thing that, the suffering, the person that we've become in the suffering, to some extent the self that we left behind. We will be able, I think, to achieve, the bigger life that say Job has is bigger because it includes what he has as well as what he lost. and the truth that he learned in what he lost and the self that he proved himself to be in the loss. That was the wager, right? Is that he couldn't possibly be as good as people thought Job was, and he was, and more. And I imagine a potential for all of us that includes the sum of all of our experiences and all of what we've learned and that can integrate, make part of a whole all that we've suffered and all that we've given up. And I do, I do believe in redemption and in resurrection, but I wouldn't want to become an unscarred version of myself. In some ways, I think the unscarred version of myself from several years ago was very unlucky. And I consider myself a much richer person for what I have experienced. And I, That's what I imagine on a Sunday is I think of the savior and this, the scars, the tokens of all that he has experienced and then all that he is able to share with other people. And of course, the ability then that those scarred versions of ourselves have to minister to other people in pain. And one of the great affordances of the circumstance in which my mom has been in for many, many years and I know nothing of her, that the interiority of her pain, but my dad has been so incredibly committed to being with her at the edge of her life. So as you say, I've kind of dialed down the intensity of her loss by just carrying on with my life and checking in with her and visiting her and making sure she's taken care of, but mostly sort of carrying on. And my dad goes up every morning and every night and prays with my mom and sings a hymn with my mom and talks with my mom and says goodbye to my mom. And I just cannot imagine, I could not, I do not have the emotional fortitude to stare down the death of a loved one every single day the way he does. However, in his ministry, he meets people every day who are dealing with death and with loss of loved ones. It's, I would say it's one of the...primary reasons that people come to see him. And he has been able to now for years, every day, to meet them, not with the memory of his suffering as an analogy for their present suffering, but he is able to meet them in the moment of his suffering and reach out to them in their suffering. And I've thought about what an extraordinary opportunity that is for us. It's what the Savior can do, right? He comes to us not just in compassion, but in solidarity because he has actually experienced all that we're experiencing. And so we might aspire maybe to an unbroken or unscarred, just a restored version of ourselves. But I think that the plan of salvation has something much grander in mind. Well, you've taken us here to the final question that I want to ask you, which is a very practical one. I have this picture of your dad on an everyday basis practically, sitting and solving real problems and bridging real communication gaps and doing real hands-on ministry. The theme of our podcast this season is asking better questions because I believe that the insights gained from disciple-scholarship can have real world practical resonances in people's lives of faith and lives at church. So Mary, what for our listeners, what questions do you think we should be asking of our grief? How can we ask better questions of the crises that we walk through? Well, one of the questions that I've started to ask of my grief is, what is it in this situation that God is grieving? Because I have had a sense in my life and especially recently, that my grief isn't precisely God's grief. And that's not to say that I think he's dismissing my grief or he's uninterested in my grief. I just think that it could be the case that some of the very things that I want most, just stability, I want autonomy, I want a certain kind of predictability in my life day to day, are possibly the things that concern God, that would worry him, and that the things that give me the most grief, that have been the most shattering for me, that have revealed my own fallibility and...and the poverty of my own systems of meaning making have been the very things that God is clearing away or wanted to see cleared away in order to make room for something else. And so I want now to knowing that God grieves, Jesus weeps, I would be interested to know what it is in my life that causes them concern or anxiety pain and to align maybe my grief more with theirs. And I think in that maybe would be the ability, President Nelson talks about the dangers of being myopic. And that would maybe be the ability to say, oh, God didn't grieve the loss of this thing. He grieved the thing. And now that it's lost, I can move into something truer to who I really am.

Welch: Mary Eyring, thank you so much for being with us today on the Maxwell Institute Podcast.

Eyring: Thanks Rosalynde, it was such a pleasure to talk to you.