Grief has a funny way of choking out your perspective and
balance. It's so easy to let that creeping vine take hold, and once you do, it's
so very hard to wrench yourself free.
Grief can become, during our darker moments, a trickster-friend. You get
so used to its presence that you forget how to live without it, insidious though
the relationship might be.
Having spent the better part of this Fall attempting to
journey forward after an intensely personal and awful loss (I miscarried right
before the start of the term), I've found myself thinking a lot about how humans
grieve, and on the literature that has been born out of these moments of agony. So much has been written on this topic, but for me, poetic works
and their explorations of how we suffer and grapple with loss have
always moved me the most and have helped to
transport me (or at least begin the journey) out of those dark spaces.
The journey to a place of peace and balance after experiencing a profound loss is
always a difficult one, and I have grown fascinated with, and taken
considerable comfort from, those who have written about their own journeys
through grief as a result.
Given that most of what I study these days is medieval, I have
found myself thinking a lot about Pearl
of late. The poem has been one of my favorites ever since I first encountered
it as an undergraduate. Nearly a decade
later and particularly in light of my most recent loss, I have returned to the
poem with a fuller awareness of the grief that gives Pearl its initial fuel and
momentum.
Simultaneously, I've found myself thinking as well about a far
more recent work: The Shack. The
novel is, at its core, a framed dream vision. The first eighty pages or so chronicle
the protagonist's (Mac's) loss of his youngest daughter, Missy. This portion of
the novel is agonizing, and it ends in the very place where the authorities find clear evidence of Missy's murder – a dilapidated shack in the wilds of Oregon.
Mac returns to the shack after receiving a cryptic invitation from
"Papa" – the name that his wife, Nan, uses for God. He falls asleep in the shack after a fit of
rage and an ensuing mental breakdown, and when he "wakes" he enters into
a dream vision in which he finds the comfort he's been searching for and his
release from grief and anger.
What strikes me the most about both of these works is the
candor with which they recount the deeply personal and awful grief that comes
with the loss of a child (or any loved one). Both Mac and the narrator of Pearl are angry, lost, and utterly
encased in their grief at the outset of these works. As I returned to them both over the past few
weeks, I immediately identified with these characters because of that. Their questions,
their hurt, but most of all, their journeys through grief to a place of balance
felt so deeply familiar and so strangely comforting.
As I kept thinking about these two works (largely in
isolation at first), I began to realize just how much they actually share. Granted,
there are NUMEROUS differences (cultural, structural, and theological) that separate
them, but I found certain aspects profoundly intertwined nonetheless. For
starters, both the Pearl narrator and
Mac have — as I mentioned earlier — allowed their grief to consume all
aspects of their lives by the time that we're introduced to them. Take, for
instance, stanza five of Pearl:
Bifore that spot my honde I spenned
For care ful colde that to me caght.
A deuely dele in my hert denned
Thagh resoun sette myselven saght.
I playned my perle that ther was penned
Wyth fyrce skylles that faste faght.
Thagh kynde of Kryst me comfort kenned,
My wreched wylle in wo ay wraghte.
I felle upon that floury flaght -
Suche odour to my hernes schot,
I slode upon a slepyng-slaghte
On that precios perle wythouten spot. (49-56)
For care ful colde that to me caght.
A deuely dele in my hert denned
Thagh resoun sette myselven saght.
I playned my perle that ther was penned
Wyth fyrce skylles that faste faght.
Thagh kynde of Kryst me comfort kenned,
My wreched wylle in wo ay wraghte.
I felle upon that floury flaght -
Suche odour to my hernes schot,
I slode upon a slepyng-slaghte
On that precios perle wythouten spot. (49-56)
Before
that spot my hands I clasped / For care full cold that seized upon me / A
desolating grief in my heart lay deep / Though reason would have reconciled me.
/ I mourned my pearl that there was trapped / With fierce arguments that fast
contended, / My wretched will in woe nature wrought . . .
The speaker here kneels over the very spot where he
"lost" his pearl — which is often interpreted as a young daughter — and laments
that the awareness of this loss "does nothing but pierce my heart sharply,
/ Swell and burn my breast painfully" (17-18).
Mac's grief after Missy's abduction and and murder is
similarly all-consuming:
Little distractions like the ice
storm were a welcome although brief respite from the haunting presence of his
constant companion: The Great Sadness,
as he referred to it. Shortly after the summer that Missy vanished, The Great Sadness had draped itself
around Mack's shoulders like some invisible but almost tangibly heavy
quilt. The weight of its presence dulled
his eyes and stooped his shoulders. Even his efforts to shake it off were
exhausting, as if his arms were sewn into its bleak folds of despair, and he
had somehow become part of it. He ate, worked, loved, dreamed, and played in
this garment of heaviness, weighed down as if he were wearing a leaden bathrobe
– trudging daily through the murky despondency that sucked the color out of
everything.
At times he could feel The Great Sadness slowly tightening
around his chest and heart like the crushing coils of a constructor, squeezing
liquid from his eyes until he thought there no longer remained a reservoir.
Other times he would dream that his feet were stuck in cloying mud as he caught
brief glimpses of Missy running down the wooded path ahead of him, her red cotton
summer dress gilded with wildflowers flashing through the trees. She was
completely oblivious to the dark shadow tracking her from behind. Although he
frantically tried to scream warnings to her, no sound emerged and he was always
too late and too impotent to save her. He would bolt upright in bed, sweat
dripping from his tortured body, while waves of nausea and guilt and regret
rolled over him like some surreal tidal flood. (27)
Both protagonists find themselves utterly consumed by their
awareness of what they have lost. It dominates their thoughts and oppresses any
capacity for joy. Seeking (whether they realize it or not) an end to
their suffering, both journey to origin point of their pain: to the places
where they lost their beloved children. The Pearl narrator moves into a garden (often interpreted as a graveyard) where
his pearl "sprang away" from him,
while Mac journeys to the shack where they found Missy's dress and an awful
blood-stain, clear evidence of her murder.
It is through this return to a place of complete pain that
their dream visions occur. The dreamer in Pearl
"awakens" to find himself in a transcendent and beautiful landscape,
where he soon encounters the Pearl Maiden — a figure who both represents the
child he lost and the Divine Wisdom he so desperately needs. Mac, in turn,
wakes from his despair-induced slumber inside the shack and exits in complete
frustration, only to find the landscape slowly transform itself from Winter to Spring and the desolate shack reshape itself into a warm and inviting log
cabin, with clear signs of life inside. Mac is soon greeted by three humans,
each of whom is revealed as an aspect of the Trinitarian God.
From here, The Shack
diverges markedly from Pearl in a number
manner of ways, but a pivotal moment in the second half of the novel shares
much with the medieval dream vision as well.
In this particular episode, Mac finds himself and his outlook —
overshadowed as it is by The Great
Sadness — challenged and questioned by Sophia. Just as the Pearl Maiden challenges the narrator's misguided, grief-stricken perceptions, chiding him at
one point for having misinterpreted and incorrectly contextualized his loss
(5.265-76), Sophia forces Mac to face his destructive worldview in a
similarly blunt and masterful way. At
the end of their dialogue — which proves as cathartic and transformative as
the dialogue between the Pearl narrator and the Pearl Maiden — Mac is given a
glimpse of Missy in the afterlife. He sees her playing with his other children
(who are, themselves, experiencing dream visions of their own), and she
eventually runs directly towards him. An invisible force (represented by a
waterfall) separates them, but Mac is told that she knows that he is there
"on the other side of the waterfall." Mac tries desperately to get to
her, but the invisible force won't let him move. Once he stops, however, and
simply gazes on her, taking in "every detail of her expression and hair
and hands" she smiles at him and mouths "It's okay, I . . . love
you." Sophia tells him at this point that while Missy cannot see him, she
knows that he is there, and that she herself chose for their meeting to be this
way. Eventually "the water roared down from above, directly in front of
him, and obliterated all the sights and sounds of his children" and he
finds himself in a grotto behind a waterfall (exactly where he had entered to
talk with Sophia). Like the Pearl narrator, then, Mac is challenged in this portion
of the narrative by a female counselor who speaks with Divine authority. His resulting vision of his daughter, in turn,
challenges his attachment to The Great
Sadness and affirms what he has learned from Sophia. Just as the Pearl
Maiden chides the narrator for becoming too attached to his limited perception
of the world, Mac learns that he cannot – in the end – be the world's, or God's,
judge, and that the more he accepts the limitations of his perception, the more
free and more joyful he will become. The
Great Sadness, then, loses its power because it can only hang over him
so long as he convinces himself that his perceptions are wholly accurate.
The water imagery in this scene, I should add, also parallels
Pearl, because in both the protagonists
meet their lost children but are separated from them by an impassable body of
water. The water prevents the dreamer from completely accessing the afterlife
and those within it. Both Mac and the
Pearl narrator try frantically to cross these bodies of water at certain points
and rejoin their beloved children, only to realize that their reunion cannot
come to pass while they are both alive. Both find their attempts to ford the
barrier to be in vain — the Pearl narrator is held back initially by the maiden's
words, and eventually wakes up because he tries to ford the stream. Mac, in
turn, tries repeatedly to force his way through the invisible barrier, but to
no avail, and Sophia eventually explains that the barrier is truly
impenetrable. The fact that they want so desperately to experience the physical
presence of their lost ones speaks, rather poignantly, to their reliance upon their limited sensory perceptions.
What they learn — in no small part through these vain attempts — is
that true vision and wisdom lie in a state beyond the senses. They learn, as a
little prince once said, that "One sees clearly only with the heart. What
is essential is invisible to the eye."
As Pearl winds its way to a close, as the narrator comes to discover
a world and a worldview much larger than his grief, the word "delyt" appears frequently, suggesting that the narrator has begun to move forward from the place of grief that brought him into the dream vision. Mac too finds a way to reclaim his life from The Great Sadness and to live in joy not
in spite of his loss, but because of it. Both works, in their own way, explore
the ways in which we can locate a sense of purpose in the midst of these awful
losses. And this isn't to say, as Mac mistakenly observes, that these events
come to pass for the benefit of our souls and psyches, but rather that
"grace doesn't depend on suffering to exist, but where there is suffering
you will find grace in many facets and colors" (The Shack, 188).
Ultimately, I'm not seeking to argue here that the author of
The Shack drew inspiration from Pearl. Rather, my point in drawing out
this comparison is to suggest that both of these works — separated as they are by centuries, by theological nuance, by culture — tap into the same mysteries
of loss in uncannily similar ways, and that these similarities can — if we let
them — remind us that we are never truly alone in our grief, deeply and
intensely personal as those experiences always are. Considering these works alongside each other can offer us the deep and
abiding comfort of knowing that when we experience the intensity of loss and grief, that we
are entering into a strange and beautiful communion with all who have (and all who
will) endure the same. This may seem terribly bleak at first,
but it's actually — in my mind at least — quite beautiful to know that even with full knowledge of
the pain that will come with the loss of our beloved "pearles," that
we can never quite keep ourselves away from love. That we are always invited and drawn back
into relationship with others and with ourselves because of these risks. Pearls of great price, indeed.
