grieving is the longing for home: Jonathan Foster's indigo

grieving is the longing for home

Jonathan Foster's indigo

what is life
if not beauty’s pursuit
at the edge of the grave?

- Jonathan Foster

A review of a poignant, truthful grappling with the death of his daughter by Jonathan Foster - a kind of death that so many are experiencing around the world as loved ones fall into the grave. Foster's book is deeply poetic. It is lower case theology: not argumentative, not linear, not proclamatory, not trying to score points. He's giving us vignettes of grief, without hiding behind answers and solutions. Worth sharing with all grievers.

lower case theology

Below please find two extended poems in Jonathan Foster's indigo: the color of grief. As the poems appear on the pages of his book, they are even more striking and poignant. This is is partly because he makes such rich use of indentation and white space, which I do not duplicate in the excerpts, fearing I might not get things right. But you'll get a feeling for how his words function as, in Whitehead's words, "lures for feeling," offering what he calls a lower case theology, a theology that is episodic not argumentative, sharing the moments of experience which devastate a heart, his and ours. You will also find two interviews which reveal his sensitivity and one of his core idea: beauty is the longing for home, everywhere. And a short review by me. Click here to purchase the book.

Jay McDaniel

shocking

to lose something
so important

i mean, this wasn’t like
the remote or
keys or
even a
famous painting

this was something actually priceless

how could this
happen?
how could someone
so full of life
lose their kid?

how could a kid
so full of life
be gone?

couldn’t wrap
my mind
around
her departure

in the dead of winter
age 20
threshold of adulthood
threshold of next
not unlike a spring season
for her
so she died
full of life and spring
in the dead of winter?
what the…?

she had so much life to live
wait… what was the point?

we had been getting her to
adulthood
showing her how
leading the way
shoe-tying
piano-playing
stick-shift driving
a thousand things
we did it
she observed
then followed

that’s the way this works
kids follow parents
but then she died
and the sequence
was wrecked

hurt so bad

messed up eating
messed up sleeping
messed up eliminating waste
messed up routine
messed up directions to post office

messed up everything

i’d be talking
and words would start acting
like little tripwires
connected to
little memories
connected to
little detonations
of sadness

just normal conversations
dentist or
barber or
grocery store
have any kids?
sons?
daughters?
how many kids do you have?

next thing i knew
i was slipping behind closed doors
trying not to make a scene
in public space
dentist or
barber or
grocery store

yeah, just trying to find
secluded place to
make room for
little detonations
of sadness

weeks

until the headstone arrived
until the sunshine arrived
march maybe
maybe april
little flames of sprouting green
all throughout the cemetery
in springtime

in springtime
we went to see the grave marker
to mark her grave with flowers
wife and me

i’ll not soon forget intentional
way she knelt
took a breath
and arranged
uprooted plants

way she leaned
back on heels
fingers absently gripping
fistfuls of grass

way she snatched a tear with
the back of her hand
dirt and moisture creating
little patterns of grief
on her cheek

way her hair fell
over her face
way i felt looking at her
how much i loved her
how much i wanted to
throw up

i stood close
like a tree providing shade
like a sentinel providing protection
useless

she arranged and then rearranged
as if this spot
might be fixed
with uprooted plants
as if uprooted lives
might be fixed
with an arrangement of
uprooted plants

started to say
it doesn’t matter

started to say
nothing matters

but i stopped
because something
very much started to matter
in the way she worked
so diligently amid
the sadness

i’ve thought
five or
thirty-seven or
a thousand times since

what is life
if not beauty’s pursuit
at the edge of the grave?

--------

Indigo: the color of grief
bit.ly/indigocampaign
© 2023 by Jonathan J. Foster

review of indigo

Jonathan,

I've read indigo this morning, and I like it very much.

For many years I have wished that open and relational (and other) theologians would write less argumentatively and more episodically. By episodic writing have in mind writing that is grounded in lived experience, exploratory in spirit, unfolds episodically (as do your chapters) rather than in lockstep linearity, avoids authorial tone (proclamation, certainty), and serious but friendly (with a tad of humor). indigo is all of these things.

I also have in mind theology that carries within it the spirit of early 20th century modernist poetry and the imagist movement, which has influenced western poetry ever since. Exemplars were TS Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams. The aim of imagism was to present images in their concreteness: avoiding philosophical argumentation and the narrative style of romantic poetry of Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley. Here's how the Poetry Foundation describes the movement:

"An early 20th-century poetic movement that relied on the resonance of concrete images drawn in precise, colloquial language rather than traditional poetic diction and meter."

indigo partakes of this spirit in many ways: its avoidance of capital (shouting) letters, its use of white space, its crossing out phrases, its experimentation with different sized fonts, its avoidance of "telling the story" of your daughter's death and your own grieving in predictable narrative terms. Imagist poems are like lightning flashes, and indigo has a good bit of lightning, not only in its introduction and concluding section, where lightning plays an important role, but in chapters and within chapters.

"Chapters" is not the right word. Your chapters are prose poems, linked the antecedents and successors in an organic way, with good transitions, but not oppressively linear. We are gradually taken into themes and often we return to themes in different "episodes."

As I read indigo, the most persistent themes, put abstractly, are tragedy, beauty, love, entanglement, becoming, and creative transformation. The good news is that you don't really try to explain them as part of a systematic theology, but rather present them through analogies and associations. Your themes function as, in Whitehead's terms, lures for feeling. To whatever degree you want readers to feel them in their universal relevance, you present them, as Eliot would put it, as concrete universals: that is, as images in which they are incarnate. "Lightning," for example.

Images is not the right word. You are building upon rhythm and sound (auditory) not just objects of vision. There are sections of the book where music plays an important role and at points we hear "beauty" not as pointing to things seen but rather things heard, and memories of things heard. Your daughter's singing, for example. And touch plays a role, too, as in hugs, not only with other people but with shared experiences of sorrow. The idea that hell needs a hug is a lightning flash.

So, who is this book for? You hope that it will help people who are grieving. Not just self-styled theologians but the rest of us. I think it can do this. I think many people yearn for this kind of writing with its honesty to grief, with its wrestling with big questions, and, yes, with its sense that maybe, just maybe, love and beauty, as realities with which we cooperate and partly depend on us, may transcend even the worst of tragedies. Hence the wisdom of the positive side of open and relational thinking.

There are times when I sense your temptation to "argue" for an open and relational understanding of God. I'm glad you avoid this, and I think this is part of the beauty of your book. Still, I sense the temptation. Perhaps especially in the episode called "anyone" in which you share a few descriptions of "well intentioned people saying dumb things." You speak, for example, of people saying "everything happens for a reason," and then argue (I think argue is the right word here) that "if everything happens for a reason one shouldn't get involved for fear of messing up God's reason for such victimizing flattening, battering...everything does not happen for a reason."

Here I found myself wishing you would be a bit gentler with the dumb-saying ones. I wish you'd explored a little more the possibility that this very phrase - everything happens for a reason - can be consoling for some people amid tragedy and that it can be interpreted in different ways. Perhaps sometimes, when people deal with tragedy, this idea comes to mind, not because they think everything is pre-planned by God (a good, old fashioned Calvinist Christian interpretation) but that whatever happens is woven into an ongoing love (the consequent nature of God) in which it is given meaning, even if it wasn't meant to happen. I know that sounds abstract, but I really feel that this is what is in some people's hearts when they utter such phrases. "Everything happens for a reason" is a poem, too, and sometimes maybe not such a dumb one.

This is a problem I have with the spirit of some open and relational theology: it speaks too easily of "bad" theology. All theology is, I think, a leap in faith. We best be gentle with one another even as we disagree. With its open and relational leanings, indigo can speak deeply to people with evangelical Christian backgrounds. But it can also speak to people with other backgrounds and people of other faiths. This is because it speaks authentically, from the heart, without preaching.

Is there a need for preaching theology, too? Perhaps so. But we already have so much of it. How about theology that is more poetic and argumentative, and that speaks from lived experience, in lighting flashes. How about indigo? I'd make the review a postcript, not a prescript for reading it. Let me know how i can help, Jonathan, and I'll gladly step forward, grateful for your spirit and work.

Peace,

Jay