Author Archives: brantleycraig

Let me tell you a story.

It’s a story about me ugly-crying in a hotel room at my laptop.

But it doesn’t start there. It starts with a long drive. This was five years ago – 2016 – and I had been selected as my college’s representative to the DuPont Seminars at the National Humanities Center in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. This was a three-week intensive academic-study thing; total nerd camp. But I had to get there. So I loaded up and headed out. I did most of the trek (after an overnight with the in-laws in Virginia) on June 12. I had my newly-purchased Hamilton soundtrack CDs and infinite repeats, and I was ready to explore this musical everyone had been talking about during some alone time in the car. And I did, even if it meant skipping “Dear Theodosia” when I realized that it was about father-child stuff and I was about to be away from my sons for three weeks including Father’s Day (and interstate driving through tears is not recommended).

On my breaks from Hamilton, I listened to satellite radio. It was weird, though – they kept breaking in on all channels, with news bulletins. They never did this. Savvy readers will have noted the date. This was the Pulse nightclub shooting. Pulse nightclub was a few blocks from my high school in Orlando (though it was not a club at that time). That put this tragedy literally close to home for me. It was hard to take – young people out for a night in Orlando. That could have been – that was, at times – me and my friends both in high school and in college. 

I had nerd camp to get to, though. And the traffic in parts of NC was awful. And I started sweating arriving on time. And I had a hotel to find. And so on.

Savvy readers may also recall that June 12, 2016 was the night of the 2016 Tony Awards. Surely newly-Hamilton-fascinated me watched those? Nope. There was a kickoff dinner for the seminars. There were introductions. There was wine. There was much small talk. And we talked about the awful, awful events in Florida in that general sort of way you do at events, and I got to say “hey, that was near my high school” and lots of “Oh, man…” sort of stuff. My tipsy self got bussed back to the hotel. I sort of recall texting my wife and watching my other then-obsession, Game of Thrones, and going to bed.

My seminar began in earnest the next morning. Slowly, I learned more and more about the shooting. I got basic stats from the complimentary USA Today in the lobby. I learned from old friends online how the Orlando community rallied and came together to support and grieve. I learned that a new friend at the seminar had lost someone close to her in the shooting. I learned that many people had known someone or knew someone who knew someone. I remained stunned. Much head-shaking. Much sadness that a place I’d lived made the news for this. Much love for the people I still knew there and how they soldiered on. But not much else.

Only in the afternoon did I get around to the Tony awards and my new crush, Hamilton. It cleaned up, as expected. I watched some recaps. I watched Lin-Manuel Miranda’s great love-is-love-is-love sonnet of an acceptance speech. And I looked up the performance number, eager to see what I had so far only heard.

The song the cast performed for the ceremony was “Yorktown (The World Turned Upside Down),” which is, naturally, about a battle (if that surprises you, go back to History class and demand a refund). Much of the choreography thus involves rifles – not a good look after a mass shooting, so the cast ditched them. I knew this. I was ready for this. That didn’t bother me, except that the scenes looked a little weird.

But then – the song reaches the line where (as is apparently true), Alexander Hamilton asks the troops under his command to remove the ammo from their weapons so on one accidentally fires and gives away their location. And he sings: “Take the bullets out your gun… the bullets out your gun…”

And finally, I just shattered. 

I cried. A lot. Alone, in my room, for all the people in my teenage hometown. For our seeming inability to get bullets out of our lives. For Hamilton trying to control his troops’ human nature and our lingering struggle to control our own. For the people performing, who took the guns out of their dances as an act of compassion. For all of it.

I still think of this story, every time I hear that particular Hamilton track, and every year around this time. I think about a guy miles away from home and miles away from what used to be home crying at people singing and dancing miles away more yet. All because of the power of a song.

I’ve been thinking of it even more lately because we’re moving (deo volente) out of COVID pandemic life, and the arts are starting to happen again. Movie theaters are reopening. Live concerts with crowds are happening. Yes – even Broadway is coming back. Grief has been very very much on my mind lately, and I think about 2016 me crying over “Yorktown” because it was a pivotal moment in my handling my grief for one of my communities (as well as my nation). Too much of what I read and hear about art venues reopening gets couched in terms of economic impact or in terms of what it means about our actual healing of/fighting off disease. Both of those are important. But what I learned from Mr. Miranda’s poetic speech, and from his song and my tears, is that the arts should also be discussed in terms of our spiritual healing. Yes, Broadway shows will provide employment for many, many people; they will up tourism dollars; they will reinvigorate New York’s economy. They may also help someone have that laugh or cry they so desperately need. Grief cannot be traded or hired or bought out. It can, however, be “storied.”

“Let me tell you a story” – these six words are some of the most powerful in our language. There is a reason so many of the great teachers of our religions speak to us in stories. Stories are what we live in, like fish in water. This last semester, I added the book The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall to my Honors class on the nature of knowledge. Maybe you don’t think of stories as a way we know – but Gottschall makes a pretty convincing case that it’s the primary way we do, from autobiography to scriptures to conspiracy theories. 

One way to think about “reopening” is that we will be getting our stories back. The ones we live in, surely – but also the ones we tell to supplement the ones we live. To focus only on “getting back to business” is to miss out on something intangible but essential. Do not let that happen. The news, after all, is only one more story. Look beyond that. Let people tell you stories. Look for – listen for – the things that help reopen your soul.

“A broken spirit is my sacrifice, God.
You won’t despise a heart, God, that is broken and crushed.” – Psalm 51:17 (CEB)

 “Jesus said to her, ‘Don’t hold on to me, for I haven’t yet gone up to my Father. Go to my brothers and sisters and tell them…” – John 20:17 (CEB)

“But what is grief, if not love persevering?” – from “WandaVison,” ep.8

 Grief sucks. Ask Wanda Maximoff.

Wanda, you may or may not know, is the protagonist of the very odd and strangely insightful Marvel comics-based TV show “WandaVision.” Wanda has lost everyone: her parents were killed in a bombing; her brother, Pietro, was killed by an evil robot; her lover Vision (himself a synthetic humanoid) was killed in the battle for the powerful Infinity Stones (these are the sorts of things that happen in the Marvel Universe). Understandably grief-stricken, Wanda uses her own reality-bending superpowers to commandeer a small New Jersey town and its citizens and create an idyllic but illusory life for herself based on the sitcoms she loved as a child. In this fictional life, her family members still live, and their lives are comedies in the strict sense of the word: obstacles arise, but are charmingly resolved through coincidence, quirky behavior, and occasionally, Wanda’s own magic. It all comes out alright in the end.

Until, of course, it doesn’t. Because what Wanda is doing, after all, is not very healthy. She herself is in serious denial. Plus, she’s completely upended the lives of the townspeople she’s magicked into her fantasy world, manipulating them and forcing them to be bit players in her own happily-ever-after. Wanda is trapped in her own grief, and has trapped all these other people in it with her. Illusions are, by definition, unreal – and reality slowly starts to crash in on Wanda and destroy her carefully-constructed world. Her self-made comedy is really a tragedy – not because Wanda is evil, or malicious, but because she is hurt, and scared, and lonely. She is grieving. And grief is terrible. And Wanda’s way of grieving serves, ultimately, to spread the terrible around.

“WandaVision” is a Marvel show, so there are many other things going on – I haven’t touched on the intrepid team of investigators looking into Wanda’s behavior, or the assorted nefarious characters using their own magic or military powers to add to take advantage of the situation, or even the great fun the show has parodying 60-some years of American sitcoms. But in the midst of all that craziness, one of the things the show gets profoundly right is the nature of grief. In the end, for all its magic and mayhem, for all its witches and robots and government operatives, “WandaVision” realizes that grief is the real superpower at work in Wanda’s life – both for good and for ill. 

And grief is a power. It has the power to upend lives, to trap, to manipulate, to tear down, to wring out, to use up, and to isolate us behind defenses of all kinds from the magic-seeming to the mundane. But it has this power because it is a power of the heart, of the very center of our being – and “WandaVision” understands this, too. Grief is a pain, but a pain born of love. “But what is grief,” Vision remarks to Wanda as she mourns her brother, “if not love persevering?” What is grief but love robbed of its familiar object? Love that has lost focus, and gone astray – not because it is evil, or malicious, but because it is hurt, and scared, and lonely when it would rather not be.

To think of grief in this way is, however, to begin to see a way beyond it. If grief is love in search of an object, it means that it is love that has both lost something – that object – but also gained something – an opportunity. In this case, that is an opportunity for a new object. Saint Syncletica, one of the “Desert Mothers” of early Christianity, drew a distinction between “a grief that destroys” and “a grief that assists.” The former, which sounds not a little like what Wanda Maximoff gets caught up in, is to be avoided. The latter, which the saint finds “revealed by our tears for our failings, and for our neighbors’ frailty,” is to be embraced – because it suggests embracing our neighbors’ needs rather than getting lost in our own suffering. In other words, it means our love finding additional objects.

In his book Healing the Heart of Democracy, Parker J. Palmer notes that heartbreak is a fact of life for people who care. That is unavoidable. What matters is what comes after:

What happens next in you and the world around you depends on how your heart breaks. If it breaks apart into a thousand pieces, the result may be anger, depression, and disengagement. If it breaks open into greater capacity to hold the complexities and contradictions of human experience, the result may be new life. (18)

Palmer is describing in more detail, I think, Syncletica’s two kinds of grief: that which destroys through fragmentation and isolation, and that which assists through openness and compassion (which, in its roots, means “suffering with”). Both feel the pain born of love – the difference is whether that pain drives us away from or toward more and different love. The challenge is not to escape the pain, but to deal with it.

Because grief sucks. Ask the friends and followers of Jesus.

They are, you may or may not know, some of our most famous grievers. Every gospel story of Easter begins in grief. Jesus’ mother, his disciples, his friend Mary – they have lost him, and in so doing feel they have lost everything. Their inspiration is dead; their loving friend has been publicly executed; the powers that be, in all their obliviousness and greed and insecurity, have won (these are, after all, the sorts of things that happen in our world). And like Wanda Maximoff, they retreat, and they isolate themselves. They go back home. They hole up behind locked doors. They go out on a boat. They ugly cry in a memorial garden. They get out of town. Their hearts, in other words, break apart, and they scatter, like sheep without a shepherd, you might say – or, you might also say, like ordinary people who feel hurt, and scared, and lonely when they would rather not be. All does not come out all right in the end.

Until, of course, it does. Because Easter happens, and things are suddenly broken not apart, but open. There are many things to notice about the stories of Christ’s suffering, death, and resurrection – but surely, for grieving people, one of the key things is how often, throughout it all, Jesus directs the love of his stunned and grieving friends outward. From the cross, he offers forgiveness to his killers, offers companionship to a fellow victim, and instructs his mother and his best friend to look out for each other. On Easter morning, he tells Mary not to cling to him, her familiar object of love, but to go and tell their friends. In later appearances, he shares food, gives encouragement, makes sure Thomas feels included, and sends all his friends, not just Mary, out to tell others, and to, as he puts it to Peter, care for his flock. In all these instances, Christ encourages those who love him to let their hearts break open, to not cling to old objects of love, but to look for new opportunities to love and to share and to care and to suffer with. Nowhere does he deny the pain they must have felt – but neither will he let them trap themselves or anyone else in it. Grief is a power of the heart, and theirs is to be a grief that assists.

In a very different Marvel film from “WandaVision,” Guardians of the Galaxy, the Guardians’ nominal leader, Peter Quill, rallies his motley band of comrades with a speech in which he notes that they are all “losers.” He means this quite literally – they have all lost things – “homes,” he says, “and our families, normal lives.” And yet, because they have lost these things, Quill and his friends are uniquely suited to care and to take a stand to preserve what’s left to save – which, being that they are in a Marvel movie, is everything. The Guardians’ real superpower is a power of hearts that break open; it is the power of assisting grief. They know, as surely as Wanda, or Mary, or Peter, or Thomas knows, what it means to lose.

And so do we. For many of us, grief of one kind or another has been a constant companion for over a year now. Personally, professionally, nationally – we have lost so much: “homes, family, and normal lives” just seems to scratch the surface of our losses. Everywhere we turn, someone or something is missing, is dying, is not as it used to be, is just gone. We are reminded every day that we are, in the literal sense, losers. We have lost the familiar objects of our love, and we are hurt, scared, and lonely. Our hearts are broken. 

But my hope for all of us this Easter season is that our hearts may break open – that we may learn to see the world with the vision of a grief that assists rather than destroys. After all, while half of the miracle of Easter is the presence of the risen Christ, the other half is an absence: the empty tomb, the disappearance of a familiar, beloved object, a reminder to not hold on in isolation, but to turn outward; not to cling or to entrap, but to seek and to welcome our fellow losers. Part of the miracle of Easter is a miracle of space, the miracle of gaining, through loss, an opportunity. It is knowing that, as people who have lost so much, we are uniquely suited to care, and to use the powers of our hearts to preserve what is left to save – which, things being as they are, might just be everything.

For what is the good news of Easter, if not the good news of love persevering? Love persevering beyond fear, beyond hurt, beyond death. Love that breaks things open, to make space for new opportunity and new life and newer love. May all of us marvelous losers be blessed by such love, today, and always.