We Go On
Meditations on life and loss, in dialogue with John Onwuchekwa
This post started as a book review, and it kind of is, but it also morphed into a series of meditations on grief instead.
It's a terrible thing to become an expert in grief, because you only really get there through experience1. I don't think Onwuchekwa would describe himself as an expert, but he has the experience, as he relates the death of his brother, aged 32, in the prime of his life, to mysterious unknown medical causes. This book, however, is not a grief book. It's a study in Ecclesiastes, and as Onwuchekwa puts it in the opening chapters, it's far better (and less painful) to learn from someone else's experiences, and the Teacher has had all the experiences so that you and I can become experts without all the experiences.2 At the same time, it is a grief book, because it is shaped by Onwuchekwa's own grief and how this made the lessons of Ecclesiastes vividly real for himself, and helped him get through the loss of his brother.
Philosophy is humanity grappling with the reality of a world conditioned by death and in search of meaning.3 It's the defining feature of our lives in this world, that they each and all come to an end. That end robs us of the things we love the most in life - the relationships of love with other people. And, in turn, we ourselves are snatched away, dragged down into oblivion. Death is our great enemy, and we do everything and anything to outrun it, outwit it, defy it. But in the end it swallows us all. And philosophy is an attempt to reconcile us to this, one way or another.
This includes Christian philosophy too, or rather Christianity as philosophy. And that encompasses Ecclesiastes. Here is the Teacher who has sampled all the domains of life, and gone to the heights and sunk to the depths. The big three, of course, power, wealth, sex, but also the obscure idols, the noble idols, the little idols. He's done them all, so that you don't have to. Because each of them fails in the face of a nihilism stronger than life. Each of these things, in their right place, is a good; and when they are out of their place they become gods.
The longer I live, the more a particular version of Pascal's wager makes sense to me. For Pascal it was: if Christianity is right, it's best to be a Christian, because the gain is immeasurable and the potential loss is extraordinary. If Christianity is wrong, well what have you lost? For me, the only reasonably alternative to Christianity is a profound nihilism - a world without meaning in which everything is absurdly pointless and of no ultimate significance and value. If Christianity weren't true, it's a better falsehood to believe than in than countless others. Not that you can believe in it if you also believe it's false, that won't work. It’s not Plato’s Noble Lie.
Onwuchekwa's book is a series of meditations on various themes. He interweaves his life, Ecclesiastes, and Jesus together into a variegated tapestry. Early on we're treated to a meditation on hebel, the way that life is a vapour, insubstantial, a chasing after the wind. How do you really realise this though? For Onwuchekwa, it was a near-death experience as a teen in Nigeria. For the Teacher? Getting everything he ever wanted and realising it was all meaningless. And yet the gift of meaning is itself a gift from God, to live in the present and accept its hebel-ness. (Eccl 5.18-20). We all need this lesson, and the sooner we learn it, the better.
There's meditations on time, knowledge, pleasure, wealth, the usual gamut. Each is worthy and weighty in their own space. Also, this is a beautiful book. They didn't spare the money on the artefact of the book as object - colour, photos, glossy, layout, design. It's a book nice to own. I am not particularly sentimental about physical books these days, but there is a (fleeting, too) joy in a well-made book.
Onwuchekwa's meditation on work helps put into words something that's easy to talk about, hard to learn. How do you work in a world where you want to believe that hard work pays off, when often it doesn't. Ecclesiastes 9:11 helps, in an ironic way:
The race is not to the swift
or the battle to the strong,
nor does food come to the wise
or wealth to the brilliant
or favour to the learned;
but time and chance happen to them all.
The book of Proverbs teaches you to work hard and you'll get a pay-off. That's ordinary time rules. But sometimes you are playing in non-ordinary time, and you work hard and it doesn't turn out; or someone else doesn't work hard, and they get the pay-off. Unfair! Life is full of unfair. You can't guarantee outcomes. That's what's maddening about the world, it never computes simple and easy. Somehow in the midst of that we need to learn to work, enjoy what it is in the moment, and set it down at the day's end, entrusting the outcomes to God.
This term I am teaching a class that's reading through Augustine's Confessions (in Latin, naturally), book 4. In this part of Augustine's spiritual memoir, he recollects a friend of his youth, Nebridius, who died suddenly, shortly after being baptised (Augustine was still a Manichaean at the time). It gives occasion to profound grief in Augustine's life, and his words here, as so often, are beautiful words. With hindsight, he writes of true friendship that it is "what you glue together between those who cling to you when love floods our hearts through the Holy Spirit"4; and reflecting upon the common lot of humanity, "every mind is wretched when chained to friendship with things bound to die, and is torn to shreds when it loses them".5 It is precisely because we love things, and people, that all die, that we are wretched. We long for eternity, for lives that never end, and love between persons, human and divine, glued together by the Holy Spirit.
I am reminded again of Wolterstorff: "Sorrow is no longer the islands but the sea." That is certainly how I felt for much of 2022. That grief had swallowed up the land and swallowed up everything with it. Instead, joy became the islands. These days I feel a bit more like Noah when the flood waters are slowly receding. More and more land appears. There's still a lot of sorrow, but there is more joy too. It's sorrow tempered with joy, and joy tempered by sorrow.
Grief is the inevitable consequence of love. The more you love, the more you will grieve, because we live in a world where relationships of love are doomed to end. There is no escape. C.S. Lewis puts it best:
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket— safe, dark, motionless, airless— it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.6
It's most of the way through his book before Onwuchekwa gets to the topic of suffering. He shares how he always used to think there was a formula for life - good inputs > good outputs, bad inputs > bad outputs. Which explained why his brother Sam was so successful and why his brother Emmanuel was such a mess. It all made sense. It's easy to think this way. O. Alan Noble talks about this the same in the start of his book On Getting Out of Bed. It's easy to think this way and think of suffering as happening to other people and it's always their fault, until you are suffering and until it doesn't work and doesn't make sense. Until his brother Sam died.
There's no easy getting out of this. No quick fixes to suffering. No 'read this Christian book and it will all make sense and you'll be living the victorious Christian life'. What there is, is leaning into God in your tears and allowing "adversity to deepen your relationships with your loved ones and your Creator". And there is finding meaning in suffering, purpose in joy, and wisdom in the house of mourning (Eccl 7.4).
Two are better than one - Eccl. 4.9
Onwuchekwa: I think a lot of folks these days believe commitment is an outgrowth of love. I'll stay with you because I love you. I actually think the opposite is true. Love grows out of the security and trust that comes from a real commitment to each other. p.151.
We weren't made to do this alone. We were made for relationships, deep, open, committed, faithful ones. And not just one of them.
I have always struggled with the friendships in my life. I don't think I've always been well served by my friends, and don't feel that my efforts at friendship with others have been well reciprocated. I'm not sure I'll ever understand the why of it. And through the grief of the last year and a half I did not start in a good place - I felt the number of people I could share with was very small. That has improved, by God's grace, but slowly and small-ly.
There is no magic answer to the problem that each of us needs friends, good faithful constant and intimate ones. You can't just 'get them'. All you can do is seek to be that kind of friend. To extend friendship to others and to be willing to be that friend that is constant and intimate (when invited in).
But here's the thing: Jesus, not marriage, is where we see God's full answer to Genesis 2:18 - 'It is not good for the man to be alone' p.162.
Sometimes it's just worth remembering the old song - what a friend we have in Jesus.
We live in the shadow of death.
The living know that they will die - Eccl 9.5
Onwuchekwa finishes his book with reflections on death and the hope of the resurrection. I think this is why nihilism is the only logical alternative to Christianity. Without resurrection, if there's just an end, then there's nothing and nothing matters.
Death is the destiny of everyone - Eccl 7.2
We'd rather talk about anything else. We'd rather face any other thing. We spend our whole lives running, our whole culture trying to fence this out. But it always finds it's way back in. We can't escape Death. And we should stop trying.
Not, I mean, that we should just succumb, lay down, curl up. No, we should listen to Dylan Thomas and "rage, rage against the dying of the light". But we can only do that if we stop denying that death is our common end and our greatest enemy. We must face death's inevitability.
Another day I'm going to write about the hope of the restoration of all things. It's necessary, it's hopeful, it's beautiful. We need it. But first we need to walk through the shadowed valley. And yet, and yet even so we must live while we are alive. Eat. Drink. Be Merry. Not in the reckless abandon of those denying that death is coming, but in the joyous living of those who know death is coming, and the great hope that death is not the end, because Jesus has ended death.
Well, you made it. And perhaps you're wondering what to do next today. It's not so hard. You put your trust in Jesus, keep praying, and then you do what the title of this book say - we go on. I hope this meandering has helped you if even a little. As for me, I do the same - I go on.
The two words are etymologically related, which you can see from the expers part; you become an expert by have experienced the things that get you there.
One reason for reading about grief is that I feel like an amateur and I'd very much not like to become an expert, but I do want to learn from those who have learnt the hardest of lessons. To quote something else from Onwuchekwa: “there are many things that can only be seen through eyes that have cried” - Archbishop Oscar Romero, but sometimes we can learn through borrowed tears.
Not all philosophy, obviously. Don't be a pedant.
Augustine, Confessions 4.7 (Sarah Ruden's translation).
Augustine, Confessions 4.11 (Sarah Ruden's translation).
C. S. Lewis. The Four Loves.