The bleak midwinter: why tears could be the best thing for us this season

In a world of devastation, you can share honest feelings of hopelessness - yet not be overcome.

J. S. Averill

J.S. Averill is an American writer and children's educator. She has recently started Substacking.

In front of a collapsed building, a rescuer carries a new born baby by the arms.

The rescue of Afraa Abu Hadiya, Syria, February 2023.

On February 6th 2023, a heavily pregnant Afraa Abu Hadiya, along with her husband and their four children, was awakened in the dark, early hours of the morning by a 7.8 magnitude earthquake violently shaking their apartment building in Syria. Afraa and her husband gathered their children and made for the building’s exit. However, just as they were nearing the door, the building collapsed upon them, crushing the entire family. Afraa, however, seems to have remained conscious for some hours because she did the unthinkable and delivered a baby girl while trapped beneath the rubble. Then, tragically, she died and her baby was left alone buried beneath a building in the middle of winter.

This year we have read too many such stories. In places such as Syria, Turkey, Ukraine, and most recently, Israel and Gaza, thousands of women, men, and children have suffered and died and grieved as a result of natural disasters and armed conflict.

For those of us who live in relative safety, it is difficult even to begin to comprehend such tragedies. Yet despite our advantages, many of us are struggling in our own ways. According to the CDC, between 25 and 30 per cent of adults in the US are currently experiencing symptoms of anxiety and/or depression. And it is no secret that mental distress levels have been steadily climbing for years in the UK as well, especially amongst youth.

It can make the joyful, merry, jolly, happy, cheerful, peaceful Christmas spirit encouraged at this time of year strike a discordant note with the actual state of our minds and hearts. All is not well inside many of us, but we sense that Eeyore is an awkward personality to bring into a room, so we tend to conceal the parts of ourselves that are anxious and hurting. I confess I’ve become pretty adept at keeping parts of myself out of sight.

I didn’t say that sometimes I feel like everything beautiful and good is always, sooner or later cornered, caught, and hauled away by the destructive forces in the world.

I met up with a couple of friends recently. We talked about our children and their school and our plans for Christmas. I said we were going to keep Christmas simple this year. What I didn’t say was that we’ve been keeping Christmas “simple” for several years now. I didn’t say that, a few years after my brother died, my parents and my siblings and I agreed that we would no longer see each other at Christmas because the hole my brother left is too acutely obvious when the rest of us are together. I didn’t say that we don’t keep our Christmas tree up for long because the crystal star we hang near the top is in memory of our son who never saw his first Christmas, and while I love to make him a part of the holiday in this way, I also can’t live with the visual reminder of that pain for long. I didn’t say that although we make an effort to give our children a happy Christmas, my husband and I are just trying to make it through to the other side of the holidays because we’ve twice in recent years painfully and unexpectedly lost our household income right before Christmas and the season now triggers within us the fear and confusion and hurt of those Christmases. I didn’t say that sometimes I feel like everything beautiful and good is always, sooner or later cornered, caught, and hauled away by the destructive forces in the world. I just told my friends that we were going to keep Christmas simple. Maybe you have your own lines you trot out on such occasions.

If you do, the season of Advent is a welcoming space for such as us. Advent is observed during the four weeks leading up to Christmas and marks the beginning of the Christian church year. Traditionally, it is a time when Christians remember how their spiritual ancestors, the ancient nation of Israel, spent roughly 600 years being conquered and enslaved successively by Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, and then Rome. The God of Israel had, however, promised that he would, one day, send them a deliverer, a “messiah”, to rescue them from their bondage. And so, the Israelite people, in their suffering, waited and looked and prayed for the coming of their deliverer.

Christians believe that Jesus, whose birth is celebrated at Christmas, was that messiah, and that (spoiler warning) he ended up delivering not only Israel, but the whole world in a very different way than anyone was expecting. (But that’s the story of Easter, and we’re not there yet.) During Advent, Christians remember the centuries of Israel’s powerless waiting to be rescued, and how, true to his word, God sent them a messiah.

Choosing this hope sometimes feels naïve and even dangerous. I want to have hope, to hold it like a banner against the forces of destruction and pain whirling about in the air.

However, Advent is not just for looking back. It is also a space for acknowledging all the myriad ways in which darkness still rules over us today. How we still suffer and hurt and die. How we inflict these things on each other. How it seems like, no matter how we try to make the world better, it’s still always in a tragic mess. And then, while we’re acknowledging all of that and feeling its great weight, Advent asks us to do something that feels preposterous at times: to believe the promise Jesus made that he will, one day, banish darkness from the earth and make it completely and irreversibly whole and new. In short, we’re asked to continue to wait hopefully for light to break while we live in the darkness.

Choosing this hope sometimes feels naïve and even dangerous. I want to have hope, to hold it like a banner against the forces of destruction and pain whirling about in the air. But, in the face of the anguish of Israel and Gaza, and the wounds I’ve experienced in my own life, do I dare live as if everything will come right in the end? I would like to, but when hope ends in disappointment it wounds deeply. I’m not always sure I can afford to risk hope.

If you still weep and mourn for what is wrong in the world, however powerless and wounded you may feel, you are not yet overcome.

Advent urges me never to stop calling for help, but if calling for help isn’t exactly the same thing as summoning hope, it’s perilously close. Is it possible to call for help if I don’t believe, if I am afraid to let myself believe any help will arrive?

Well, apparently it is. I learned this from Afraa’s tiny daughter buried in rubble.

After the earthquake, relatives and friends rushed to the ruins of the collapsed apartment building in order to try to rescue those who had been inside. As they dug through the debris, one of them reported hearing “a voice” from beneath the rubble. The rescuers followed the sound and eventually uncovered the baby, still attached to her mother by the umbilical cord. She was pulled from the wreckage of her house and family, and sped to hospital where she miraculously made a recovery and was adopted by her aunt and uncle who gave her her mother’s name.

She was rescued because someone heard her voice. The journalist does not specify what kind of noise she was making, but given that she was injured, suffering from hypothermia, and barely breathing it seems it must have been weak crying or whimpering. And considering that she was surrounded by her dead mother, father, and four siblings, and that the entirety of her short life outside her mother’s body had consisted of the noise, terror, chaos and pain of the building falling upon her, it seems impossible that she was hopefully and consciously calling for help. How could she imagine what help might be? Her mother had not even had the chance to hold her in her arms. What could she know of a tender face, gentle hands, warm blankets, nourishment in her belly, soft fabric against her skin, the healing of wounds? She was not waiting or hoping for any of these. She did not even know they existed. She was simply weeping for the terror and pain and loneliness of her little life. But the weeping was enough to save her.

As I consider tears, it seems to me that they can, in themselves, be reason for hope. The person who weeps has accepted neither that things are the way they should be (as do those who cooperate with or advance the destructive forces in the world), nor that things are the way they must be (as do those who, however understandably, give up and surrender themselves to being destroyed). If you still weep and mourn for what is wrong in the world, however powerless and wounded you may feel, you are not yet overcome. In fact, unless we grasp how grievous our wounds are, how can we begin to seek out the right physician? How will we choose to make the changes within our power to make? A world that is lamenting its own brokenness, as Advent encourages it to do, seems to me to be a world for which there is yet hope.

I have never experienced the trauma of a building collapsing upon me, but I’ve spent plenty of time trapped beneath the twin wreckages of a life I once had and the one I was hoping to build. Maybe you’re buried in rubble too. Maybe you’ve survived an earthquake and its aftershocks, but you’re not sure you’re glad you have because you’re bleeding and crushed and in the dark and you can’t imagine how you will rebuild and survive in such a world even if you do eventually emerge. Maybe you’re not even sure you want to be rescued because it’s all, all broken now – your home, your family, your bones.

This Advent I am trying to gather the strength to call for help for myself and for the world although my heart and my faith are bruised. Maybe you will call too. But if we are too afraid and confused and wounded to do even that, then let us weep, friend, together in this darkness. For although this is a world in which much breaks and dies, it is also one in which rescue has been known to arrive unlooked and unhoped for. And if the memory and the promise of Advent hold any truth, sometimes the hand outstretched unexpectedly to deliver turns out to be, beyond all imagining, the hand of God.

Article

Belief

Biology

Creed

21 June 2024

5 min read

We’re gonna need a bigger ontology

Orca attacks prompt questions about being.

Henna Cundill

Henna is a researcher with the Centre for Autism and Theology at the University of Aberdeen.

A boat holding a camera crew drifts next to a whale fin.

Filming Shetland's orcas.

BBC.

In May 2023, British sailor Iain Hamilton was aboard his yacht in the Strait of Gibraltar when it was set upon by a pod of five orcas who succeeded in biting off both rudders, leaving him with no means of steering his boat back to shore. These enormous killer whales could have destroyed the small boat in its entirety, rounding off their escapades by making a quick lunch of Hamilton and his crew. But instead, they seemed content to merely play with the small vessel, pushing it around “like a ragdoll” for a while, before swimming away to find their next meal elsewhere.

How do we explain such behaviour? Environmentalists have been quick to suggest that the orcas are demonstrating their frustration with the human race – carrying out revenge attacks on those callous two-legged beings who overfish their waters and pollute their habitat. Other commentators propose a less anthropocentric view. One leading zoologist, Mark Cowardine, attributes the whales’ behaviour simply to play, “Boisterous play, yes, by animals weighing up to six tonnes, but nothing more sinister than that.”

The phenomenon of whales attacking boats is not new. Herman Melville’s magnum opus Moby Dick (published in 1851) is a fictional tale of one such encounter, inspired in part by the real-life sinking of a ship, The Essex, during a whale attack in 1820. However, there appears to have been a surge in such incidents in European waters over the past few years – more than 500 orca attacks were recorded between 2020 and 2023 alone. It is thought to be largely the same pod of whales who are responsible, but scientist fear that other pods are beginning to learn the behaviour.

This raises the question: at what point should humanity intervene to prevent the spread of knowledge? Theoretically, it would be possible, to isolate the ring leaders and remove them from whale ‘society’ (send them to ‘whale jail’ if you like). And, let’s be honest, in previous generations, trophy hunters would have blithely exterminated the troublesome pod without a second thought. But we live in more enlightened times, wherein we respect nature’s right to be protected from human interference.

The whale world has its own language, with distinct dialects, and is even thought to have culture, including celebration of life events and rituals for grieving the death of a family member.

On the other side of the globe, this right has even been enshrined in law. Pacific Indigenous leaders from the Cook Islands, French Polynesia, New Zealand and Tonga have agreed a treaty that officially recognises whales and dolphins as having legal personhood. The Whanganui River in New Zealand is also recognised as a “legal person” – a move intended both to enact reparations for the damage done to the river by European settlers, and to protect it from any future harm by the human race.

A being that is recognised as having legal personhood is one which has “rights and duties itself and which can enforce these rights against other legal persons.” So far so good for a river, which is vulnerable, not sentient, and certainly needs protecting from our shocking ability to exploit and pollute the natural world. But what can we say about whales and dolphins? Unlike the river, they are sentient. The whale world has its own language, with distinct dialects, and is even thought to have culture, including celebration of life events and rituals for grieving the death of a family member. With such obvious evidence of moral intelligence, should we be considering the ‘duties’ inherent to a whale’s legal personhood, as well as the rights?

The whales still seem to be communicating the same message: our ocean is vast, and we can make you humans feel your tininess in it.

In parts of the Hebrew Bible, animals are already described as having personhood. In the creation story both humans and animals are described as having nephesh – a Hebrew word that is sometimes translated as ‘soul’, and which indicates certain aspects of what it means to be sentient and have a moral conscience. Intriguingly, God seems to employ this sentience – at times employing animals to communicate with humans.

One famous example even includes a whale. When the runaway prophet Jonah was thrown from a ship into the ocean, we are told that God directed a large fish to swallow him up, and after three days return Jonah to dry land to continue the work to which God has asked him to do. In another example, when the donkey of the prophet Balaam was being unfairly beaten, the Bible records that the donkey turned and said to his master, “What have I done to you, that you have struck me?”

It is clear that some of the biblical writers believed that God could and would use animals to communicate with the human race, either through their behaviour or even through direct speech. Therefore, these orca “attacks” make me wonder if God may still be doing so today. Whilst both humans and animals are described as having nephesh in the creation story, the story does then go on to distinguish humans as having ‘dominion’ over the created order. The idea of what it means to have ‘dominion’ has been interpreted differently through the centuries of Christian thought. In the time of Moby Dick, when the fashion for trophy hunting and taxidermy was at its height in the western world, dominion had a feel of superiority and dominance to it. These days, it is more common to hear ‘dominion over creation’ described in terms of responsible stewardship and care.

But whilst human culture has changed (arguably for the better) it is noticeable that between Moby Dick’s time and now, the whales still seem to be communicating the same message: our ocean is vast, and we can make you humans feel your tininess in it. The temptation is there for us to intervene, to prevent these boisterous orcas from perpetuating their violent behaviour. This would serve to silence the voice that reminds us, uncomfortably, of our fundamental human vulnerability on the ocean. But perhaps we should not be too hasty. We cannot know if, inherent to the personhood of whales, they have a ‘duty’ to keep us in our place. Perhaps it is even their God-given call to behave in a way that reminds us that creation is ultimately, untameably, wild. Listening carefully, we might yet discover that God is speaking to us in whale song.