The last time I was at Rosa’s house, it was the night before Massi’s funeral. She was completely destroyed after losing her fiancee (and rightfully so!) and she didn’t want to eat or get out of bed. So when Jason and I went to visit her last night, it was comforting for me to see her sitting at the dinner table with her family.
    The television wasn’t squawking over our slow-starting conversation at the table but was turned down just low enough for me to miss out on the overdubbed, eloquent dialog of a headhunter and his native american counterpart in a show that I hadn’t seen in years called Renegade. Some sort of ragu pasta was dished out on plastic plates and we respectfully declined as it passed our way. We had both already eaten before we came, and we weren’t intending to stay long. Jason did a good job opening up conversation while my eyes went around the kitchen, to the television, and back to the table.
    Rosa’s parents aren’t what you’d normally think of when you think of a set of Italian parents. If I had to describe them to you, words like rustic come to mind. In Italian, the word that comes to me, is usually found on the brown packet of sugar that I always go for when drinking an espresso. I don’t care for the pretty, white, refined, sugar. But I normally reach for that rough, raw, crude, unprocessed, unrefined, brown sugar that says grezzo on it. When drinking coffee, I prefer this sort of sugar. When sitting at the table with Rosa’s parents, I kept thinking “sugar packet.” They aren’t the normal kind of folk that I run into in the city. They come from the blue collar, farm stock, that you know how hard they work by looking at the lines on their leathered faces, calloused hands, and darkened fingernails. While Jason maintained conversation with Rosa, I kept wanting to find an avenue into the conversation between her parents and brother on the other end of the table. They spoke through a thick accent that forced me to listen harder.
    At some point, the two conversations going on at the table converged on the topic of justice. Everyone was in agreement that Massi didn’t deserve this short of a life and that it didn’t make sense that there is still in existence dishonest men with longer lives. I quickly found a spot to make a joke in order to lighten up the mood, “Yea, like that Antonidretti guy!” The conversation stopped and everyone paused at this foreigner trying to figure out what he was saying. “What?” I tried my phrase again, sounding it out slower, “An-tone-eee-ooo–teee” Rosa just kind of looked at me confused. I tried another route real quick, “You know, il Divo, that politician, he’s really old, they made a movie about him?” Rosa’s dad fixed his askewed glance as if his eyes had been crossed, and unfurrowed his brow, “Oh! Andreotti!” Everyone gave out a sigh, as the joke quickly faded into confusion, and then resolution. Her dad gave out a big belly laugh because he caught the joke and said something in dialect like, “yea that guy will never die!” I tapped Jason on the leg, under the table, because I was surprised that the joke was salvaged and Jason said under his breath, “three points for you.”
    We eventually went into the other room and Rosa began asking us different questions that she had been wrestling with. The first one had to do with, “Can Massi see what I’m doing now and is he going to be angry with me if I don’t honor him with the rest of my life?” This spun out into a very interesting discussion on how little the Bible talks about intermediary states and what the resurrection means for us in our day to day lives. Her other big question centered on Jesus’ invitation “Truly I tell you, if you have faith and do not doubt, not only can you
do what was done to the fig tree, but also you can say to this
mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and it will be done. If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer” (Matt. 21:21-22). Why would God not heal Massi if she asked for this in faith? This led into a great discussion about doubt not being sinful, God not having a meticulous destiny for everything that happens, and how prayer is an invitation to collaboration. I now realize in summing up our long evening, that it sounds like we had cliches for every question that she asked. This is not the case. It really was a great evening with hard questions.
    I think in our evangelical circles, there exists a hard-nosed, non-human, spirituality that says “Rosa should be back in church a week or so after the funeral with hands raised in worship praising the God who giveth and taketh away.” Rosa said that she’s had people come up to her and give her this unsolicited advice. I can’t help but think how cruel this way of thinking is. What kind of spirituality do you have if it prohibits you from fully expressing yourself in your humanity? What kind of spirituality do you have if you have to be the strong one all the time and not let anyone in on what you’re really feeling? When your whole world falls apart into a rubbled heap, and you’re left to decide whether it’s best to sit in that rubble or start rebuilding, who do you want there with you? The religious person who tells you that your current suffering is connected to some hidden sin in your life and that you should get back to attending church? I don’t think so. When it comes to rebuilding your shattered faith, you need more room to breathe, to question, to feel, to build. You need more space to be the human that you are in this new context in which your old forms of faith are like broken toys in a larger playground.
    I felt like, last night, Rosa was given permission to step into that space, that extra room. I don’t think we were able to speak to all of her doubts. And on the car ride back, I felt like maybe I had said too much. But what I think is best, in these situations, is that people are given the space and the grace to be people. When Christ came to this earth, he didn’t come as an angelic being, aloof from all contamination of this life. No, he came as one of us–a human, (grezzo even!). And he showed us how to be fully human. And what I’m finding out, is that in ministry, a lot of our canned answers and conventional theology is for the angels, and not for humans.