Beauty, Decency and Loss

Krista Tippett (Speaking of Faith) and Kate Braestrup talk about love, death, God and miracles...

Kate Braestrup is a Maine writer and a Unitarian Universalist chaplain to game wardens on search-and-rescue missions. She is called in when children disappear in the woods, when snowmobilers disappear under the ice. Kate Braestrup likes to say that she is "religious but not spiritual" -- she is, she says, a doer, and her sense of God emerges from what happens between and among people. We hear about the wisdom she draws from the world of law enforcement in the wild. There, as she puts it, "the rubber meets the road" theologically.

From the human dramas in which she becomes implicated, Braestrup gleans and shares insight into the raw processes of human grief and healing -- the fact that waiting for news of a missing person is aching physical labor; the way in which the officer who has just discovered a young woman's body in the woods becomes acutely aware of the feel of ordinary ground under the soles of his boots; the simple, stunning, recurring experience that human beings are equipped, preparing unconsciously in all we do, to deal with unimaginable loss. These losses are final, and yet they have a power to draw beauty and decency into relief, to be tended and redeemed on some level, by the practical care -- the human concern -- that arises to meet them.

Among her many bracing reformulations of basic truth, Kate Braestrup notes that we only use the word miracle when improbable events go our way. But she inhabits a world where improbable things go wrong, go badly, all the time -- and so do the rest of us. Her Unitarian Universalist sensibility is reflected in her sense that Christianity has spent too much time focusing on death as a problem to be solved. This is our culture's instinct, certainly; and yet as it turns, notions like solution and resolution are meaningless at the hinges of our lives.

Of the deepest lessons she draws from her work in the wilds of Maine, Kate Braestrup writes this: "Sometimes the miracle is a life restored, but the restoration is always temporary. At other times, perhaps most of the time, a miracle can only be the resurrection of love beside the unchanged fact of death."

To listen to the audio version of this broadcast (52 minutes), click on the play button below. To read the discussion as a transcript, go to the Speaking of Faith website, and under Program Details click on Transcript.

Kate Braestrup: "If nothing else, and that's a big if, but if nothing else, God is that force that drives us to really see each other and to really behold each other and respond to each other. And for me that is actually enough."
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