The Days of Silence & Flame
Lent, longing, and a father’s fraying
This Weekend Edition of Ecstatic features Rachel Hoskins
HIRAETH IS A WELSH WORD I learned recently with no English equivalent. Roughly translated, it refers to a deep longing, a homesickness for what is irretrievably gone. Like my father’s fraying skin. His hands, his arms, his face unravel like threads under too much friction, caught by a gale, pulled by the strictures of time. I try to catch them as they unfurl. I try to keep them together. Like scotch taping a shredded flag, there is no putting them back. There is no making him whole again, my fraying father.
Time smooths the edges of my recall like water over formerly sharp stones. It crumbles the past like light and moisture turning wood to dust. When someone dies, people say the pain will fade. And they are right. What they do not tell you is that the memories will fade, too.
He died in March, during Lent, in our basement apartment, in his bed, under a window that overlooked a red brick alley, an outlet for our dead-end street where he taught me to ride a bicycle. “Don’t worry, I won’t let you go,” he said, running behind me, chasing my back tire, holding onto that seat. But he did let go. And I peddled away, unknowingly, my face turned forward, my hair flying back.
I still peddle away—propelled by a will not my own. Filled with hiraeth, I long to turn my bike around. I imagine that longing tinged with sunlight, flooding that brick alley, filtering through that bedroom window, casting its dappled shadows over my father’s room. It illuminates my childhood with a kind of honeyed and everlasting light like the love of God.
SOCIAL SCIENTISTS SAY our memories are stored collectively. We hold our experiences, not in our mind alone, but in the minds and memories of others, as well. My brother reminds me of when we swam through swamps. My friend recalls when we scaled monument walls and saw the world rippling at our feet. Shared memories remain. Those unspoken dissipate and fray. Yet, some experiences root within our psyches with such complexity that they are nearly ineffable. Then, I believe, materiality steps into the gap. Embodiment unlocks time. Atoms and energy, sounds and scents, touch and images weave together those shredded strands, re-forming a life.
I have forgotten so much about my father. He is a word, a story I too often forget to speak. But back in my hometown, after years away, his memories resurrect with a suddenness prompted by physicality. Downtown, I drive by the paint store and smell my father’s cotton overalls splotched in color, the contrast of natural fiber and chemical synthesis. I pass the grocery store and taste again the flavors of my working-class family: a hotdog’s salty snap in puffed crescent roll, oatmeal, potatoes, hamburger with noodles. I drive by the Baptist church and hear my father reading the Bible and feel the vocal vibrations in his chest. Seeing the park where we used to play, brings him back to poignant life. It is a hurling within space that bends the arch of time. My throat constricts.
NOW I KNOW WHY people resort to séance and soothsayer. It is the longing that drives them. It is the cruel transience of our one-way trajectories. I am filled with hiraeth, longing—to go back, yes, to turn my bike around. Like an idolatrous devotee of the St. Ignatian way, I attempt to contemplate his story, to superimpose his past with my present and imagine again every nook and cranny of our once shared lives. No longer content, I am dissatisfied with memory and its poor approximations. Instead, I drive to exact locations. I get out of my car and attempt to resurrect the dead.
In this park, he picked me up and sat me on this granite ledge, under the shadow of that hill. I run my fingers over its texture, close my eyes, and attempt to excavate time from the porous rock. He was in remission then, but still bald, happy, newly energized, and wearing his running clothes. The future opened. A couple passes me, and I am pulled back into the present, pretending to survey the scenery. Nearby, a child laughs as she runs towards her dad. The granite beside me goes inert.
Corporeality, it turns out, is no match for temporality. Memories, too, are such stuff that dreams are made on. “Death takes us by storm,” Annie Dillard writes. And “then what?”
EX NIHILO from our beginning, in nihilum at our ending, we live, as that ancient mystic and theologian Gregory of Nyssa suggested, on the cusp of nothingness, defined by it, in fact. Born from non-existence and racing toward non-existence, we live and die in a cosmic millisecond. On the scale of the universe, each lifespan is the single flutter of a bee’s wing, beating over 200 times a second. But we long to find a foothold. We long to stitch ourselves into the fabric of permanence.
My father used to burst through the back door of that apartment, at the end of the day, splotched in blues, browns, reds, and grays. My brothers and I stampeded the length of that galley-style hall. We climbed his legs and arms. He threw us over his shoulders. The day the hospital sent him home, he came through that same door unable to hold his own weight. My uncles, his brothers, supported him on either side; they held him like the arms of a cross. He stumbled. They caught him. His clothes hung limp.
I stood there, only seven, like a stone watching them, unable to move. At my feet, the construction paper garland I had made to welcome him home fell to the floor.
During the 40 days of Lent, we wander in the wilderness of our mortality and wrestle with our death. It is a reckoning, this season of Lent. It is a reckoning of life’s finitude—and its longings. On Ash Wednesday, I receive the mark of the cross in ashes and take Christ’s body and blood into mine, remembering his life, death, and resurrection, and also, his temptation in the wilderness (Matt. 4:1-11). Was it a tempting for power, pleasure, and security? Or was it to deny the actuality of being vulnerable and human? Maybe, it was both.
I LEAVE CHURCH and stop by the store. A girl at the register asks me what is on my forehead and does not like the answer. “I’m a Christian and I don’t do that,” she says. I nod in agreement, “Not everyone does.” This is not a moral judgement. But, sometimes, I have to wonder if the reason why Lent has not found more resonance in Christian enclaves is because, often, we would rather not think about our vulnerable state. It is easier, I guess, to jump from this life to the next one, from glory to glory, then to sit with the subject of radical frailty and finitude. Or, maybe, it is easier to find in that impermanence an escape where both “your sins and your good deeds will be lost in oblivion,” writes Czesław Miłosz. If there is no reckoning, we may eat, drink, and be merry, live as we please, forget, and be forgotten.
We may bury ourselves in oblivion and attempt to dim that flame, or appease its appetite, but it will never be enough. “Then what?” C.S. Lewis famously suggested that our insatiable longings point us toward another reality, indicating that we were not made for this world. But I wonder, sometimes, if maybe our longings speak to a more radical truth—that this time-bound, human experience exposes only reality’s partial view, and that we long to be made whole. We long for what is also unseen and eternal (II Cor. 4:18).
So, at last, I go on my pilgrimage to that final relic: the carbon composition of my father’s grave. Embarrassingly, I lose the way. I wander in that cemetery, staring at the engraved faces of angels, until I find that plot, that little spot of earth, under tall trees, at the base of that same hill where my father took me that day. My knees contact dirt and grass, and I am speaking to stone. But there is only silence. He is not here. And so, again, I go back to that brick alley, that dead-end street. I go back, but this time, I pry up the pavement. I grasp that brick, looking for that crucible of hiraeth hidden within that humble vessel of clay and find it fired in the light of an Eternal Enduring Flame.
Like a word on the tip of my tongue, my father is almost within reach, held in wholeness, not by memory or by my longing, but by the One who intersects our every moment, weaving together all that time and space would fray.
Rachel Hoskins
Writer & Theologian
Rachel Hoskins is the winner of the Frederick Buechner Excellence in Writing Award and was recently published in The Christian Century and Ginosko Literary Journal. She is pursuing a Ph.D. in Patristics at Emory University and holds degrees in theology from the University of Oxford and Princeton Theological Seminary. You can read more of her work at rachelehoskins.com or at her Substack, The Immanent Domain.
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That was so beautiful Rachel. I could not say it like that but I too long for a father now gone. I dream of passing on and reawakening in our small house in Los Angeles with him at the kitchen table yawning loudly in his white T-shirt, hair mussed, as my mom passes him a first cup of coffee. I don't want a mansion in heaven. I just want my tiny childhood home and my Dad.
So vivid, so moving. Anyone who reads your essay will be invited to return to powerful memories of their own, especially memories of loss. But in returning to them, they may once again be found. Perfect for this Easter season. Thank you for what you’ve written.