From Pastor to Theological Vagabond, Jonathan Foster on Loss, Beauty, and Defiance

When we encounter death, we're forced to confront life's biggest questions. Why do we suffer? Where is God in our darkest moments? Can we find beauty and meaning in the midst of grief?

Our guest is writer and former pastor Jonathan Foster who joins us for a profound and incredibly moving conversation about his book "Indigo: The Color of Grief," which he wrote after the tragic loss of his daughter.

In this raw, poetic dialogue, Jonathan invites us into the "liminal space" between hope and despair that he's inhabited since his daughter's death. He shares how this experience shattered his traditional beliefs about an omnipotent, omniscient God and led him to be "disinvited" from his religious denomination.

Jonathan reframes beauty as an act of defiant resistance against tragedy. And ultimately, he reveals the surprising power in simply being present with those who are suffering - not trying to solve or fix, but sitting alongside them in their "hell."

Whether or not you've experienced profound loss, Jonathan's perspective contains valuable wisdom for anyone confronting life's toughest challenges. By the end, you'll have a new appreciation for the profound presence of absence and be inspired to live with deeper intention.

You'll learn:

• Why you don't have to choose between hope and despair
• Why your pain doesn't get smaller, and why you might not want it to
• Why beauty is an act of resistance
• What we call the person who sits with us in hell
• Why "no thing" is a very big something
• And so much more...

Learn more about Jonathan:
website
Indigo
Instagram

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Transcript

Transcript

Jessica Fein: [00:00:00] Welcome. I'm Jessica Fein, and this is the “I Don’t Know How You Do It” podcast, where we talk to people whose lives seem unimaginable from the outside and dive into how they're able to do things that look undoable. I’m so glad you're joining me on this journey and I hope you enjoy the conversation. 

Welcome back to the show. Have you ever read a book that felt like the author was inviting you into their mind and heart as they work through life's biggest questions? That is exactly what today's guest, Jonathan Foster, has achieved with his latest book, Indigo, The Color of Grief.

Jonathan is a writer and former pastor who whose daughter was killed in a tragic car accident. As he struggled with some of the biggest questions about life and death, and the meaning of it all, he changed his views on some things and was disinvited, as he puts it, from his religious denomination. His book Indigo is a raw and poetic exploration of his grief journey and the profound questions it raised about God, love, beauty, and the meaning of [00:01:00] life itself. Just a few little small talk topics, right? In this conversation, Jonathan takes us deep into the liminal space between hope and despair as he wrestles with ideas like the reasons behind suffering, the paradoxes of an omnipresent but not omnipotent God, and how we can find defiant beauty even in our darkest moments.

Jonathan invites us not just into his personal story, but into an examination of how we all cope with loss, uncertainty, and the quote, “undomesticated wildness of life.” I have been quoting this book since I read it, and I'm so excited to introduce you to Jonathan Foster.

Welcome Jonathan, I'm so happy to have you here today. 

Jonathan Foster: Thank you. It's really nice to be with you and I'm, I'm glad this has worked out. 

Jessica Fein: Me too. I have to tell you, I love your book. It is absolutely beautiful. It's, first of all, beautiful before you even open it. It's beautiful from the outside. Feels beautiful.

And again, before you start reading, [00:02:00] just looking at it, the way that the words are on the page, so sparse and how you have certain lines crossed out. It's like we're in your thought process with you. Then all bets are off once you start reading because it's really stunning. You write that grief is the longing for home.

And I thought that was one of the most beautiful descriptions of grief that I've ever read. Grieving is the longing for home. I felt that very deeply. So tell us about your grief journey and what led you to write this book. 

Jonathan Foster: Yeah, well, thank you very much for those comments and for having me on. It's always fun to talk about the work, or meaningful maybe is a better word, and even more so with this particular work because it's so personal.

It feels like, without being overly dramatic, I have just been on a long series of subtractions in my life. And with each loss, I've learned a little bit more about who I am and who I might be and beauty and art. And for me, God has been entangled with all of that. My faith journey is very much [00:03:00] mixed up for good or for bad and all of this too.

And then, yeah, this most recent book, Indigo, is about probably the most intense thing that happened in our life, which was New Year's Day, 2015. And our daughter, our oldest child, and our only daughter was killed in a car wreck. So in a matter of moments, like I say in the book, in a heartbeat, we're Her heart stopped beating and it's wild what just a few seconds will do to your life.

Because now we have post New Year's Day 2001 and pre for our family. It was just a watershed moment in every sense of the word. And I've been wrestling with it for nine years and three months now, still wrestling with it. Like, what does it mean? Who am I? Who is God? What does loss mean? This huge hole I have in my life, but I'm trying not to offer answers.

I'm trying to be like intellectually honest is the phrase I use a lot with the incredibly intense pain, but also try not to go completely nihilistic. Although I'm totally fine if [00:04:00] people do, I mean, life is weird, it's hard, weird and hard. And so I don't blame anyone for their journey, what they're trying to process, but I've just been stuck in this weird liminal space of like, you know, half the time thinking this is awful and the other half time thinking, oh wait, there's actually something really beautiful also going on.

Jessica Fein: The book is called Indigo, The Color of Grief. Why is Indigo the color of grief? 

Jonathan Foster: Well, first of all, I'm not sure that it is technically, although it is interesting if you just do a little googling indigo does have a long history of being associated with grief type things, but I didn't know that getting into it for me indigo was always an evocative words over the last 234 years.

When I've thought about writing something like this, although, to be honest, I didn't know it would turn out like this, that word just kind of kept popping up in my mind. And as us, uh, more creative types do, you kind of just get obsessed around a particular thing. And I just thought the word was evocative.

And then when you think about it, like indigo, the color, is it blue? Is it purple? Is it dark? [00:05:00] Is it light? It's like some gradation of all the above. If you turn it upside down, it's going from dark to light and right side up. It's light to dark. I thought all of that worked really well. And then also it's a bit of an Easter egg kind of a thing, but it does make one appearance in the book itself that I think it was a meaningful thing for me to write and to think about.

And so I guess for all of that, all those things, it made a lot of sense to just go with it. 

Jessica Fein: Do you want to tell us about the appearance it makes or is that a spoiler? 

Jonathan Foster: No, I mean, it's the part where I'm actually describing the events that unfolded on the day, New Year's Day, when we found out about our daughter.

In the morning, I'm, I'm reading a book and I'm becoming aware of the absurd loss of life because I'm reading about Elie Wiesel and his book, Night. And so the morning it's dark and it gets light. And then in the evening, as it goes from light to dark, we've passed through that indigo color in the evening as we're waiting for the official news of my daughter's death.

And so that color and that movement, that gradation, that [00:06:00] shifting thing, I think is very poignant and symbolic for what we were feeling that day, but also honestly, kind of like when you back up what we all are kind of experiencing all through life, because nothing stays the same. It's always shifting. 

Jessica Fein: I was really struck that you were in the middle of reading Night by Elie Wiesel, and you specifically write about how he responds to the question, where was God?

And that becomes something you wrestle with as well. And of course, you actually have a history of a relationship with religion. But before we get into that, tell me how you've wrestled with the where was God question. 

Jonathan Foster: Yeah, my whole thinking about all of that has evolved and changed, which I think, not just for me, but for any human, I actually have come to really believe that's an honorable thing to lean into.

You know, in the Proverbs section of the Old Testament of the Bible, I think it's Proverbs 25, the writer says that it is the glory of God to conceal a matter. It's the glory of kings [00:07:00] and queens to search out a matter. And I remember coming across that verse when I was young, and it, it's kind of always struck in my heart.

Yeah. And I just think it speaks to, again, how honorable it is to enter into these things and to try to figure it out. Not that you ever really figure it out. I'm not even sure what that phrase means, but there's something beautiful about not shying away from that, you know, and trying to be present to the paradox of pain and beauty.

So to try to answer your question, how has it changed? There's a million things, but I'll just say this. In my tradition, I was handed the idea that God was omnipotent, so all powerful, can do whatever he wants. Omniscient. Knows everything that's ever happened and is ever going to happen, you know, knows the future and omnipresent.

What has happened with me among many other things is I have disassembled all of my thinking about omnipotence. I actually still think that if there's a God, that God is powerful, I just think it's relational power, not authoritative power. It's like the difference between if you had Dwayne the Rock Johnson and Mother [00:08:00] Teresa and you would say, who's more powerful?

Well, if you're arm wrestling, yeah, Dwayne's got her. But in all other instances, we would all say, Oh, no, no, I'm, I mean, not that Dwayne Johnson's, he's probably a good guy. I have no idea. But we're probably all going to go with the power of Mother Teresa. So omnipotence got disassembled for me and reframed in a completely different thinking.

Omniscience, I think the long and short of it is the future hasn't happened yet. So it doesn't make sense to say that God can know the future because it just hasn't. It's an unknown quantity. However, I am down with omnipresence. So one out of the three, not only stuck with me, but actually served to kind of revolutionize the thinking about the other two, because if God is really with us in the midst of, or whatever we want to call it, whatever your divine love, I typically call it love.

But if that is with us. In the midst of something this bad or in the midst of something as bad as Elie Wiesel had to deal with and millions and many, [00:09:00] many other people, and maybe what you've had to deal with, well, that's a very interesting God and it has a lot to say about the other omnipotence, omniscience stuff.

That's one way to frame it. 

Jessica Fein: Do you want to share with us why it was you were disinvited from your denomination? 

Jonathan Foster: Oh, sure. Yeah, it's a fun story. Yeah. I'll try to make it as short as possible. So yeah, I've been a pastor my whole life. I planted churches, you know, in the denomination that I came from. By the way, for the most part, it was good people and they're well intentioned people.

My dad was a pastor. Both of my granddads were pastors. So I come from a long line of this stuff, you know. And my partner, she's from it. You know, our kids, we all grew up in it. So for the most part, it wasn't bad. However, what really happened kind of was after my kid died, I really started thinking about, so obviously it was a Christian pastor tradition.

For me, everything revolves around Jesus and the death and resurrection of Jesus. And so it's a bit embarrassing to say, because I was in my forties and had been pastoring my whole life at that point. But I had never really [00:10:00] decided kind of what I thought about, well, why did Jesus have to die? I had just inherited the story that had been told me, which is, well, of course Jesus had to die because I'm sinful and bad.

I mean, they don't say it this way, but that's kind of how it comes about. God doesn't really like you, so he had to have a sacrifice in order so he could, when he looks at you, he could see Jesus. It's some weird, convoluted story like that. Sorry, I shouldn't be that disrespectful. But it is, um, story like that.

Now it seems kind of really absurd, but at the time it was kind of what I was thinking and preaching and emoting, but have being a father and having a kid and not only just having kids, but having a daughter who was, gosh, sorry, I might get emotional. Normally I don't, but if I do, whatever it is, what it is, you know, she was so much fun and there was so much love there and then to have her gone and then to still have that love there is just weird.

Like I'm still trying to figure it out. Like, wait a minute, the love should be gone, but it actually felt like there was as much or more love than ever in the middle of [00:11:00] all that. And so, to me, that's the omnipresence, like my friend Elia DeLeo calls it, divine entanglement. Like that's the entanglement of this whole thing.

And it didn't make sense to me at all anymore that God would need sacrifice or death or to kill his own kid in order to give forgiveness to someone else. It just made no sense whatsoever. So I started asking, well, why did my kid have to die? I wasn't necessarily mad at God. I was just trying to figure it out.

All those questions led me to ask, well, wait a minute, why do I think Jesus had to die? The short answer to that is, well, he had to die because we killed him. That's what we do. We've ordered our world around violence. And then I got into thinking by a guy by the name of Rene Girard, who's a French American intellectual.

That gave me some reasonably intelligent ways to process why Jesus had to die because we order our world around violence. And then I started changing my tune. And now I'm trying to, I'm trying to answer your question. I'm sorry, there's a lot to it. But once I realized, Oh, Jesus had to die just because that's what we do.

We kill people who don't fit into our systems. I [00:12:00] said to myself, self, who are we scapegoating now? Like, who are we kicking out now? Who are we saying doesn't fit into our system now? Because if that story is true, good, right, and I felt like in my heart that it was, whatever you think about Jesus, like, I'm not interested in some transactional thing that he did to get God to like us.

I think that's BS. It doesn't make any sense. Even though my theology had basically said that that was the case. No, but I still think the story, like, it's a beautiful story of someone who enters into it on behalf of others, you know, because he's, he's, he's, Identifying with, quote unquote, the sinner, you know, the marginalized, the victim.

He was called a friend of sinners. And that wasn't a compliment. They were like, no, dude, we're killing you because you are a friend of the people who we've kicked out. So I'm like, all right. I like that story. That's what I think we really want to rally around. How should we do that in this day and age?

Who's being scapegoated now? Who can we line up with? Well, there's no shortage there. So a lot of people being marginalized, but in my context, the LGBTQ people were [00:13:00] certainly at the top of the list for lots of different reasons. And so I, I changed my posture and I said, no, man, everyone's welcome here.

Everyone belongs. You don't have to believe in order to belong. Just come belong. If you believe like us down the road, by the way, that begs the question, what do we believe? And that was changing, but you just belong. And, um, that was really kind of like the thing. No, that was the thing. I was a part of the church of the Nazarene and despite being in good standing and all my heritage and all that stuff, they very quickly said, you're out.

And I told them like, this is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. This is absurd, but also I get it. It's not going to work for you because you got money and bills and pensions, you got paychecks. You guys got a cash. So of course you got to get rid of me. And I did my best to leave graciously. But yeah, that was a really, really big event in our lives.

Vocationally by far, it is the biggest event and I can't imagine anything ever being bigger than that. That's my attempt at trying to keep that story short. And [00:14:00] so for the last few years, I've been a wondering nomadic theological vagabond writing about a combination of scapegoating and death and grief, and my atheistic beliefs about an omnipotent God.

And yeah, it's just been super interesting. 

Jessica Fein: It's super interesting, and it strikes me that you're still spiritually guiding people. You're just doing it through a different means and inviting us into your questioning is a real kind of spiritual leadership, in my opinion. for saying that, and I think maybe that is what's happening.

And you talked a little bit about the idea of liminal space a few moments ago, which you actually say your book is about the liminal space between hope and despair. And again, it was something that struck me so personally, and I think a lot about juxtaposition as well. And I'm a word person too.

I love the word liminal. But this whole idea of being in between, and you know, you and I both have experienced the before and the after. How do you stay in that liminal space between hope and despair, and not just [00:15:00] move to permanent residence and despair? 

Jonathan Foster: Yeah, first of all, liminal is a great word, and for a while, probably a few years ago, I was thinking, because that's a synonymous thing with this indigo, it's just liminal is used a little bit more often, so I wound up going with something maybe not quite as used.

Yeah. How do you stay in that middle space and that tension? That's a good question. It's like trying to keep one foot in the reality of the present of the now and the one foot in the, in both the pain and hope. I mean, a part of it for me has been, this might make sense to you because I know you've gone through similar kinds of things, but I've always been nervous about when people would say like, well, in time, it'll get better.

You know, you'll feel better. There was a part of me still to this day, even though it's been nine years, three months. I don't want to get better. It doesn't make sense that it should ever feel better because this kid was so more than just important. I mean, in a neurological sense, you know, we are formed by our relationships.

And so my, literally my brain over a 20 year span just got wrapped up in this person's life [00:16:00] and a part of who she was as a part of who I am, that's never going to get better. Also, I didn't want it to get better because I don't know if you can relate to this and I try to say this in a book, but I kept feeling like, you know, That, that grief and that pain, the intensity of that thing was the very last thing I had left of my daughter.

She wasn't there, but the very last thing was this weird absence that somehow connected me and her.

Jessica Fein: I totally get that. You talk about absence as a protagonist. Right, right, right. I thought that was so interesting that nothing or No thing is very much something you write, you know, and I've often thought about the presence of the absence.

And I think, you know, as, as you mentioned, I have a lot of loss most recently and notably for the purpose of this conversation with my daughter just two years ago, and the presence of the absence is there all the time. That is not no thing. 

Jonathan Foster: And absence is a no thing because she's not there. But in another sense, it is absolutely a something, and it catalyzes [00:17:00] something in you and in me that is so freaking powerful.

It's just wild. And I, like, I still stumbling trying to describe it. My friend, uh, Rick Boothby had a son who committed suicide. Now it's been about 16, 17 years ago, but. Rick is a psychoanalytic philosopher and he teaches at Loyola Marymount. And he writes about the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's idea that interact with this whole absence is a presence thing.

This whole nothing is a something thing. I'm trying to answer your original question, which is how do we stay in that space? Part of me is saying I didn't want to leave it and I didn't want it to get better. And it didn't really matter because in many ways it wasn't better. But what I finally decided was the best way for me to process this thing.

Somehow I came across this. This probably isn't original with me, but I'll just say the concept and then I think it'll make sense. The concept is the pain doesn't get smaller, but your heart can get bigger. And when I landed on that, I thought that is kind of it. It's because I don't even want the pain to get smaller, but the [00:18:00] interiority of who I am has gotten larger.

And so now I can just carry the thing. It felt like that was honoring the law still without trying to quickly rush to, Oh, I got to feel better or whatever. Just approaching in that way gave me the grace and the freedom to let it be as intense as it can be. 

Jessica Fein: One of the things you write about is that beauty is a type of defiance.

And that reminded me, by the way, of a guest we had on the show, Tameet Sethi, who wrote Joy Is My Justice. I don't know if you know her, but Joy Is My Justice was her book. And I love this idea that beauty is a type of defiance. What do you mean by that? 

Jonathan Foster: Joy is my justice is a good line, too. Yeah, I'm trying to say something like, you know, that beauty really emerges in the midst of resistance.

I think I say that in the book. Beauty is such an important, deep concept that, you know, it's not some cheap thing. Some kitschy, cheap ideas that comes along on the Hallmark channel or whatever. It really only for me emerges in the depths [00:19:00] of difficult things, which I name as resistance. You know, resistance in life can manifest itself in a bunch of different ways.

And maybe nowhere more intense than when we lose a loved one. Side note, can I just say real quick, I don't know if you've experienced this too, but for anyone listening, often what happens is people will say, well, I haven't experienced something like you've experienced, so I can't enter into this with you, and I don't really think that's true.

Everyone's got their own stuff they're going through and it's all kind of connected, divorce or death of a dream, death of a loved one, it's all kind of connected to this idea of, well, life just hasn't gone like I've wanted it to go, or I thought it would go. So we're kind of all in this together. I get that too, all the time.

And, you know, all of us to some extent, yes, we all have experienced or will experience loss, and the other thing is uncertainty. Right? And so any of us that thinks we're not living in uncertainty and we've lost more power to you, but your eyes will be opened at some point because that's just the reality.

So yes, I think that these concepts can apply for everybody. Yes, yes, [00:20:00] yes. So the listener who hasn't lost a kid should give themselves some freedom to experience all the pain that they're feeling because it's your pain. Like it's your stuff and you don't know anything else. And there's a lot of different ways that life can be overwhelming, which gets back to the resistance thing.

Resistance is very real, but there's something like beauty. I think of it as maybe going upstream of this river of resistance and there's beauty that emerges and there's a defiant way to live. 

Jessica Fein: Right. It reminds me of James Baldwin and a lot of his writing, actually, now that you're talking about it, and of course, you know, he talks about standing up to tragedy, and I think that there's strength and beauty there, and for us, that was very much a guiding thought, and actually, my father wrote me a letter about the idea of corners of beauty and trying to find the corners of beauty, and so when we were in this situation, we really felt like, okay, things are horrible and tragic and scary, and We can create our own little corner of beauty here.

And I really resonate with Baldwin on that in terms of saying like, [00:21:00] yes, we're all going to be met with tragedy and you, it can blow you down, or you can stand up and say, hello, tragedy. I'm here. I see you. Yes. Let's do this thing. Right. And so I think that that really strikes me as this notion of defiance or resistance.

Jonathan Foster: Yes. Yeah. And note that you just said “and,” you didn't say “but.”

Jessica Fein: Oh, I try very hard not to, not say the word but. Yeah. So thank you for noticing that. 

Jonathan Foster: Right. Right. That's a big distinction. 

Jessica Fein: Another thing that you write about is the platitudes. This notion that everything happens for a reason is one thing that you write.

And I love you said, quote, “everything does not happen for a reason. Unless one of the reasons is randomness, which by definition is something that happens without reason.” And I loved that because we cannot think that what has happened to us, to our children, to people we love, that there's a reason there.

And so how do you, with so much thoughtfulness and grace that you carry, how do you respond to these kinds of statements? 

Jonathan Foster: Really hard, isn't it? When you're [00:22:00] in the midst of it and other people and I know for any of us who've walked through these things then automatically in life, life opens the doors for you then to be with others and of course your work.

I mean, you're intentionally stepping into it with others and so people are going to say all kinds of things to you. My work was and is like that to being a pastor or a counselor or it's hilarious or hilarious. I don't know if it's hilarious. It's crazy. How often, you know, someone will just pull me aside and then all of a sudden will be sharing the most absurd, ridiculous thing that's happened to them.

And I'm like, okay, wait a minute, I did not know this was coming. And then in those moments, people will say things to try to create meaning in their life. And I get it on one level, kind of like what you said earlier, for a lot of people, my basic approach is look, As difficult as it is for me to hear you say, everything happens for a reason.

I kind of get that that's how you've manufactured meaning in your life. All of us were just like meaning making creatures. You know, I'm pretty convinced that we all kind of know that underneath a few layers, we all get that [00:23:00] life is so undomesticated and so crazy and wild. It's just nuts. It's out of control.

So, we come up with these things to figure it out. And so, what I try to do in my work is admit that. And I'm still doing that. I'm still trying to come up with ways to figure this out. I just think there are less sucky ways to do it. There are less bad ways to do it. And a bad way for me, not bad, I'll say unhealthy.

I think that's a better word. An unhealthy way to process this is to think in terms of some distant, omnipotent God out there pulling levers, pushing buttons. Sequencing the code, who's responsible for, just like you were saying, that my daughter would die. Like it just, it doesn't make any sense. And then of course, a lot of people say, well, you know, he had to have that happen so that these series of good things would happen.

And I'm like, that's just not very evolved way. That's not an intelligent way of thinking. That's how I would think. I mean, that's an easy way to think. Kill this to make something good happen. Now, if there is a God, it's gotta be more complicated and interesting than that. And Simone Weil actually helped me a [00:24:00] lot.

She's a French thinker. I don't know why so many good thinkers come from France, but she has this line. I can't remember how it goes exactly, but something like God does no violence to secondary causes in order essentially to make his plan happen. I butchered the phrase, but the intent is like, if there's a God, He doesn't have to hurt these people to make this go good.

All of that thinking, yes, helped me disassemble platitudes. Like everything happens for a reason. It does not really make sense, but I understand why sometimes people just default to it when life gets really hard. 

Jessica Fein: Yeah. You know, as you indicated earlier, a lot of the listeners have not lost a child or maybe have not experienced real grief and hardship yet.

And they know other people who have and they want to show up and they want to be helpful. And I loved your line where you said, quote, friend is the name we give to people who are with us in hell. Because you talk about what to do and not do when your friend is suffering. 

So tell us about that. 

Jonathan Foster: Yeah, [00:25:00] there's so many things to that.

The first thing I thought of when you said that was I'm remembering my tradition. My tradition was so much built around getting people out of hell. Mostly it had to do with a postmortem thing. It was all about getting people to believe the right kind of stuff so that they would get fixed so that they, you know, get cleaned up enough so that when they die, they go to the right place and not go to hell.

And, when my whole theology started to shift, all my eggs went in the omnipresent basket. And I thought about, if there's a God, there would be no God forsaken space in the entire cosmos. It doesn't even make sense. Like, how could you create a space where God's not there? And if God is there, and if God is love, now if God's not love, all bets are off, I don't know.

And by the way, I'm not interested if God's not love. But if God is love, and love is in a space, there's always a chance for something good to happen. And so, for me The story of Jesus is a bit of a story of someone, and of course, that is what the New Testament story basically says, that Jesus descends into whatever [00:26:00] Sheol, Hades, whatever that is, and interacts with death.

Well, I think we're invited to do the same. You know, that was so contrasted for me with the way my tradition says, we got to go get people, get them out of hell. And then we tell them how to do it. You know, we throw them a line, we throw them a rope and pull them out. No, no, no, no. What you got to do, you don't got to do it.

You're invited to do it. Love is inviting you to just go in there and be with them. And it's the solidarity thing. So yeah, like I write solidarity over solutions. It's not being so quick to rush to solutions. It is actually in that solidarity thing that we are helping our friends. And again, theologically, that's what made sense to me.

It's like, if the story of Jesus, what rings true about it is that this person who embodies love comes into the hell place and is there, is in solidarity with all that. And I love that whole thought. I don't get to play Savior. I don't get to be the Messiah. I just really am invited to go be with people.

And at the end of life, what else is there? I mean, really, [00:27:00] what else is there other than just being with people? And a lot of people are experiencing hell, so I think it's a really beautiful invitation for all of us. 

Jessica Fein: I do, too. I saw a cartoon yesterday, actually. It was posted on Option B, and it takes this notion and makes it, you know, just this little visual cartoon where there's a person in a cave and the friend comes and is sitting outside the cave and says, Hey, I'm here.

You want to come out of the cave? And the person in the cave says no. And the friend says, okay, I'm going to sit right here and if you change your mind, I'll be here and I have some food and I have, you know, whatever. And just this idea that the person is not saying, you got to get out of the cave. You've been in the cave too long, you know, or any of that kind of stuff.

Just, okay, I'm here. And I think for so many of us who want to be helpful, useful, be good friends, we think, well, I'm not doing anything. Yeah. You are doing something, right? Yeah. It's not about the doing because you are, quote unquote, rescuing, there's no rescuing to be had. 

Jonathan Foster: Right. What are you going to do?

Like, in your life, I'm not asking you to [00:28:00] be critical towards anyone, but I suspect you've had stories too, where after your daughter passed away or in the midst of your long tragedy that people came to you and offered some platitudes. And then you were probably like, okay, well, that helps me. But not really helped me. 

Jessica Fein: I'll tell you the one thing that really gets to me.

And I wrote a whole article about this was at least, however, that sentence ends, there's no good way for that sentence to end. And I'll give you an example. I had a friend who died shortly after she got married and it was a car accident many, many, many years ago. And I heard people say, at least she didn't have any kids.

At least she's not leaving any babies, right? Then, a few years later, my sister died. She was young, she was 30, and she had a baby. And I heard people say, at least she had a baby. At least she left, you know, her legacy. And it's like, come on, there's no, at least there's no right. Anything that happens after that statement.

There is so much depth here.

There is so much to [00:29:00] wrestle with almost on every page of the book. So I invite all the listeners to get this book. to start thinking about some of these topics, the way you present them. And I personally am just so grateful to have the book. I just read it and I'm already going back to it. And as I mentioned to you earlier, I'm already quoting you.

So thank you so much for writing it and for sharing some of your experience with us today. 

Jonathan Foster: Absolutely. Anytime. And I'm really, like I kind of already said, I'm not so grateful that the event happened, but I'm really grateful to have entered into some of this stuff and come to some newer, not necessarily new, but hopefully healthier ideas for myself.

And if it helps others, man, what a cool thing to be able to do. So, yeah, thank you very much. 

Jessica Fein: Here are my takeaways from the conversation with Jonathan. Number one, embrace the liminal space between hope and despair. We do not have to live in one side or the other. Number two, our pain and loss doesn't get smaller, nor would we want it to, but our hearts expand to hold it.

Three, beauty can be an act of defiance in the face of [00:30:00] hardship or even tragedy. 4. Friend is a name we give to the person who sits with us in hell. Solidarity is more important than trying to come up with solutions. And number 5. Nothing or no thing is something. The presence of the absence is incredibly powerful.

Thanks so much for listening to the show. I really appreciate it. I know how many choices there are of things to listen to and I do not take it for granted. If you want to continue to support the show, I would be so grateful if you would take a second to rate and review it so that we can make sure other people are able to hear it as well.

Have a great day. Talk to you next time.