Waiting, Anticipating Resurrection
A Feature Review of
The Understory: An Invitation to Rootedness and Resilience
Lore Ferguson Wilbert
Paperback: Brazos Press, 2024
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Reviewed by Rachel Lonas
In the 1990’s our youth group went to a yearly summer youth camp along with many other churches. There was beach time mixed in with emotion-based worship services and “chapel talks” from a famous pastor who was the son of an even more famous pastor. His go-to was having us repeat pithy phrases back and forth like a motivational speaker. The one that still rings in my ears is, “Your friends will determine the direction and quality of your life.” That was 25 years ago, but there is some irony in his words now. Then, following in his famous father’s footsteps, pushed us to stick with church and other evangelicals. As his career progressed, though, he found many of those loyal churchgoers had not stuck with him as he reached some different theological conclusions.
He was right though. Your friends do matter, and how you evaluate who is safe and who is not may matter most of all. Who can you disagree with and still have respect for? Who is going to tell you the truth because they know you will hear it from them? Who is going to let you weep tears of lament and joy as a part of what psychiatrist Dr. Curt Thompson calls “confessional community”?
Lore Wilbert, author of A Curious Faith and Handle with Care, wrestles with these questions and themes in her latest book The Understory: An Invitation to Rootedness and Resilience from the Forest Floor, a memoir largely set in her small town in the Adirondacks. Here abstract themes meet the concrete (grief is discussed through understanding forest litter, resilience through underground fungal networks, etc.) in lessons, not answers.
Each chapter is themed along these lines, with Wilbert’s story woven in vignettes through her exploration of forest life. I felt like this format pulled me out of the storytelling too quickly, but I slowly settled into a visual of paddling down a river, letting Wilbert be the tour guide in the kayak for these difficult, sometimes raw moments in her life and in her friends’ lives.
Seeing as she gives so many specific descriptions of her home landscape (where she notes the Mohawk people tended the land for generations) and her love of lakes, this feels right. In her poetic reflections, she is showing us the New York understory she is so familiar with and yet still gets curious about in its intersections within her life and emotions every day. Wilbert borrows from many who have listened to the wisdom of the earth, most notably botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer whose timeless book Braiding Sweetgrass has given clarity to many naturalists and those seeking healing by honoring the creation that surrounds them.
The book offers an interesting interplay between the sights and smells of the forest with Wilbert’s desire for Christian community. This combination made for a very embodied book that is not afraid to show some of the ugly scars she carries after deeply loving the American church and its members.
Perhaps the throughline is this: desiring the interdependence we as Christians are called to comes at a cost—sometimes so much cost that we’re not always sure it’s worth it anymore. Wilbert points out that anxiety roosts where open-handedness once was, and it’s tiring trying to once again reimagine what a faith community can look like when experiencing loss after loss. She posits, “But sometimes, I have to believe, what looks dead to the world is simply ‘just not vertical any longer’” (22). Like trees, forced uprooting doesn’t mean death, it may just mean a different kind of “life”, one that supports different things in the undergrowth to flourish.
Wilbert is close to my age, and the conversations she is having with many of her friends are similar to mine. We’re naming how adulthood in Christian community in 2024 feels untethered from our childhoods in Christian community. We feel guilty for the decades of not knowing how much of our faith was placed in institutions and gatekeepers—the church habits, standards, and routines that would keep us in good standing until one day they were used against us like a well-timed judo move. And yet, we know that we have still found goodness within and among the people of God. We still know and desire to worship God and strive for Christlikeness in our everyday lives. We just don’t know what that is supposed to look like anymore when the templates we were given needed an overhaul.
Wilbert says, “The process of grief is learning to live without the thing that has been taken away. It is learning to live in subtraction. Even if another good is added eventually, what was subtracted is never added in again. The former life has gone. There is a new normal now” (100). She shares how the “new normal” is not just thinking about her feelings, but embracing those feelings through mourning and tears. That meant a process letting go of the apologies she might have been owed or the picture of reconciliation she wanted, knowing they could possibly never come.
“But what do you do when it all happens too fast, too close, too alone?… I realized I was waiting for the funeral before I would acknowledge all these deaths, and this is no way to live…Until I could stop for death, sit with death, stay with death and acknowledge its presence and let what had existed before simply now go to rest, I was going to keep feeling guilty for being unable to save a lifeless corpse” (110).
When you’re running from pain the last thing you want to do is sit in it. Making eye contact with death shows you all the other devastating things you must recognize about the brokenness of this world and your own life. Wilbert reminds us through her story that we’re all trying to save lifeless corpses. We wait for some expected ritual of finality. We hold our breath until God reminds us we can, in fact, exhale and wait for resurrection instead. Her conclusion in much of this is to do the uncomfortable work of asking if believers can share in the Gospel work God has for us to do even when we disagree with each other. When we clash, can we ask questions instead of immediately pointing fingers? Can we remember that we, too, once believed some of those things, and access that emotional place?
Reflecting back on that summer camp and all the ways I have changed over the decades, I know what I would expect of a pastor speaking to my own teen daughters. I would expect that he or she has gained vulnerability through ministry instead of showmanship. I would expect him or her to echo Wilbert’s heart in saying, “My work is not to ask you to look at my grief and think of me but to show you a grief so common you can face your own” (106). Wilbert tells one life’s story, but it is the vehicle for grief, not the focal point. She points out many times that she can only tell her side of the story which means other interpretations of events could be out there, too. In doing so, there is a humility that shifts her narrative; she is able to name her trials and the betrayal she felt from her family and Christian communities without retribution. Their stories are interwoven with hers and in doing so she gives these things to God and goes forth at whatever pace the day may bring.
Rachel Lonas
Rachel Lonasis a writer and educator specializing in literature and composition. Several of her pieces can be found at Fathom Magazine. She lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee, with her husband,
Justin, and their four daughters. She enjoys all things creative—watercoloring, nature journaling, landscaping, and being inspired by botanical gardens.
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