Returning to Love, Again
A Feature Review of
Even After Everything: The Spiritual Practice of Knowing the Risks and Loving Anyway
Stephanie Duncan Smith
Hardcover: Convergent, 2024
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Reviewed by Cara Meredith
What is the risk of love? Luci Shaw says it’s the risk of love being unreturned. C.S. Lewis would probably remind us of certain possibilities of wrung and broken hearts. Even though the old ABBA song begs us to take a chance on love (or on me, for that matter), one thing is true: love is a risky business, indeed.
Given these many gambles, it’s downright astonishing we humans continue in our quest and risk love, often over and over again. But for me, and for a wide swath of readers, I imagine, there also exists a “spiritual practice of knowing the risks and loving anyway” – of saying yes to love, without so much knowing whether there will be a return on love. Such is also the theme (and in the aforementioned quotation) of the subtitle of Stephanie Duncan Smith’s new memoir, Even After Everything. Because even after everything, we humans are invited, still, to throw the dice and place all bets on love.
Of course, the book centers not around a semi-circular blackjack table, rooted in love, as much as in the grounded circular rhythms of the liturgical calendar. Picture the color wheel of the sacred year, the seasons of Advent and Epiphany, Lent and Easter and Ordinary Time too, marked by a spinning wheel of greens and purples, whites and blacks. The reader journeys alongside Stephanie—a first name I use purposefully, as she often does the same of the many authors, theologians, and thinkers we meet along the way—through these holy seasons, and then, once again, when the color wheel spins anew and we taste part of the cycle once again. Because, as it turns out, this spinning and turning and returning is the cycle in the end: the life and death and life, once more, both of Christ but also of our very lives.
Of life, the reader grows privy to a hybrid memoir of personal story and theology, of detailed insight and heart-palpitating prose. We meet Stephanie, a successful editor and writer, who stretches toward “the sacred work of expansion” (23) and draws the circle wider, by way of opening herself up to pregnancy and growing her family. For the author, such expansion is not without consequence, not “when fear menaces our hope, when we have no knowledge or control over what happens next, [when] all we have is the now” (9). Every sentence, of course, is rooted in that circular narrative of the liturgical year when and as her story—and perhaps, if we’re honest, many of our stories too—reflect such rhythms. Here, “Advent is nothing if not the story of beginnings, revealing a God who dares to expand, who chooses enlargement over happiness, no matter the chaos” (32). But here also is the God who soon weeps with us in the darkest night, who stands beside us in every paradox and contradiction, who lies beside us in death.
As a reader, we know miscarriage looms on the horizon. Stephanie gives us a foretaste of this in the preface and on the inside jacket cover too – but the inevitable can still be just as jarring and harrowing, even if we know it’s coming in the end. Sensitive readers may need to skip over chapters three and four, while others of us will be found rocked by a vocabulary that mirrors the theme of the chapters (and, once again, of the particular Paschal cycle). The moment of loss was “savage in its serenity” (35), marked by The Great Unfair (39), and full of “the audial ache of a hurting world” (50). For some readers, including myself, it will not be easy to read about the pain that accompanies loss, but just as we mourn alongside the author, who is herself encased in sadness, we remember that ever-turning kaleidoscope of a color wheel – the same one that weaves “in and out of bouts of brimming-over joy, impossible hope, and fragile fear” (62). This too is part of the cycle, and perhaps, as this sage theologian reminds us, of this one wild and precious life.
Because then, the cycle renews. Life returns. For Stephanie, the embodied acts of pregnancy and parenting means mimicking the one whose “life sets into motion a subversion that will disrupt death forever” (94), even if we first have to sludge through the muck of Good Friday and Holy Saturday. Even then, the reader is reminded that God is doing a good thing, that “wherever God is found doing a new thing, wherever the Spirit is breathing new life, wherever joy is breaking through the walls of our fear … we anticipate the final feast in which our future is sealed” (112). Breathless with anticipation, we act as spiritual midwives when her daughter is born, encouraged to listen when the “liturgical year calls us to stay with the story that leads into new life” (126). Once again, we lean in and stay close to love, “warmed by the hot astonishment of our belonging” (145) before the cycle begins again.
As the story often goes—for the author, for the reader, and for all of us who dance to the rhythms of the liturgical year—“the color wheel turns and we tesser its rim” (188). We return once again to love and to this choosing of love, for “Love is the face that will never let us go, and her face shines ever toward you” (188). This is the gift Even After Everything beckons us to remember, the truth Stephanie Duncan Smith hopes the reader will receive.
Cara Meredith
Cara Meredith is a writer, speaker, and part-time development director. The author of The Color of Life(Zondervan) and the forthcoming Church Camp (Broadleaf), she gets a kick out of playing with words. A lot. You can connect with her on her website, CaraMeredith.com.
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