←All letters

The chair across from you

K. A. Emanuel · Eight minutes

There is a particular silence that happens about four seconds after you tell someone something true. You have handed them the worst thing, and now you are watching their face to find out what it costs to have said it. Most people cannot bear those four seconds, so they fill them. They say at least. They say everything happens for a reason. They say have you tried. They are not cruel. They are frightened, and the fastest way out of fear is a sentence.

A chaplain is a person who has been trained not to fill those four seconds.

That is nearly the whole job. Everything else is decoration on that one discipline. I say this not to be modest about the work but to be accurate, because people arrive at an hour of counsel expecting the wrong thing and then feel cheated when they get the right one. They expect a verdict. They expect to be told whether they were wrong to stop going to church, whether the marriage is finished, whether the anger they feel toward a dead parent makes them a bad son. And I will not tell them, not because I am withholding it, but because I do not know, and neither does anyone, and a man who pretends otherwise is selling something.

What actually happens in a room

Two chairs. Not a desk between them, because a desk makes one person a clerk and the other an applicant. Not side by side either, which is for driving and for the kind of conversation men have when they cannot look at each other, and which we do use, outdoors, walking, when that is what someone needs. In the room: two chairs at a slight angle, close enough that neither of us has to raise our voice.

The first two minutes are silent. People hate this. They fidget, they apologize for the silence, they ask if they should start. And then somewhere around ninety seconds something drops, and the version of themselves they assembled in the car on the way over comes apart, and what they actually came to say arrives instead of what they planned to say. I have watched this happen so many times that I no longer consider it remarkable. But it does not happen if you skip the two minutes.

Then you talk. Uninterrupted. In whichever language the thing lives in. And it does live in one, specifically, which is why this matters so much for people who grieve in Amharic and function in English. There are sentences a man can say about his father in Amharic that he physically cannot produce in English, because the English version passes through a part of his brain that is on duty, that is performing competence, that has been performing competence since 2003. Let him use the other language. The whole hour turns on it.

The thing about being asked one good question is that you cannot un-hear it. It follows you to the car.

After the account, one question. Not a list; a list is an interrogation and people have had enough of those. One question, and the work of the hour is choosing it. Usually it is a question nobody has asked, because everyone else has been busy reassuring. When did you last say that out loud? Who is allowed to see you tired? What would it mean if it were simply true that you cannot fix this?

Then we name it. This sounds soft and it is the hardest part. Grief that has gone seven years without being called grief has become something else by now: a temper, a drinking, a distance from a wife who has stopped asking. Saying this is grief out loud, in a room, to a person who does not flinch, is not a small event. People cry at the naming far more often than at the telling.

Then, if you want it, a text. One passage, read slowly, twice. Not applied to you like a bandage. Just read, and left there. If you do not want it, we skip it, and I do not mention it again, and nothing about the hour changes. I have sat with people who have not been inside a church in two decades and have no intention of going back, and the hour worked exactly as well.

Then one small thing. Not a plan for your life. One action, sized to this week: a phone call, a sentence you will say to your wife, one night where you go to bed at ten. Anything larger is a fantasy, and fantasies are how people leave a room feeling wonderful and change nothing.

And then a blessing, or a goodbye. Whichever you want.

Why a chaplain and not a therapist

You should probably see a therapist. I say this to people constantly and I will keep saying it. A therapist can do things I cannot: treat a disorder, prescribe or refer for medication, work with you for two years on something that took thirty years to build. If you can get one, get one. If you already have one, keep them, and come to me for something else.

Here is the something else. A therapist works within a frame where your suffering is a problem to be understood and, ideally, reduced. That frame is correct and useful and it has limits. There are things that happen to people that are not problems to be solved, and treating them as problems is its own injury. Your mother died. Your marriage of nineteen years ended and you still believe, on the evidence, that you loved her. You left a country and it is not there anymore, not the version you left, and you cannot go back to it because it has stopped existing in time rather than in space. None of that is a disorder. None of that gets fixed. What it needs is a witness, and a frame large enough to hold it, and those are what a chaplain is for.

The second difference is money and the third is shame, and they are related. A therapist costs a hundred and eighty dollars an hour and has a six-week waiting list. And for a great many people I sit with, the sentence I am seeing someone is not sayable in their family, in their church, in their mother's hearing. Whereas I went to talk to a priest is a sentence that passes without comment in every house I have ever been in. I am aware that this is partly an accident of culture and that it lets people through a door they would not otherwise walk through. I am not too proud to use the door.

On not being your pastor

The most common reason people come here is that they cannot go to their own church. Not because the church is bad. Because the church is small, and the deacon is their cousin, and the woman who runs the women's group works with their wife, and there is no version of walking into that office that does not become, within a week, something everyone knows.

I am not attached to your congregation. I will not see you on Sunday. I have no stake in whether you stay married, no position to defend, nothing to gain from your conclusion. That unattachment is not coldness; it is the specific condition that makes it possible for you to say the true thing. It is the same reason people tell strangers on planes what they have never told their brother.

So: the chair is there. It costs what you decide it costs, including nothing. You do not have to believe anything to sit in it, and you do not have to have a crisis to deserve it, and you do not have to be able to explain why you came.

Most people cannot explain why they came. They sit down and say, "I don't really know what I'm doing here." That is a fine way to start. It is, in fact, the beginning of the truest hour I know how to offer.

←All letters

←All letters

The money you send home

K. A. Emanuel · Eleven minutes

Nobody who has not done it understands that it is a job. They think it is generosity, which is a thing you do with what is left over. It is not generosity. It is a second shift that starts when the first one ends, and it has a schedule, and a quota, and performance reviews, and no vacation, and you have been working it for eleven years.

I want to describe it accurately, because I think a great many men in Atlanta are carrying this and have never once heard it described accurately, and there is a specific relief that comes from hearing your own situation said back to you by someone who is not asking you for anything.

The arithmetic

It starts as one number. A brother's school fees. It is manageable and it feels good. It feels, in fact, like the whole point, like the reason the leaving was worth it. Then the number acquires dependents. The brother finishes school and does not find work, because there is no work. An aunt gets sick. A roof. A funeral, and funerals are enormous, and the family has already told everyone that you will handle it before anyone has asked you. A cousin's wedding, where your absence is already a wound and your contribution is the only apology available to you.

And here is the part that is never said out loud: every number you send establishes a floor. Not a ceiling, a floor. Six hundred dollars in March is not a gift in March; it is the new baseline for April. To send five hundred in April is not to have given five hundred dollars. It is to have taken one hundred away. This is not because your family is ungrateful. It is because human beings adapt to their circumstances in about six weeks, which is a mercy in most contexts and a trap in this one.

So the number only moves in one direction, and your income does not, and somewhere in year four or year seven the two lines cross, and after that you are running a deficit that you cover with overtime, and then with a second job, and then with the money you were putting aside for your own children, and then with the credit card, and you do not tell anyone, because there is nobody to tell.

You cannot say "I can't" to a person whose alternative is nothing. So you say nothing, and you find the money, and you go to work.

Why you cannot say no

Because the request is not unreasonable. That is the whole difficulty. If the requests were greedy or frivolous you could refuse them and feel righteous. But the request is school fees. The request is a surgery. The request is a mother, in a country where there is no pension and you are the pension, asking for something she would not ask for if she had any other option. Every single request is legitimate, which means every single refusal has a cost you can picture in detail.

And underneath that there is a debt that is not financial. You did not get here alone. Someone sold something. Someone's brother made a phone call. An uncle put up money for a ticket in 2006 and has never mentioned it once, which is worse than if he mentioned it weekly. You are the family's collective investment, and the returns are due monthly, and the principal is never retired.

And underneath that there is the thing that actually keeps men awake, which is that they are not sure they deserve to have made it out. Why you and not your brother, who was smarter. Why you and not the friend who did not get the visa and is now forty-three and still in the same room. There is no answer to that question, so the money becomes the answer. The money is how you pay for the accident of your own survival. And a debt like that cannot be discharged, because it was never really about money.

What this does to a man

I will tell you what I see, because people do not come to me saying "I have a remittance problem." They come saying their wife is angry, or they cannot sleep, or they have stopped going to church, or they exploded at their son over a cup left on the counter and frightened everyone including themselves.

The wife is angry because there is a household budget that she is not permitted to see all of. She knows money leaves. She does not always know how much or when, and she has learned that asking produces a fight, so she has stopped asking, and the not asking has become its own wall. Meanwhile you experience her questions as an accusation that you are betraying your mother. Two people who love each other, arguing about a number, where the number is not the subject.

The sleep goes because of the phone. The calls come at four and five in the morning Atlanta time, because it is the middle of the working day there, and you cannot turn the phone off, because one of these nights the call will be the one. So you never fully sleep. You sleep the way a man on watch sleeps. Do that for nine years and it is not fatigue anymore, it is a personality.

The anger comes from the arithmetic of a man who has no discretionary anything. No discretionary money, no discretionary hours, no discretionary attention. Every resource is spoken for. And a man with zero margin has no capacity to absorb a cup left on a counter, so the cup gets the full weight of eleven years, and then he sees his son's face.

And the church goes last, usually, and quietly. Partly time. Partly that Sunday is the only morning to sleep. But mostly, in my experience, because the church is where the community is, and the community is where the requests are, and going to church has come to mean standing in a fellowship hall being asked about money by four different people who all have someone sick at home.

What I actually say about this

I am not going to tell you to stop sending money. That advice gets given constantly, usually by people who have never had anyone depend on them, and it is worthless, and worse, it is insulting, because it treats an obligation you experience as sacred as though it were a bad financial habit.

What I say instead is four things.

The first is that this is a job, and you may say so. Out loud, to your wife, in plain words: I am working a second job that neither of us chose and I have never once called it that. Something moves when a man says this. It moves because his wife has been living with an invisible third party in her marriage and has been told, by his silence, that she is imagining it.

The second is that the number needs a name and a ceiling, and the ceiling must be set here, at your own table, before the request arrives. Not negotiated on a four-in-the-morning phone call with a crying sister, because no number decided on that call is a real decision. Decided in advance, in daylight, by two people, and written down. It will be too low. Set it anyway. A ceiling you break twice a year is infinitely better than no ceiling, because a ceiling makes the breaking visible, and what is invisible cannot be grieved or shared.

The third is about who does the saying no. Right now every refusal is yours alone, and each one costs you a relationship. Some of that can be moved onto structure rather than onto you: we send on the first of the month and we do not send between. We give to medical, we do not give to business ideas. A rule is easier to say and easier to hear than a judgment about one person's request, and it does not require you to tell your aunt that you have decided she matters less.

The fourth is the one nobody wants. Your children are watching how you carry this, and they are learning from it what a man is. If what they learn is that a man is a person with no interior life, who is exhausted and unreachable and who provides, then you will have successfully sent money home for twenty years and lost the thing you were sending it for. The point was a family. Do not spend the family on the family.

One more thing

There is a version of this you were never offered: that you are permitted to grieve what it cost. Not to regret it. Not to undo it. To grieve it, which is a different act: to say that leaving cost something real, that you have been paying for it continuously, that you did not know when you were twenty-six what you were signing, and that some days you are just very, very tired.

There is nowhere for a man to say that. Not to his family here, who need him steady. Not to his family there, who need him solvent. Not to his friends, who are carrying the identical thing and have the identical rule about not mentioning it.

That is what the chair is for. One hour, no advice, in Amharic if that is where the sentence lives. And nobody at your church will know you came.

←All letters

←All letters

Who will bury me here

K. A. Emanuel · Fourteen minutes

An old woman asked me this in a kitchen in Clarkston, holding a cup she had not drunk from, and she was not being morbid. She was asking a logistical question and a theological one at the same time, the way old women do, and she wanted an actual answer to both.

The logistical one is this: when I die in Georgia, does my body go home, and if it does, who pays, and if it does not, where exactly do I lie, and will anyone come.

The theological one is this: is a grave in a country I arrived in at sixty-one still my grave.

I want to write about both, because almost nobody does, and because the practical ignorance around this causes a specific and avoidable suffering that I have now watched several families go through in the worst week of their lives.

The week itself

Here is what happens, and it happens fast. Someone dies, often in a hospital, often at an hour when the family is scattered. Within about six hours a decision is required that nobody has ever discussed: is the body going home, or staying.

Nobody has discussed it because to discuss it would have been to invite it. So the conversation happens in a hospital corridor, in two languages, among people who are in shock, with a funeral director waiting, and it goes badly. It goes badly in a predictable pattern: the eldest son assumes repatriation because that is what is done; the daughter who has looked at the numbers knows what it costs; the widow says almost nothing because she is being protected from the conversation; and the grandchildren, who grew up here, quietly do not understand why anyone would send a body across the world.

And whatever is decided in that corridor will be lived with for thirty years.

What repatriation actually involves

I am not a funeral director and I will not quote you prices, because they move and because every case differs. But nobody tells families the shape of it, and the shape is knowable in advance.

Sending a body to Ethiopia is an international shipment of human remains, and it requires, roughly: a funeral home here that has actually done it before (and many have not, and the ones that have not will learn on your mother); embalming and a sealed shipping container to airline specification; a certified death certificate, usually several originals; a burial-transit permit; consular documentation from the Ethiopian embassy, which takes days and does not care that you are grieving; an airline that accepts human remains on that route, which is a much shorter list than you think; and someone at the other end (a real person, named, with a phone that works) to receive the body at Bole, clear it, and carry it to the church.

Two weeks is fast. Three is normal. Longer is common. And the family here will spend those weeks in a state that is not quite mourning, because the mourning cannot begin until the body arrives, and so they sit in a house full of people, performing grief they have not yet been allowed to feel.

The money is raised the way it is always raised: the edir if there is one, the church, a hundred WhatsApp messages, cousins who send two hundred dollars they do not have. The community does this well. It has always done this well. But if there is no edir, or the family is not connected to one, or they are newer here, or they had a falling-out with the church four years ago, then a family who has just lost a father is fundraising by text message at two in the morning. I have sat in that room. It is a humiliation on top of a bereavement, and it is entirely preventable.

The argument nobody wants to have out loud

Underneath the money is the real argument, and it is about where the family actually lives now.

To send the body home is to say: we are from there, and in the end we return. It honors the dead in the specific way the dead expected to be honored, in the ground where their own mother is, in a churchyard where someone will say their name at the yearly remembrance for as long as anyone is alive to say it.

To bury here is to say: this is where we are now. It means the grandchildren can visit. It means the widow can go on a Saturday. It means that in forty years there is a stone in DeKalb County with an Amharic name on it, and that is not nothing. That is, in fact, how every diaspora on earth has eventually become a people somewhere new.

Both are right. That is what makes it unbearable. It is not a dispute between the faithful son and the assimilated one, though it will be framed that way by somebody in the corridor, and that framing will do damage that outlasts everyone in the room.

The question is not which choice honors the dead. Both do. The question is which one the living can carry, and only the living can answer that.

What I say to families, when I am called into that week, is this: the person who should decide is the one who has to live in the house afterward. Usually that is the widow, and usually she is the one person nobody has directly asked. So I ask her, alone, in Amharic, with the sons outside the room. Frequently it is the first time in three days anyone has asked her what she wants rather than told her what will be done.

The other line through the family

There is a second split I should name, because it runs through more houses than anyone admits and it surfaces in exactly this week. One part of the family is Orthodox and another part is Pente, and twenty years ago that was a wound, and everybody agreed to stop discussing it, and now there is a body and a decision and no shared vocabulary for making it.

What it sounds like in the room: the evangelical son who will not light a candle and cannot say why in a way his aunt can hear. The Orthodox mother who experiences her daughter's prayer, offered in love, as a second bereavement. Two people who are each grieving the same man and each privately certain the other is doing it wrong.

I am not neutral on questions of faith and I will not pretend to be. But I am not on either side of this one, and I have found that this is the whole reason a family will let me sit in the middle of it. What I say is: you are not going to settle in four days a disagreement you have had for twenty years, and nobody is asking you to. You are going to bury your father. There is a form of the service that lets each of you do the thing your conscience requires without requiring it of anyone else, and my job this week is to find it and to hold the room while you use it.

It works more often than it has any right to. Grief makes people briefly willing to be in a room with someone they have been avoiding, and that window closes fast.

The funeral your children cannot follow

Then there is the service. Three hours, in Ge'ez and Amharic, and the twenty-two year old grandson is standing at the back in a suit understanding perhaps one word in nine.

He loved his grandfather. He is not indifferent. He is locked out. And what he takes from the most important ceremony of his family's decade is that he is a guest in his own grief.

There is a fix for this and it is not complicated and hardly anyone does it. Ten minutes, in English, somewhere in the service or immediately after it. Not a translation of the liturgy; the liturgy is not a lecture and does not need subtitling. Ten minutes that says: here is who this man was, here is what is happening in this room and why, here is what your family believes about death, here is what will be asked of you in the next three days and what it means. And then one of the grandchildren speaks, in English, about him.

I have watched a family do that. The younger ones wept for the first time that week, and afterward they stayed in the hall instead of standing in the parking lot on their phones. If a chaplain does nothing else in a diaspora funeral, doing that ten minutes is worth the whole of what I know.

What I told the woman in Clarkston

I told her, first, that she should decide it herself, now, while she is entirely well and it is an abstraction, and write it down, and tell her sons in a moment when nobody is dying. Not because the paperwork matters, though it does. Because the decision is a gift. Made now, at her own table, it costs her an afternoon of discomfort. Made for her later, in a corridor, it costs her children an argument they will carry to their own graves.

Then I told her the theological part, which she had actually asked first and which I had been circling.

She wanted to know whether it counted, whether the God she has prayed to since she was a girl in a stone church in a highland town would know where to find her in a cemetery off Memorial Drive.

The whole of the faith says yes. Not as a consolation; as a claim. Abraham is buried in a field he had to buy from strangers in a country he was not from, and the entire story that follows is told from that foreign grave. The bones of Joseph were carried for four hundred years by people who were not going the way he had planned. Christ himself was buried in a tomb that belonged to another man. There is no soil in scripture that is more findable than any other soil. There is only the promise that the ground does not get the final word about where a person belongs.

She said: "So I can stay here."

I said: "You can stay here."

And she drank her tea, finally, and we talked about her grandson, who is at Georgia State and does not call enough.

←All letters

←All letters

A faintly burning wick

K. A. Emanuel · Seven minutes

You have stopped praying. Not dramatically; you did not renounce anything. You just noticed, some months ago, that it had been a while, and then noticing became its own small weekly shame, and now the shame is heavy enough that it keeps you from starting again, which is an efficient trap and you did not build it on purpose.

I want to tell you what the verse everyone quotes at you actually says, because it is not what it is usually used for.

A bruised reed he will not break, and a faintly burning wick he will not quench.
Isaiah 42:3

It is normally deployed as encouragement, in the sense of cheer up, God is patient with you. Fine as far as it goes. But look at what is actually being described, because the image is oddly specific and the specificity is the point.

A wick that is faintly burning is a wick that is failing at the one thing it exists to do. It is smoking. It is about to go out. In any practical household of the ancient world you would pinch it out and put in a new one, not from cruelty but from basic competence. A smoking wick is worse than no light: it fouls the air and announces its own inadequacy in the smell.

That is the thing the verse says God will not do.

Notice that it does not say the wick will be restored to a good strong flame. It does not say the reed will be straightened. It says only that the breaking will not happen and the quenching will not happen. What is promised is not improvement. What is promised is that your current inadequate state will not be used against you as grounds for disposal.

The tiredness is not the sin

Most people carry a private theory that their exhaustion is a moral failure: that a better person, a more faithful person, would not be this tired, and that the tiredness is evidence submitted against them.

I want to be plain. Fatigue is not a spiritual condition. Very often it is a circumstantial one, and the circumstances are: two jobs, a child who does not sleep, a parent five thousand miles away who calls at four, a body that is fifty-one and is being asked to perform as though it were thirty-one. Under those circumstances a person does not pray. Under those circumstances a person should probably not be driving.

The tradition knows this better than the tradition's spokesmen usually do. When Elijah, having just done the most spectacular thing in his career, lies down under a tree and asks to die, God's response is not a rebuke and not a sermon. He is allowed to sleep. Then he is fed. Then he is allowed to sleep again. Then he is fed again. And only after that, two meals and two long sleeps later, is there any conversation at all.

If your prayer life has collapsed and you are getting five hours a night, the theological problem in that sentence is the five hours.

What to do, if you want something to do

Not a discipline. You have tried disciplines; that is partly how you got here, because a discipline you break becomes a second failure stacked on the first.

Here is a smaller thing. Once a day, at a moment already fixed in your schedule so you do not have to remember it (in the car before you go into the house, at a red light, in the three minutes the water takes), say one sentence. Any sentence. It can be I have nothing today. It can be a name. It can be, and often is, the shortest honest sentence in the language: help.

That is not a lowered standard. It is the standard. The psalms are full of people producing exactly that much and it was recorded as scripture. Half the psalter is a man in a bad year saying one thing badly.

And if you cannot do that either (some weeks you cannot), then the position you are in is the one the verse was written for. You are the smoking wick. You are not being asked to produce light. You are being told, by someone who was looking directly at a wick like yours, that it will not be pinched out.

One more

There is an old and useful practice for exactly this, which is to let someone else pray it for you. Not with you; for you, in your absence, about things you have named. The reason it helps is not magic. It is that the shame of having stopped is enormously reduced by one other human being knowing about it and not reacting.

If you want that, you can write to night support tonight and choose the last option, which says: someone to pray, whether or not I can. You do not have to explain yourself. You do not have to come in. Nobody will follow up unless you ask.

The light does not need to be strong. It needs to not go out.

←All letters

←All letters

The two churches in one family

K. A. Emanuel · Seven minutes

Your mother is Orthodox. You go to a Pente church. Or your father is Pente and you have gone back to the Orthodox church, quietly, and have not mentioned it. Either way the arrangement in your family is that nobody raises it, and both of you think about it more than you let on.

I want to lay out what is actually at stake, because in most families the argument people are having is not the argument they think they are having.

What the difference actually is

There are six places where the two traditions genuinely part, and it is worth knowing which ones are real.

Fasting. The Orthodox fast is not a suggestion. A layperson observes something near a hundred and eighty fasting days a year: every Wednesday and every Friday outside of the fifty days after Fasika, plus Great Lent at fifty-five days, the Advent fast, the fast of the Apostles, the fifteen days before Filseta. On a fasting day you take no animal product at all, and traditionally nothing before three in the afternoon. Most evangelical churches keep no calendar of fasts and treat fasting as occasional and private.

Mary and the saints. The Orthodox ask them to pray. Evangelicals pray only to God. Each side tends to describe the other's practice in the worst terms available: the Orthodox hear "you do not honour the mother of our Lord," the evangelical hears "you worship a woman." Neither description is what the other side thinks it is doing.

Communion. In the Orthodox church it is guarded, and most adults receive rarely and after preparation. In most evangelical churches it is offered freely and often. So when an Orthodox relative declines your communion, that is not a snub, and when you take it lightly in front of them, they are not imagining the difference.

The priesthood. One tradition holds that certain acts require a priest in apostolic succession. The other holds that they do not. This is the disagreement underneath a great many others.

The calendar. Genna on the seventh, Timkat on the nineteenth, Fasika on its own reckoning. Living between two calendars is a practical problem more than a theological one, and it is the one most families feel weekly.

Icons. Prayed before, in one tradition. Absent, in the other.

And the thing under all of it

None of those is what keeps people awake. What keeps people awake is this: each side privately suspects that the other one is not saved.

That is the real weight in the room at Genna dinner. Your mother is not upset that you skipped the fast. Your mother is afraid that you have left the church and therefore left God, and that she will be in one place and you in another, and that this is permanent. And you, sitting across from her, may be carrying the mirror image of exactly that fear about her.

Nobody says it, because saying it would be unbearable, so instead you argue about whether the meat in the doro wat was necessary.

What I will and will not do with this

I am a non-denominational evangelical chaplain, and I am not neutral. I hold the evangelical side of several of the six differences above, and if you ask me which ones and why, I will tell you straight. Anyone who claims to have no view on this is either not paying attention or is managing you.

What I will not do is hand you a verdict to take home and use. I am not a priest, and nothing I say settles anything between two churches that have been working on this for far longer than I have been alive. A chaplain who allows himself to become the deciding vote in a family argument has stopped being useful to anybody in it, including the side he agrees with.

What I can do is sit with both of you, in Amharic, without either of you having to perform for the other.

Some practical things

At a funeral, go. Whatever the liturgy is, go, and stand, and do not make your theology the subject of the day. A funeral is not a debate. Your presence is read by your family as loyalty, and your absence is read as a verdict.

When you are offered communion you do not believe in, decline quietly and privately. Do not decline at the rail in front of everyone. Speak to the priest or the pastor beforehand. Almost every one of them has handled this before and will help you avoid a scene.

When your mother asks why you do not fast, the true answer is usually not "because the fast is wrong." It is usually "because I stopped and I did not notice when." That answer is harder to give and much more likely to end well than a theological one.

Do not recruit your children as evidence. When a grandchild is used to demonstrate which side won, the child learns that love in this family is conditional on the correct answer. Children draw that conclusion faster than adults expect and they keep it a long time.

The sentence worth saying

If you say nothing else, there is one sentence that changes the room, and it is not a concession on doctrine.

I know you are afraid for me. I am not lost.

That is it. It does not resolve the question of the saints. It answers the question she is actually asking, which she cannot ask directly, and which she has been asking in code for years by putting more food on your plate.

If you want to sit with someone while you work out how to say it, that is what the hour is for.

←All letters

←All letters

The fast you stopped keeping

K. A. Emanuel · Seven minutes

You did not decide to stop. There was no moment. There was a Wednesday with a sandwich in a break room because the shift ran long, and then a Friday you did not think about until evening, and then a Lent where you kept it for eleven days and let it go, and now it has been years, and the thing you feel about it is not conviction but a low, constant, background embarrassment.

Two things are worth separating here, and most people have them fused.

What the fast actually asks

It is worth being accurate, because a lot of people carry guilt about a rule they could not state precisely.

A layperson in the Ethiopian Orthodox church observes something on the order of a hundred and eighty fasting days a year. Clergy and the particularly devout keep more, up toward two hundred and fifty. Every Wednesday and every Friday, year round, except in the fifty days after Fasika. Great Lent runs fifty-five days. There is the Advent fast, the fast of the Apostles, the three days of Nineveh, and the fifteen days of Filseta. On a fasting day you take no meat, no dairy and no eggs, and traditionally you eat nothing at all until the ninth hour, which is three in the afternoon.

Read that again and notice something. That is not a devotional practice you fit into a week. It is a structure that a whole society is built around. It works because the shops sell fasting food, the canteen at work has a fasting line, your neighbours are doing it, and the rhythm of the day bends to accommodate it.

Why it fell away here, and what that means

Here, none of that is true. You are on a shift that does not care what day it is. The food available to you at two in the afternoon is whatever is in the machine. Nobody around you is fasting and nobody notices whether you are. The whole apparatus that carried the practice is gone, and what is left is you, alone, trying to hold up by willpower a thing that was never meant to be held up by one person's willpower.

That is a real explanation. It is not an excuse and I am not offering it as one. But it matters, because the story you have been telling yourself is that you stopped fasting because your faith weakened, and that is very probably not what happened. What happened is that you emigrated, and one of the things you left behind was the community that made the fast possible.

People do not usually mourn that. They convert it into guilt instead, because guilt is a more familiar feeling than grief and it does not require you to admit that something has been lost.

What fasting was for

The fast has never been about the food. Nobody in the tradition claims that God dislikes butter. The fast does three things.

It puts the body in the service of prayer, so that the whole person and not just the mind is involved. It creates hunger deliberately, so that you are reminded, in your own stomach, of people whose hunger is not deliberate. And it marks time, so that a year has a shape and the shape points at something.

Of those three, the third is the one the diaspora loses hardest. Here the year is shaped by the pay cycle and the school calendar and nothing else. There is no season that means anything. Time goes flat.

What to do about it, if you want to do anything

Two wrong moves are common, and they are opposites.

The first is to declare the whole thing legalism and be done with it. That is a tidy argument and it costs you something real without admitting that it cost you anything.

The second is to try to resume the whole calendar on your own, on a Monday, by force of will, and then fail in nine days and add that failure to the pile.

The thing that actually works is smaller and less impressive. Pick one day. Wednesday or Friday, the two that carry the most history. Keep it in whatever form your actual life allows, which may be no meat rather than no food until three, and may involve eating at noon because you are operating machinery. Keep that one day for a season. Do not announce it. Do not extend it. See what it does.

If somebody tells you that a modified fast is not a fast, you may take that seriously and still keep going, because a practice you can sustain is worth more than a practice you abandon annually.

And about the guilt

The tiredness is not the sin. The break room sandwich is not the sin. There is a version of religion that runs on making you ashamed of your own exhaustion, and it is extremely effective at producing attendance and very bad at producing faith.

If you have been carrying this for years and it has quietly become one of the reasons you do not pray, that is worth an hour with someone. Not to be absolved. Just to put it down on a table where you can both look at it.

←All letters

←All letters

Praying for your father

K. A. Emanuel · Seven minutes

Your father died. At the fortieth day your family held the tezkar, and a priest read, and people came, and somewhere in the middle of it you realised you did not know whether you believed any of it was doing anything.

Or the reverse. Your mother died and your family held nothing, because the church you go to now does not, and you have a feeling you cannot name about that, and the feeling has been there for two years.

This is the sharpest place the two traditions diverge, and it is the one where people most want a chaplain to tell them the answer. I am going to do something else. I am going to tell you what each side actually holds, and why, and then I am going to tell you plainly what I will not do.

What the Orthodox practice is

The Ethiopian Orthodox church prays for the departed. There is the funeral itself, the fitihat, the observances through the mourning period, and the tezkar at the fortieth day, which is not a small thing: a memorial service and then a feast that can run to hundreds of people, with the photograph and the candles, and the whole community coming through the house.

The reasoning underneath it is that the church is one body and death does not sever it, so the living and the dead can still hold each other up in prayer. To an Orthodox family, not praying for your own father is close to unthinkable. It reads as abandoning him.

What the evangelical position is

Most evangelical churches do not pray for the dead. The reasoning is that scripture gives no instruction to do it, that a person's standing is settled at death and not negotiable afterwards, and that prayers for the departed risk implying otherwise.

To an evangelical family, the tezkar can look like an attempt to change something that is not ours to change, and possibly like a comfort built on a false premise.

What each side hears, wrongly

The Orthodox side hears the evangelical position as: your father is beyond help and we will not even ask. That is not what is being said, but that is what arrives.

The evangelical side hears the Orthodox practice as: we are buying him out of something with food and money. That is not what is being done, but that is what arrives.

Almost every family fight on this subject is between those two misreadings rather than between the two actual positions, which are more careful and less cruel than either caricature.

Where I stand

You are entitled to know this before you sit down with me, so I will say it plainly rather than hide behind the map.

I am a non-denominational evangelical chaplain. We do not pray for the dead, and neither do I.

The reason is not coldness, and it is not contempt for the tezkar. It is that scripture gives no command to do it, and that a person’s standing before God is settled in their lifetime and is not something the living can renegotiate afterwards. If that is true, then prayer for the departed, however lovingly it is meant, is asking for something that was never on offer. I hold that, and I am not going to soften it into a shrug in order to be easier to sit with.

Now here is what I will not do with it.

I will not walk into your mother’s house in the worst week of her life and tell her that what she did for your father was superstition. That question is between her and her church, which has been working on it for longer than either of us has been alive. A chaplain who arrives at a grieving family and hands down a verdict on their own dead has mistaken himself for something he is not, and has also, incidentally, ended the conversation in which he might have been useful.

So: ask me what I believe and I will tell you. Ask me to say it to your family as a ruling, and I will not. Those are two different requests and people are often surprised that the second one is refused.

What I can say to both of you

Three things, and they hold whichever side of this you are standing on.

Grief will find a shape whether you give it one or not. The tezkar, whatever else it is, is a container. It says: on this day, we gather, we eat, we say his name out loud in front of people who knew him. Families who hold nothing at all very often find that the grief does not therefore stop; it simply arrives without a date, usually alone, usually at three in the morning. If your theology rules out the tezkar, you still need something on the fortieth day. A meal. A gathering where his name is said. It does not have to be liturgy to be a container.

Attending is not agreeing. You can stand in a church whose theology you do not hold, at the funeral of a man you loved, and be entirely honest. You are not voting. You are burying your father. Most families that split over a funeral did not split over doctrine; they split because somebody's absence was read as a verdict on the dead man.

What you actually want to know is usually not the doctrinal question. When people bring this to me, the question underneath is almost never "is intercession for the departed legitimate." It is "did he die at peace," or "he and I had not spoken in four years," or "I was not there." Those are the real ones, and they are answerable, and no church council has to convene first.

If it is the last one

A great many people in this community were not there. The call came at an hour when nothing could be booked, or the visa would not come, or the money for the ticket was the money for the rent. You have been carrying it since, and you have not told anyone, because the person you would ordinarily tell is the person who died.

That is not a theological problem. It is the one I would rather spend the hour on.

←All letters

←All letters

Honour your father, from eight thousand miles

K. A. Emanuel · Six minutes

You send money every month. You call on Sunday, or you mean to, and some Sundays go by. Your mother says she is fine and you cannot tell whether she is fine. Your father's knee has been bad since March and you found out in June. Somebody in the family has started ending calls with a particular kind of sigh.

And underneath it, the commandment, which you learned as a child and which did not anticipate a nine hour time difference.

The substitution

The most common thing that happens to this commandment in the diaspora is that it gets quietly converted into a payment.

It is an understandable conversion. Money is the thing you have that they do not, it is measurable, it arrives reliably, and it produces visible good: a roof repaired, school fees, a procedure. And it is real honour. I am not going to stand here and call remittance a substitute for love when for a great many families it is the difference between dignity and its opposite.

But watch what it does over time. The transfer becomes the relationship. You send, they receive, you both acknowledge that the sending happened, and the call is eleven minutes long and consists largely of confirming logistics. Nobody has asked anybody a question in two years.

And then the parent gets old, and what they need is not two hundred dollars.

What they actually want, which they will not say

Parents in this position almost never ask for what they want, for two reasons. They know what you gave up to be there and they will not add to the bill. And in a culture where the parent is the one who provides, asking a child for attention is a reversal that is genuinely hard to perform.

So they ask about the weather in Atlanta. They ask whether you have eaten. They tell you a long story about a neighbour you do not remember.

The long story about the neighbour is the ask. That is what it looks like.

Four things that are worth more than they cost

Call when nothing is wrong. If every call is prompted by a crisis or a transfer, the phone ringing becomes a small dread. A call with no agenda is worth more than the same minutes attached to business.

Ask one question you do not know the answer to. Not "how are you." Something specific, about their life before you existed. What the house they grew up in looked like. How they met. What they wanted to be. You will get a version you have never heard, and you will find that they have been waiting to be asked.

Put the grandchildren on, even badly. Yes, the child's Amharic is four words and they are shy and it is awkward for ninety seconds. Do it anyway. A grandparent does not need a conversation. They need to see the face.

Find out who is actually nearby. Somebody is doing the physical care: a sibling, a cousin, a neighbour. That person is carrying what you cannot carry, often without acknowledgement, and often with quiet resentment that will surface at the worst possible moment, usually at the funeral. Name it now. Thank that person directly, in words, and if you can, send some of the money to them rather than through them.

The thing nobody warns you about

The hardest part is not the sending. It is the moment you realise that you are going to miss the end.

Not necessarily the death. The years before it. The slow part, where they become someone who needs helping to a chair, and you are getting that in summary form, once a week, in eleven minutes, filtered through their determination not to worry you.

People in this community carry an enormous amount of anticipatory grief about this and have nowhere to put it, because to say it out loud sounds like you are wishing the thing would happen, which is not what it is at all.

What honour can mean at this distance

The commandment does not say be present. It says honour. Honour is something you can do from here, and it looks like this: you tell the truth to them, you do not let the relationship become a wire transfer, you take their opinion seriously even when you are not going to follow it, you make sure they are not being managed by a committee of their own children, and you make it possible for them to say a hard thing to you without being handled.

And when they do say the hard thing, which they will, at the worst moment, in a sentence that lands like an accusation, you understand that you are being paid a compliment. They said it because they are not afraid of losing you.

←All letters

←All letters

The children who do not speak Amharic

K. A. Emanuel · Seven minutes

You speak to them in Amharic. They answer in English. You have both been doing this for so long that neither of you notices any more, and it works, in the sense that information gets across.

Then one day your mother calls, and you hand the phone to your nine year old, and there is a silence with a shape to it, and your mother says something bright and lets them go, and you take the phone back and neither of you mentions it.

That silence is what this letter is about.

First, the guilt, because it is in the way

Most parents carrying this believe they did something wrong. They believe there was a moment where they should have been stricter, an Amharic school they should have found, a rule they should have enforced.

The honest picture is less flattering to the idea that you had that much control. Children are ruthless economists of effort. A child who is surrounded by English for seven hours a day at school, whose friends are English, whose television is English, and who can be perfectly understood at home in English, will not spend the additional metabolic cost of a second language for no return. That is not defiance. That is a nine year old doing arithmetic.

You were working two jobs. There was no Amharic-speaking cohort of children within twenty minutes. The one Saturday school met at the hour you worked. These are not excuses, they are the actual conditions, and pretending you could have overridden them by being a better parent is a story that makes you feel worse without making anything truer.

What is actually lost

Be precise about this, because vagueness lets it grow.

What is lost is not intelligence, not identity, not love, and not the relationship with you. You speak English. You and your child are fine.

What is lost is specific and it is worth naming. Your child cannot have an unmediated conversation with their grandparents. They cannot follow a funeral. They cannot follow a wedding. At a family gathering, when the room switches, they go quiet and start looking at their phone, and the adults read that as rudeness and it is not rudeness, it is exclusion, and it is happening to a child in a room full of their own relatives.

And one more, which parents feel and rarely say: the child cannot access the version of you that exists in Amharic. You are funnier in Amharic. You are more yourself. Your child has only ever met the careful English translation of their own parent.

That last one is a real loss and you are allowed to grieve it without anybody telling you to look on the bright side.

What is not lost

The food transfers. The hospitality transfers, and it transfers strongly; your children will pour coffee for guests in twenty years without being able to explain why. The music transfers. The faith transfers, if you transfer it. The sense of obligation to family transfers, sometimes more heavily than you would wish.

Culture is not stored in vocabulary. A great deal of it survives the language.

What still works, at eight, at eleven, at fifteen

Stop making it a subject. The moment Amharic becomes a thing the child is being tested on, it joins homework in their mind, and nobody has ever loved a language that was graded.

Attach it to something they want. Music, food, a grandparent they like, a show. The child who learns twenty words in order to understand the joke will outrun the child made to learn two hundred from a list.

Keep speaking it even when they answer in English. This feels futile and it is not. Passive comprehension is real and it is the seed. Plenty of adults in this community understood everything and spoke nothing at fifteen, then became functional at twenty-six because the understanding was already in there.

Send them, if you can ever afford it. Six weeks with cousins who do not speak English will do more than six years of Saturdays. This is expensive and for many families impossible, and I am not going to pretend otherwise, but if there is ever a year when it is possible, it is the highest-return thing on this list.

Give the grandparents a script. Three questions the child can answer, and three the child can ask. Send it to both ends. What kills those phone calls is not the absence of language, it is the absence of anything to do with the language they have. A nine year old who knows how to ask "what did you eat today" has a working conversation.

And when they are twenty

A great many of them come back to it. Not all. But it happens often enough in this community that it is worth knowing: somewhere in their twenties, usually attached to a death or a first child or a trip, they start asking. They buy the book. They ask you to speak slower rather than switching.

Your job between now and then is not to have taught them the language. It is to have left the door open, and unashamed, so that when they come looking there is something there and no one has been made to feel stupid.

←All letters

←All letters

When everyone knows everyone

K. A. Emanuel · Six minutes

Something is wrong and you have not told anyone.

Maybe the marriage. Maybe you lost the job in February and you have been leaving the house at the usual time. Maybe a child is in trouble, the real kind. Maybe you have been drinking in a way you would not describe out loud. Maybe you have not felt anything in months and you have started to find that interesting rather than alarming.

And the reason you have not told anyone is not that there is no one. It is that there are too many, and they all know each other.

The double bind

This community's greatest asset and its sharpest cost are the same fact.

When you arrived, somebody's cousin found you a room. Somebody put you on a shift. When there was a death, forty people came without being asked and there were chairs and there was food and nobody had to organise it. That is not a small thing. Most people in this country have nothing like it, and they are poorer for it in ways they cannot see.

The same density means that a thing told to one person is known to forty by Sunday. Not through malice. Through love, mostly, and concern, and the ordinary human pleasure of having news. But the effect is the same: there is no confidential space inside your own community, and the church, which is where you would go, is the single densest node in the whole network.

So the place where help is available is the same place where being known is total. And so people who are drowning keep showing up on Sunday, well dressed, and say fine.

What this costs, measurably

Marriages here end later and worse than they need to, because by the time anyone outside knows, it is past the point where anything could have been done.

Depression goes untreated for years, because the word for it in the community is often a word that means weak, or ungrateful, or lacking faith.

Men in particular arrive at the worst version of a problem, having handled it alone, having decided that handling it alone was the responsible thing. Often the first person they tell is a stranger, at a point where the options have narrowed to two bad ones.

And people leave the church. Not over theology. They leave because the cost of being present while something is wrong is higher than the cost of being absent, so they go quiet, and then they are gone, and everyone assumes they lost their faith. Usually they lost their privacy.

Why a chaplain, specifically

This is the gap Phanos Chapel exists in, and it is worth being blunt about the mechanics.

I am not on your church board. I do not know your mother. I am not at the wedding on Saturday. There is no path from my ear to your cousin's ear, because the network that would carry it does not include me.

That is not a small feature. For a lot of people in this community it is the entire thing that makes speaking possible.

And the confidentiality is not a pleasantry. What you say stays with the chaplain, with three exceptions and only three: if you are about to take your own life, if someone else is in danger from you, or if a child or a vulnerable adult is being harmed. Outside those three, it does not leave the room. Not to your pastor, not to your family, not in a prayer request, not in general terms.

What I would say to the community, if it were listening

The instinct to gather is right. When someone dies, you already do this perfectly.

The failure is that the same machinery does not engage for the slower emergencies. A marriage in trouble, a job lost, a son arrested, a mind coming apart. These get silence, or worse, they get advice delivered in public.

If you are the one who is well right now, there is one thing you can do that costs nothing. When someone tells you something hard, do not repeat it. Not to your wife. Not as a prayer request with the name removed, which fools nobody. If you can hold one thing for one person for one year, you become, in a community this dense, an extremely rare and valuable object.

And if it is you

You do not have to be in crisis to be worth an hour. Free, in Amharic or English, no report to anybody, no follow-up unless you ask for it. You can say the thing out loud once and see what it sounds like outside your own head.

That is often the entire intervention. It is not nothing.

←All letters

←All letters

Was it worth coming

K. A. Emanuel · Seven minutes

You were somebody there.

Perhaps not important. But known. You had a profession, or you were on your way to one. People in the street knew your father's name and therefore knew yours. You spoke your own language all day and you were quick in it, and funny, and people listened when you talked.

Here you are a name that is mispronounced at every appointment. Your qualification does not count. You are doing work you would not have done there, among people who are polite and who do not know that you are educated. You have been explaining yourself in your second language for so long that you have stopped noticing how much slower you are in it.

And the question arrives, usually late, usually alone: was this worth it.

Why it is so hard to say out loud

Three walls stand around this question.

The first is that people at home gave things up so you could go. There was money, or a sacrifice, or a family decision. To say you are not sure is to insult that.

The second is that people here are supposed to be grateful. Gratitude is the required posture of the immigrant, and it is expected by everyone including other immigrants. Doubt reads as ingratitude, and ingratitude reads as a kind of betrayal.

The third is your own children. They are here. They are fine, or mostly fine. To question the move is to question the ground they stand on, and so you do not do it in front of them, ever.

So the question sits in you with nowhere to be said, which is exactly the condition under which a question turns into something heavier.

Taking it seriously instead of arguing with it

I am not going to talk you out of it. People try to, with statistics about opportunity and the schools and the hospitals, and none of it touches the thing, because the thing is not an economic proposition.

What you actually lost is worth naming in full, because half the weight of this comes from never having been allowed to list it.

You lost status. A real thing, not vanity: the daily experience of being read correctly by the people around you.

You lost fluency, which means you lost a portion of your own personality in every room.

You lost the assumption of help. There, if something happened, thirty people came. Here, if something happens at two in the morning, you work out who you could reasonably call and the list is short.

You lost the ordinary background of your own life. The particular light. The smell of the street at a certain hour. Nobody counts this and everybody feels it.

And you lost the version of your life that would have happened. That person is still running, somewhere behind your eyes, in a career you can picture exactly.

That is a genuine list of genuine losses and you are permitted to mourn it without being ungrateful. Grief and gratitude are not opposites and a person can hold both at full strength.

What is also true

Having said that honestly, the other side is also real and does not cancel it.

Your children's options are wider, and not slightly. The medical care that was available when somebody got sick was available. The money you have sent has changed a number of lives that you do not get to see the full accounting of. And you have become someone who can do hard things alone, which you did not know about yourself, and which is not nothing even though it cost more than it should have.

The question underneath the question

When people bring this to me, "was it worth it" is almost never the real one. Three other questions hide inside it, and they are more answerable.

Did I waste it. The years, the credential you never converted, the plan that was going to take two years and took eleven. This one is about the future, not the past, and futures can be changed.

Does anybody here know who I actually am. The loneliness of being read wrong every day by kind people. This one is about finding two or three rooms where you are known at full size.

Am I allowed to be sad about this. Yes. That is the whole answer to the third one, and for a surprising number of people it is the one that was actually blocking the pipe.

One caution

There is a version of this that stops being a question and becomes a residence. When every conversation routes back to what was lost, when the comparison is running constantly, when the present has become merely the place where you wait, that is not homesickness any more and it does not resolve on its own.

If you recognise that, and especially if you have stopped sleeping, or stopped wanting things, or found that you no longer look forward to anything at all, that is worth speaking to someone about, and worth speaking to a doctor about, not only a chaplain. There is no weakness in that sentence and I am not going to dress it up.

But if it is the ordinary version, the one that arrives at midnight and goes away by Tuesday, then what you need is not an argument. You need to say the list out loud once, to somebody who will not flinch and will not immediately tell you about the schools.

That is an hour. It is free. Nobody is counted or converted here.

←All letters

←All letters

A funeral you attend by telephone

K. A. Emanuel · Seven minutes

The call comes at an hour when nothing can be done. It is the middle of the night here and the middle of the day there, and by the time you understand what you have been told, people are already arriving at the house.

And then the second thing lands, which is that you are not going to be there.

Maybe the ticket is four figures you do not have this month. Maybe your papers do not permit the trip, or permit it but not the return. Maybe the burial is tomorrow, because it is always tomorrow, and no flight in the world gets you there in time.

So you will attend your father's funeral on a video call, held up by a cousin, with the audio cutting out.

The first seventy-two hours, practically

You will be asked for money quickly, and the amounts will be larger than you expect, and you will be making decisions at four in the morning in a language of logistics while in shock. A few things are worth knowing before you are in it.

Find out whether there is an edir. If the deceased or the family was a member of a burial society, a great deal is already handled and already paid for, and the family may not think to tell you because to them it is simply how death works. Ask directly and early. It changes the numbers substantially.

Name one person as the point. Not a committee. In the absence of one named relative who receives and disburses, money arrives from six countries into four accounts and reconciliation becomes a second grief that surfaces at the tezkar.

Send to the person doing the work, not through them. Someone is sitting with the body, feeding the house, arranging the chairs. That person is spending their own money and will never mention it.

If the death was here and the burial is there

This is its own ordeal and people go into it blind, so here is the shape of it.

Repatriation of remains to Ethiopia runs through the funeral home and the airline, and the Ethiopian Embassy issues the permit. What the embassy requires is a death certificate, a letter from the funeral home confirming embalming by standard methods and a hermetically sealed casket, a letter from the local health authority stating there was no contagious disease, the burial permit, and a copy of the passport, originals and copies of each. The embassy charges nothing for the permit and states it can issue within thirty minutes when the file is complete.

The cost is not the permit. The cost is the funeral home, the preparation, the casket and the freight, and it is measured in thousands. Families are routinely blindsided by this at the worst possible moment.

Two things are worth saying plainly. First: if the money is not there, burial here is not a failure of love, whatever anyone implies. Second: if there is a conversation to be had with the elders about where a person should lie, have it while everyone is alive. That conversation is difficult and it is far less difficult than having it in the seventy-two hours after a death.

The fortieth day

The tezkar at the fortieth day matters more than outsiders understand. There is a memorial service and then a feast that can run to hundreds of people, the photograph, the candles, the whole community coming through the house, and the stories told out loud.

If you missed the burial, you may be able to make the fortieth day, and if a choice has to be made between them, consider seriously that the fortieth day is the one where you can actually be present to your family rather than in shock among strangers.

If you cannot make either, hold something here on that day. Not a performance. Ten people, food, and his name said out loud in a room. Grief that is given no date does not therefore go away; it simply arrives without warning, usually alone, usually at three in the morning.

The particular grief of not being there

People who attend a death by telephone grieve differently, and it is worth knowing why so that you do not think something is wrong with you.

You did not see the body. A significant part of how human beings accept a death is physical, and you were denied it. For months you may find that some part of you has not registered it at all, and then you will see a photograph and it will land like news.

You were not held. Everyone else was in a room being fed and wept with for three days. You went to work on Tuesday.

And you are carrying a specific arithmetic that you have run many times: the visit you did not make in 2019, the call you cut short, the year you meant to bring them over. That arithmetic is not evidence. It is what grief does with a mind that has time and distance and nothing to hold.

What actually helps

Say the name out loud to someone who will not change the subject. Ask the relatives who were there to tell you what the room was like, in detail, even though it hurts, because the detail is what your mind needs in order to believe it. Write the letter you would have said at the graveside and send it to nobody. And do the fortieth day, in some form, with people, on the actual day.

If your family is inside this now, the chaplain will come to the house, in Amharic, at no cost. Not to conduct anything. Just to be in the room, so that the person holding everyone else up has somewhere to put it down.

←All letters

←All letters

The marriage that worked there

K. A. Emanuel · Seven minutes

Nothing happened. That is what makes it hard to explain to anyone.

There was no betrayal, no catastrophe, no single fight that broke it. You are both working. The children are fed. And somewhere in the last four years the two of you became two people who manage a household together and do not talk, and you are not sure which year it happened in.

This is one of the most common things in this community and one of the least discussed, so it is worth explaining the mechanics, because the usual explanation people reach for is that one of them changed, and that is almost never what happened.

What the marriage was standing on, that is gone

A marriage at home was held up by a structure that nobody noticed because it was everywhere.

There were other adults in the house or on the street. Childcare was ambient. When the two of you were unbearable to each other, there were rooms to go to and people to sit with, and the pressure came off without anyone making a decision.

There were elders. When something went wrong there was a recognised process: people who had standing with both families sat down and worked it, and the shimgilina was a real mechanism, not a sentiment. You could lose an argument to an uncle and both keep your dignity.

And the roles were legible. Each of you knew what you were supposed to be doing and so did everyone watching, and the agreement did not have to be negotiated because it was inherited.

Here: a two bedroom apartment, no other adults, no elders with standing, opposite shifts, and an entire division of labour that has to be invented from scratch by two exhausted people who have never had to invent one before.

You did not stop loving each other. The scaffolding came down.

The four specific pressures

Opposite shifts. An enormous number of couples here are running a system where one comes in as the other goes out, because that is how childcare is covered without paying for it. It works financially and it is corrosive, and the corrosion is invisible for years. You are not fighting. You are simply never in the same room awake.

The money that leaves. Both of you send home. You may not know exactly what the other sends, and each of you may privately believe the other's family receives more. This is one of the most reliable fault lines in diaspora marriages and it is very rarely discussed directly, because to raise it is to seem to attack the other person's mother.

The reversal. Frequently the wife's earnings or English or credential outpace the husband's, because the labour market here values different things than the one you left. Neither of you expected this and neither of you has a script for it. A man who cannot say out loud that this has hurt him will express it some other way, and the other way is always worse.

No exit valve. With no third adult and no elders, every disagreement is between exactly two people with nowhere to go, and it either gets resolved or it gets stored. Most of it gets stored.

What to do about it

Get into the same room awake, on purpose. Not a date night, which is a suggestion from a culture with babysitters and disposable income. Ninety minutes a week, with the phones in the other room, talking about something other than logistics. If you cannot find ninety minutes, that finding is itself the diagnosis.

Put the remittances on the table. Both numbers, written down, once a year. Not to reduce them. To stop each of you privately estimating the other's. The estimate is always worse than the truth.

Name the reversal out loud, once. One sentence from him is usually enough: this is not how I pictured it and I am still working out how to carry it. Said once, it stops leaking into everything else.

Be careful who you use as your elder. Many couples here import the shimgilina by phone, which means the arbitration is being conducted by people eight thousand miles away who cannot see the conditions and who have an interest in one side. That is worse than no process. If you want mediation, use someone who can see your actual life.

Why so few couples here get help

Because the only place that offers it is the church, and the church is where everyone you know is. Going to your pastor about your marriage means it is known, and once it is known it cannot be unknown, and so people wait until it is past saving and then present it as a decision rather than a problem.

That is the specific thing a chaplain outside your congregation is for. I am not on your board, I do not know your mother, and I am not at the wedding on Saturday. You can both sit in a room in Amharic and say the true thing without it costing you your standing.

Both of you, or one of you. One is allowed. A surprising amount can be done with one person in the room.

And one hard thing

Not every marriage should continue, and there are situations where staying is the dangerous choice rather than the faithful one. If you are frightened of the person you live with, that is not a marriage problem, that is a safety problem, and the number for it is 1-800-799-7233, which is free and answers at any hour.

For everything short of that: most of these marriages are not broken. They are under-supported, by an amount that nobody warned either of you about.

←All letters

←All letters

Marrying outside

K. A. Emanuel · Seven minutes

You have met someone, and you already know how the conversation at home is going to go, which is why you have not had it yet.

Outside the church. Or outside the ethnicity. Or not Habesha at all. Or Habesha but the wrong region, which people will insist is not a thing while behaving as though it is the only thing.

Two audiences read this letter and I will speak to both.

To the one who wants to marry

The first thing to get clear is what the resistance is actually about, because it is almost never what it is stated as.

It is stated as doctrine, or as culture, or as "you will not be happy." Underneath it is usually one of three fears, and they are all fears about loss.

The first is that your parents will lose access to you. Not metaphorically. They believe the language will go, the food will go, the church will go, and that within ten years you will be a person they visit rather than a person they have.

The second is grandchildren. Specifically, grandchildren who cannot speak to them. For a grandparent that is a concrete and terrifying picture, and they are not wrong that it is a real risk.

The third, in families where the split is Orthodox and Pente, is salvation. If your parents believe the church is where God is, then your marrying out of it is not a lifestyle disagreement to them, it is you walking away from the thing that saves you.

Notice that none of those three is about the person you have chosen. Your family has not met them. The objection was fully formed before the person existed.

Which means the useful move is counterintuitive

The instinct is to argue the merits: they are kind, they have a good job, they respect me. That argument answers a question nobody is asking.

What actually moves this is addressing the three fears directly and early.

Tell them what will not be lost, and be specific and honest rather than expansive. Say which language your children will hear in your house. Say whether you will be at Genna. Say whether the person will learn to greet them properly, and then make sure the person does, because that first greeting is worth more than a year of reassurance.

And be honest about what will change, because if you promise everything stays the same and then it does not, you will have spent your credibility on the one occasion you most needed it.

Practical order of operations

Tell one person first. An aunt, a cousin, the sibling who is closest to your mother. Someone who will be on your side and who has standing. Being told first converts them into an ally, and you need an ally inside the family before the main conversation happens.

Do not spring the person on the family. A stranger at Genna, presented as a fact, guarantees the worst version of everybody.

Get the person prepared. Not a performance. How to greet an elder. Why they will be fed relentlessly and must not say no. That silence is not hostility, and that being talked about in Amharic in front of them is not rudeness. Ten minutes of briefing prevents most of the disasters.

Expect two ceremonies and budget for it. This is nearly universal and people are still surprised by it every time.

Decide the religious question between the two of you before the families arrive. Which church, if either. What happens with children. If you two have not settled it, the families will settle it for you, badly, in public.

To the parents, if you are the one reading this

I want to say one thing carefully, and it is not that your concerns are foolish. They are not. The risks you are naming are real and you have watched them happen to other families.

But here is what I see, over and over, in the room. The families that hold out longest do not usually prevent the marriage. They are almost never able to. What they achieve instead is to be absent from the beginning of it, and that absence becomes the permanent shape of the relationship. Ten years later there is a grandchild who was not held as a baby by their grandmother, and the reason is a position taken in a single hard year that nobody can now remember the exact terms of.

You may keep every one of your convictions and still go to the wedding. Those are not the same decision, and a great many parents discover that too late.

What I can and cannot do

I am a licensed chaplain and I can solemnise a marriage so that it is legally valid in Georgia, in Amharic and English, for couples the church cannot or will not marry. I cannot perform the siraate teklil, the crowning, or a marriage with qurban. Those belong to a priest and to nobody else, and I will not imitate them.

What I will do, more often than the wedding itself, is sit with the elders. That conversation is where these are actually won or lost, and it is a lot easier with someone in the room who speaks both languages and is not a party to either side.

←All letters

←All letters

Why did God let this happen

K. A. Emanuel · Seven minutes

Somebody told you it was a test.

Or that God has a plan. Or that everything happens for a reason. Or, in the worst version, that if your faith had been stronger the thing would not have happened, which is a sentence that has done more damage in this community than most people who say it will ever know.

You nodded. You said amen. And you went home and something in you had closed.

The four answers, and what is wrong with three of them

It was a test. This appears in scripture and it is not nothing. But it is applied far too widely. If every illness, accident and death is a test, then the sick are being examined and the healthy have passed, which is exactly what the book of Job spends forty chapters demolishing. Job's friends give this answer at length and elegantly, and at the end of the book they are the ones told they spoke wrongly.

Everything happens for a reason. Usually offered as comfort, it functions as an accusation. If there is a reason, the reason is either not good enough, in which case God is on trial, or it is good enough, in which case your grief is a failure to see clearly. Both outcomes leave the grieving person worse off than before they were comforted.

Your faith was insufficient. This one I will call by its name. It is cruel, it is not taught by any serious reading of the text, and it is devastating in communities where people already believe that suffering is a verdict. When a family loses a child and is then told the child could have been saved by more faith, that family is being asked to carry two unbearable things instead of one. If someone said this to you, you do not have to keep it.

I do not know. This is the one that is almost never offered, and it is the one the text itself is most comfortable with.

What the book actually does with this

It is worth noticing how much of scripture is complaint.

A very large share of the Psalms are people arguing with God, sometimes rudely. "How long, O Lord." "Why do you hide your face." These are not edited out. They were kept, and sung, and are still sung, which means the tradition decided that the argument belongs inside the worship rather than outside it.

Job asks the question for forty chapters. When God finally answers, the striking thing is that he does not give a reason. He does not explain. He asks Job a long series of questions about the world instead, and Job stops, not because he was convinced but because he was met.

And at the centre of the Christian account is a man on a cross saying "my God, my God, why have you forsaken me." That is the question in this letter, asked by the person Christians say is God, out loud, in public, unanswered in the moment.

Whatever else that means, it means the question is not blasphemy. It has never been blasphemy. Somebody along the way taught you that it was, and they were wrong.

What you are usually actually asking

When people bring this to me, "why did God allow it" is rarely the question underneath. Three others hide in it.

Am I being punished. This one is very common and almost never said out loud, and it is usually attached to a specific thing from years ago that you have never told anyone. It is worth telling someone, once, out loud. Not because a chaplain can absolve you but because saying it breaks the private logic that has been running unopposed in your head since it happened.

Is anyone there at all. This is the frightening one, and it usually arrives not as an argument but as a silence. You pray and there is nothing, and the nothing goes on long enough that you begin to suspect it is the answer. That experience is old and it is documented and it has a literature, and the people who wrote that literature are not considered failures of faith. They are considered the serious ones.

Can I say this out loud without losing my people. Usually you cannot, in your own congregation, which is why the doubt goes underground and becomes something worse. That is the specific thing this page exists for.

What I am not going to do

I am not going to solve it. Nobody has, in several thousand years of extremely serious people trying, and any chaplain who resolves theodicy for you in forty minutes has sold you something.

What I will do is sit in it with you without rushing you out of it, and without requiring you to arrive anywhere by the end of the hour. Nothing here is a test you can fail. You may say the angry version. You may say the version where you do not believe any of it any more. It does not shock me and it does not get reported to anyone.

One thing worth holding

People who ask this question honestly, and stay in it, and refuse the cheap answers, tend to end up with something more durable than the people who took the first comfort offered. Not happier, necessarily. More durable.

The faith that survives this question is the only kind that is worth anything when the next hard thing comes, and there will be a next hard thing, and you will want something that does not shatter.

←All letters

←All letters

Going back, or not going back

K. A. Emanuel · Seven minutes

You are going back next year. You have been going back next year for some time.

Or you went, recently, and something about it was wrong in a way you have not managed to describe to anybody, and you have been a little quiet since.

Or you are not going, and have decided not to, and would rather not discuss it.

Why the visit keeps not happening

The stated reason is money and time off, and those are real. But there are usually two other reasons operating, and neither is usually said.

The first is the cost of arriving. You do not go back as a visitor. You go back as the one who went, which means you arrive carrying expectations you did not agree to. There will be a list. There will be people who need things and who have been waiting for you to be in the country in order to ask. The trip you imagine is a quiet fortnight with your mother; the trip that happens is a three week administrative session in which you are the budget.

The second is that you are afraid of what you will find. That the house is smaller. That your friends have arranged their lives without you in them. That your parents have aged more than the phone conveyed. That you have become a guest in the place you are homesick for.

Most people who delay the trip for years are not delaying because of money. They are delaying because some part of them knows that going will settle a question they would rather keep open.

What the trip is actually like

Almost everyone reports some version of the same three days.

The first days are euphoric. The light, the language, the smell of the street. You are fluent again. You are funny again. You are read correctly by everyone, instantly, for the first time in years.

Then, somewhere in the second week, a quieter thing happens. Someone refers to you as the one from America. A conversation moves on without you because you do not know the reference. You notice that you are being hosted rather than being home. And you realise, with a specific and lonely clarity, that the place you have been homesick for is not a place, it is a time, and it is not there any more, and it would not be there even if you moved back tomorrow.

That is the thing nobody prepares people for, and it is the reason so many people come back from the trip subdued and cannot explain why to their spouse.

The plan to return

A great many people in this community carry a plan to go back permanently. In five years. When the children finish school. When the money is right.

I am not going to tell you that plan is a fantasy. Some people do it, and do it well, and are right to.

But it is worth being honest about what the plan is doing for you while it is not being executed. A permanent plan to leave is very effective at keeping you from arriving where you are. It licenses you not to make friends here, not to learn the city, not to put anything down, not to grieve what you lost, because none of it is permanent and therefore none of it has to be reckoned with.

Ten years of that is a decade spent in a waiting room.

The question worth asking is not whether you will go. It is whether you would do anything differently today if you knew for certain you were staying. If the answer is a long list, the plan is costing you more than it is holding for you.

If you are not going back, and know it

Some of you cannot go. The reasons vary and some of them are not ones you can discuss freely, and I am not going to make you explain.

What I will say is that people in this position often carry an unmarked grief that has never been acknowledged by anyone, because it has no funeral and no date. You did not lose a person. You lost a country, or you lost the option of it, which is a loss with no ritual attached and therefore no permission to mourn.

You are allowed to mourn it. It is a real loss. It does not require anyone's approval and it does not mean you are ungrateful for where you are.

Something to do with it

Two things help more than they sound like they would.

Tell someone the specific thing. Not "I miss home." The particular corner. The particular hour of the afternoon. The person you would go and see first. Specificity is what turns a fog into a grief, and a grief can be carried, whereas a fog just sits on everything.

And put something down here, on purpose, even if you are leaving in five years. Plant the thing that takes four years to fruit. It is a small act and it is oddly load bearing.

If you want an hour to say the list out loud, in Amharic, to somebody who will not tell you about the schools, that is what this is for.

←All letters