An Atlas of Love

on Mary Oliver, the loss of a child, and faith reimagined.

Jul 21, 2024

Sara Riaño

It didn’t take long for me to realize that Mary Oliver knew God, and God knew her.
I remember being timid about reading her poetry when I first came back to the Christian faith at seventeen because I thought I wasn’t supposed to read secular work. The first poem I read was Wild Geese. With the opening line, “You do not have to be good,” I thought I was committing heresy just by reading it.

I resolved that her work was off limits, as much as it allured me. You see, before I came back to the faith, I was a bleeding heart pansy, as a conservative family member once put it. My heart broke for the world. I’m still a bleeding heart pansy, truthfully. But when I returned to the religion of my childhood, I believed that to be Christian meant that God needed to cauterize that trait. I closed myself off. Cloaked myself in pretty, evangelical-approved packaging, believing that to know Christ, I had to eradicate who I once was.

This is a story many throughout history have known.

Despite this, Mary Oliver’s wild and precious gospel found me again during a time of profound, cataclysmic loss.

We found out I was pregnant on Father’s Day 2021. I didn’t know what to think. I remember shaking and holding the pregnancy test, hardly able to believe my eyes.

We weren’t trying for a baby. Early on in our marriage, we decided we wanted to wait at least three years before we had a child. We were young when we got married—I was twenty, and Christoffer was nineteen. We were children ourselves. I wanted to work on healing my own mother-wound before bringing a child into the world. I lost my own mother when I was ten to cancer—and I had only just started therapy. There was a lot to unpack. But one thing led to another, and there I was.

A little life growing within me, no bigger than a poppy seed.

Only a day later, I woke up in the dark hours of early morning to a sharp, tearing feeling in my womb. I grasped at Christoffer, quivering like a frightened animal. I ran to the bathroom, petrified that I was having a miscarriage. I remember praying to God, my face buried in my hands, dark blooms between my thighs. If it is not meant to be, let this cup pass, I begged.

I got in to see a gynecologist the next day.
The sound of a heartbeat. It was only a hemorrhage. I wept. I could not understand why.

Everyone we told was ecstatic—Christoffer’s mother saw the glow on me before I even told her the news. Having seven children of her own, I suppose she would know.
Yet I couldn’t shake the disquiet I was feeling. I talked to my therapist, trying to make sense of it all. I felt so shameful that I wasn’t sure about being a mother.

I think back on that first long, dark night as I wept bitterly in the bathroom, unsure of what was to come. The pit I felt inside my chest. I know now that even then, I carried an instinctual, maternal knowing that ours was going to be a long, winding journey.

To make sure everything went smoothly, we had follow-up appointments scheduled for eight, ten, and twelve weeks.

At eight the hemorrhage was healing. Everything looked just fine.

At ten, the doctors were concerned, but they told us not to worry.

I took a blood test to learn the sex of our baby.

At twelve, we learned we were having a boy. We rejoiced.

But only a few days later, we received the most devastating news a parent can receive: our son would not live once he left my womb. He had anencephaly, a fatal condition with a 100% mortality rate.

Ours was a cup that would not pass from us.
We held this cup between our shaking hands, knowing we needed to drink.

We lamented. We screamed at the heavens. We held each other.
We named our son Atlas.
The one who upheld our world. The one who became a map by which we would come to read everything.

Atlas entered this world on January 11th, 2022, at 2:51 p.m.
A heartbeat.

They placed him in my shaking arms.
His eyes were blue. He spoke to us without words.

He lived outside of my womb for two hours—a miraculous gift I am still very grateful for.
But I could not disentangle how viscerally traumatic the experience was from the joy of it. I still struggle to this day.

In the postpartum period, it came to light that I had several chronic health issues, all of which affect my fertility. No one knew that while I grieved Atlas, I was also grieving the future children I thought I would never get to love.

Wendell Berry tells us there are no unsacred places. Only sacred and desecrated.
While I knew within my heart that God was present in my suffering, it felt like the sacred ground of my motherhood was left to crumble to ruin. My body became a desecrated wasteland. What was meant for life, forsaken. Fertile ground locked away, the key irretrievable.

I was broken open in every sense. My body. My heart. My soul.
Mostly, I felt broken open to irreconcilable grief. But wonder found its way too.

I don’t quite remember how I came across Mary Oliver’s poetry again.
But I know it was early spring.
I couldn’t get myself to read the Bible at the time. I prayed over and over again that the Lord would renew my desire for the Word. But it was not yet the time.

I think back on how tender God was to me during that time. How gracious. How loving. I just knew that God wanted to be soft with me, though I couldn’t understand why. I fought against this instinct.

I wasn’t raised to believe that God was soft.
I was raised to believe in rigid absolutes.
Yet that all came crumbling down after Atlas.

During the darkest night of my soul, all that I believed about God was called into question. The faith tradition that I had grown up in and returned to could not offer answers to the tension I was feeling. It was not meant to.

Before Atlas, I believed the god I was taught to reverence was a tyrant. Cruel. Mercurial. Self-aggrandizing.

He was a god that not only endorsed, but celebrated, the denigration and subservience of women. He was a god who chose some and not others. Razing cities to make promised land. He was a god who paraded American flags while the marginalized wept. Celebrated guns over the bodies of children. Who was complicit in the exploitation and destruction of the world. But it would all burn anyway, right? He was a god who discriminately decided which cultural identities were important, the rest all fodder to be melted down in the great melting pot of Christendom.

This did not sit well with my soul.

I could not convince myself that these beliefs were true.

But it seemed like these extreme ideas were the logical conclusion to the systems of belief I was exposed to. And I did not think I was allowed to believe any other way.

I believed that in order to be a Christian, I was meant to just accept the things that unsettled my soul. I could be a bleeding heart no more. I was meant to swallow the stock phrases and sound bites that were upheld as sovereign truth in one hand, and used to bludgeon with the other. I would take it all on the chin until I was like them. Until I saw it their way or God’s way, whichever came first. Theirs was the faith that knew better and thought better.

A well intentioned faith, but complicit faith nonetheless.

I could no longer worship this god.
You do not have to be good.

An idol had been fashioned in the image of men and named the object of our worship.
Completely visible. Completely knowable. A golden, graven image.
I would not walk on my knees repenting to this god. This god who cared nothing for the family of things.

After Atlas the unyielding structures of my faith were burned to the ground, a smoldering and ashen heap.
I could not believe that the god I had been taught to believe in was good, so I no longer believed.

But from the ruins of my former faith, something green and tender rose.
Something living. I Am Who I Am. I will become what I choose to become.

“Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers. Let me keep company always with those who say, ‘Look!’ and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads.” — Mary Oliver1

Sometimes I am afraid that by believing in such an expansive, wondrous, and loving God, I will lose sight of any of God’s discernible qualities. That in becoming everything, God must become nothing. But I do not believe this to be true.

I have discovered something that I can never unknow.
God was not only meant to be contained within the man-made tabernacle. Our chapels, or our systems of belief. The Incarnation of Christ reveals this to us.

“Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him.” John 4: 21-24

I had known the true God all along. It was only the image of the false god that made me doubt this knowing. So I cast aside the god hewn by human reason, my heart eager for true worship. This God’s was a wild, beautiful, haunting hymn. Ancient, yet familiar. It called to me, beckoning.

Contained within, the echo of my own name. I know My own, and My own know me.2

This truth was sung over me all the days of my life. At four years old, making mud pies in grandma’s garden. At ten years old as I sat beside my mother’s deathbed. At twenty-one as I labored to bring my son into existence, only to be asked to carry him to the river. At twenty-four as I weep, my arms still yearning.

It was there in the desert of my grief that I learned my lament was a holy, God ordained gift. For this gift led me to desire the life-giving, good, and loving God I knew must exist.

Through her adamant devotion to this world, Mary Oliver brought me to the feet of Christ. Through hard-earned psalms, she taught me how to find wonder. How to reverence. She urged me to look and to look again. Because the good poet knew that when we keep looking, something miraculous happens: we discover the presence of the Divine. In wild geese. Sunrise over the ocean. In hospital beds.
Noticing becomes sacramental.

When we learn Divine indwelling can be found in all things, hymns rise out of ash.

The desecrated is reclaimed.
A holy, living God grows in the place of the golden calf.
A wild, miraculous tabernacle, everywhere we look.

”You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place in the family of things.”3