‘There Is Grief In Good Things’: Q&A With Writer And Minister Jeff Chu
Roughly two-thirds of the way through his new book, “Good Soil: the Education of an Accidental Farmhand,” Jeff Chu, then a student at Princeton Theological Seminary and a worker at the school “Farminary” (working farm), reflects on the New Testament parable of the seed sower (Matthew 13).
What was its significance for him, a gay child of immigrants from Hong Kong raised in a conservative Christian family teeming with preachers, deacons and Sunday school teachers?
There were times, after he came out and stopped going to church (temporarily, as it turns out), that he despaired of becoming “the good and godly man of my family — and my own-imagination,” Chu wrote.
“Grief came to visit, as it inevitably does, but grace did, too,” Chu added. “And all along the way, I never stopped dreaming about good soil. Good soil where I could simply lie down for a bit and rest. Good soil on which I might build a home. Good soil in which I could grow something. Good soil where I might belong.”
Ordained in the Reformed Church of America, Chu, who graduated from PTS in 2019, currently works as an editor, writer and congregational associate. The author of “Does Jesus Really Love Me?: A Gay Christian’s Pilgrimage in Search of God in America,” Chu also co-authoredThe New York Times bestseller, “Wholehearted Faith,” a labor of love he completed after the death of his dear friend, Rachel Held Evans,
Chu and his husband, Tristan, now live in Grand Rapids, Michigan. In a wide-ranging conversation with Religion Unplugged, Chu talked about, among other things, the many faces of grief, how it changes over time, grief in the Scriptures and how deeply loss is intertwined with love.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Elizabeth Eisenstadt Evans: What was your first experience of grief?
Jeff Chu: Life is full of all different kinds of grief. Grief from a dream that doesn’t come true. Grief from the loss of friends, of loved ones. Grief from moving homes — probably my first experience of a major shift in life. When I was 9, we left California, where we lived, as many Chinese families do, in a very intergenerational way. We moved to New Jersey, to a small town where there were very few kids who looked like me, and we didn’t have any relatives around. That was a source of some grief.
There is grief in good things. Grief of a career in journalism in London and New York City that didn’t quite turn out the way I hoped it might. Grief that I could never fulfill my parent’s dreams for my adulthood. I experienced grief in so many forms while working as a farmhand. It’s all over my book, because grief is a common thread throughout life.
Evans: “Good Soil” is threaded with memories of loss, both of humans and of animals. Do you think we grieve differently for animals like dogs or, for that matter, chickens?
Chu: We grieve differently for everyone we encounter, depending on the level of intimacy and affection. For many of us, I imagine, our love for the animals in our lives — whether it’s the dog with whom we share a home, the horse we have ridden for years, or a friends’ pet — is somewhat less complicated than the grief we feel for a human with whom we have shared joy and sorrow, celebrations and fights. Because I’m a dog person, that unconditional love comes somewhat more easily than with someone with whom we really had to struggle to build and hold to a relationship. Not better or worse, but different.
Grief and love are deeply intertwined. There is no real way to separate the two most of the time. I would argue that grief is, in fact, an expression of love. One of the hardest things about it is not naming that grief is rooted in love.
Evans: In “Good Soil,” you make a lot of connections between what’s going on in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures and your own life, in the life of the farm, and of the people you encounter. How do you connect grief born out of love with your own faith?
Chu: The Psalms are one of the great gifts of our faith. They contain so much grief, processing of grief and wrestling with grief. The true gift of the Psalms is that we are reminded we are not alone. Other human beings have experienced grief, cried out to God, found hope and possibility even in their grief. I take a lot of solace from not being alone in grief and in knowing we have had people come this way before, even if the circumstances were different.
Evans: Do you think that grief and how you experience it changes as time goes by?
Chu: For me, grief has changed over time. It doesn’t go away, but the storms, the sharpness, the texture changes. My paternal grandmother, who most embodied unconditional love for me when I was a child, died when I was 17. I miss her everyday because I think about her every day. Now I have more capacity to express my joy for having had her for my grandmother, to explore the stories I know about her and to learn lessons from those stories.
Evans: Did being on the farm sharpen your awareness of our human connection to our environment? Is there a sadness connected to climate change?
Chu: One of the things working more intimately with the land taught me was how life and death and renewal are writing into creation itself. I am deeply concerned about the human fingerprints on our environment. We have not been good stewards of what we have been given. I do believe that nature is resilient and that we’re constantly being invited to pay closer attention to love more deeply, to tend more carefully, to do better.
The mechanisms are there, if we choose to participate in them, to bring healing, not just to the earth, not just to ecosystems, but to ourselves. Our lives are intertwined with the lives of everything that lives and breathes about us. We have to imagine new ways of engaging with the world around us. This is our call as people of faith.
Evans: Near the end of the “Good Soil” you recount a visit to see your friend, the writer Rachel Held Evans, as she was dying. It was near the end of your time at Princeton. A few years later, you finished “Wholehearted Faith,” the book she had started. What was that like for you?
Chu: I would never wish that writing assignment on anyone. I finished that book because Rachel meant so much to me as a friend, and it was one way in which I could honor her. It was the hardest writing I’ve ever done, and part of that was simply rooted in the fact I was still breathing. Part of that has to do with the fact we were and are very different people.
Just look at our life stories: I’m Chinese, she was White. I’m gay, she was straight. I don’t have kids, she had two. What we shared was a deep conviction that there is hope in the story of God’s love for us and for the world. The whole project will always be tinged with grief for me, which means it is also infused with the love of two friends who journeyed through a fair amount of life together.
Evans: To circle back to the theme of these conversations: has your spirituality been changed by the experience of grief?
Chu: I am less prone to putting grief on a particular timeline now. I have experienced the loss of grandparents who all died of old age, as well as the loss of Rachel and other friends who died young. These kinds of losses remind me that there is no one way to properly express grief and no expiration date. I like to imagine this has made me more compassionate. And I hope, I hope, it has forced me to cling even more tightly to belief in a God who promises to renew all things.
Elizabeth Eisenstadt Evans is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Religion News Service, National Catholic Reporter, Sojourners, Christian Century, The Washington Post and Philadelphia Inquirer.