2026 seems to be beginning much like 2025 ended. The ever-constant news of tragedy continues to dominate many social media feeds, and while none of it is particularly different from the tragedies we’ve been experiencing, having such events happen so close to the New Year can feel defeating. Like many of you, I have been newly horrified by the tragic murder of Renee Good in Minneapolis, seeing not only multiple videos of her death but also the lies being spread about what we all have seen with our own eyes. It feels as though we enter this year in yet another state of mourning.
There are many things to say or do in light of these recent events, but as is often my way, I have returned to a topic I have spent many years with—the topic of grief and how this connects, or can connect, us to our relationship to God. Grief can be personal. My sister and her children suffered the tragic and sudden loss of her husband many years ago. Grief can also be collective. This loss, while intimately personal for my sister, was collectively felt by our family, and has shaped many aspects of our interactions since. Grief can also be universal. I see this in how many are grieving the various tragedies around the world but also in how many are also suffering the grief of what they expected or hoped for. The United States has a long history of oppression and suffering, but it also has a long history of ideals and dreams. These have not been equally available. The American Dream has always been largely impossible for many. Yet this ideal, this belief that we as a country could be good, could be better than we used to be, is still something I mourn. It may be something you are also wrestling with.
My doctoral supervisor, Heather Walton, wrote in Literature, theology and feminism, “In response to human agony there can only be either silence or art, because the extremity of another’s pain cannot be expressed as if the conventions of the real world remained unchallenged.”[1] We need art to help us process. We need to wrestle with truths through ideas, through experiencing something less concrete. And so, when I am struggling with grief, I turn to Jonathan Saffron Foer’s book, Tree of Codes. The book, which is, in fact, part book and part sculpture, demonstrates this very need of forming a new thing while allowing the wounds, the literal holes, to remain both intact and visible.
Foer’s book is a memorial to author and artist Bruno Schulz, an artist and novelist. Schulz, a Jew living in a Nazi occupied city in now Poland, was killed by a Gestapo officer in 1942. One of Schulz’s works, Street of Crocodiles, is the base for Foer’s book. Importantly, Foer received a blessing from Schulz’s family, which is also noted in the beginning of his book. Tree of Codes is now a bit difficult to come by, because it is complex and difficult to print.[2]
You see, rather than simply adapting or digitally editing Schulz’s book, Foer has kept the book but has inflicted trauma upon it. The book has holes, literal wounds. Because of these holes, these fragile wounds in the book, reading it also poses a challenge. And so I will begin as I did when first attempting to read it—with a process of learning how.
How, I asked, do you read around these holes—do you put a blank sheet of paper underneath? Your hand? Do you strain and try to ignore what you can see through the large missing pieces? This wounded book gives us a picture of the wounding grief does to us. There are holes left by the absence of loved ones, traumas that cannot be papered over. The book does not, and in fact cannot, allow us to forget what is missing. To read this book is active participation in this grieving as well.
After much trial and error, I finally opted to read this book with my hands. Placing a hand under the page I was reading, I was constantly feeling the holes. Trying not to make them worse. Trying not to catch a nail on one of them. Slowly, carefully, thoughtfully, I would move through the book. Taking in the new story Foer had created, I was also always thinking of the story that was missing. The author that was present and yet gone. What sentence did this used to be? What lesson did Schulz wish me to learn?
It is no stretch to then think of Thomas and the wounds of Christ. My hand in the pages’ wounds echo Thomas’ in Christ’s. As Thomas looked for reassurance of Christ’s resurrection, I looked for reassurance of this book’s new life. In this connection, I turn to theologian Shelley Rambo, as she analyzes the way we interpret the story of Thomas and Christ. In the introduction to Resurrecting Wounds, she says
“The return of Jesus reveals something about life in the midst of death. If we take the line between death and life to be more porous, as the context of trauma suggests, then resurrecting is not so much about life overcoming death as it is about life resurrecting amid the ongoingness of death. The return of Jesus marks a distinct territory for thinking about life as marked by wounds and yet recreated through them.”[3]
Rambo does not wish to erase wounds, or to fill them in or cover them up. In fact, she explicitly requires the presence of the wounds to create a new life that is not in denial of death and suffering but sees a way to create something new while allowing the wounds of death to remain visible and present.
This allowance of the presence of wounds is exactly what Foer is demonstrating in Tree of Codes. By keeping the holes present, rather than simply deleting words digitally, he forces us to keep an active awareness of what is missing. Reading through Foer’s book is actively remembering Schulz’s book but also calls to mind the great loss the Holocaust brought the world.
In my search for how to read, I found a third option–to leave the text as it lays, seeing not only the words on the page, but also the “hole words,” as one theorist, N. Katherine Hayles calls them. This is the method I employed upon my final reading, and it is also the method Hayles uses to analyze the story. In leaving these hole words, Foer’s story may not be changed, but the layers of the text adds a new coded meaning. For example, using Hayles’ method, a sample text says:
The cartographer<ion in> spared our city <an easy intimacy, of><secret w> One could see <<passivity>>gestures, raised eyebrows<water>”[4]
Each bracket indicates a layer of text, showing us that these layers of wounds can run deep. Yet the meaning of these wounds is no less important.
Or, as I found on page 8,
<the> children greeted each other with <jar> masks painted
on their faces <pain.>
The hole words do not lack meaning, and it is obvious that Foer not only considered which words to erase, but how to position holes to allow this type of layered reading to take place. While the story itself may not include certain elements of Schulz’s, the sculpture of Foer’s certainly adds coded meanings.
I turn back to Rambo in this discussion of meaningful wounds. In the chapter titled “Surfacing Wounds: Christian Theology and Resurrecting Histories in the Age of Ferguson,” she says, “Unhealed wounds of the past persist and surface in the present, appearing in unrecognizable ways, in forms that confound.”[5] Much like the hole words in Foer’s book, these wounds add coded meanings rather than obvious statements. Here, Rambo discusses the many wounds racism in the United States has left, she explains that these wounds are not straightforward, observing that “suffering is not equal, the consequences not the same for white and black Americans,”[6]. These wounds must be acknowledged, but they also must be understood for their complexity. She references theologian James Cone, as he explains the paradox of the Cross, explaining that Cone’s linking of the cross and the lynching tree emphasizes this layered meaning, showing that not only do we see God’s work of redemption on the cross, but that the lynching trees are the present crosses, and that we must see the crosses across history.[7] However, rather than merely seeing redemption in the cross/crosses, Rambo insists that the message must shift for whomever is looking at it. For me, as a white American, I must remember the wounding, and particularly the wounding that Christianity has brought. She urges us to remember the origins of Christianity in the colonized world, saying,
“To remember these origins is to expose the insidious use of Christian teachings to justify the enslavement of black peoples. This history indicts white Christians…Christian theology is produced by erasing wounds.”[8]
Therefore, when I look at the Cross, I must, as theologian Willie Jennings says, “[look] downward to the ground and soil in which the Christian cross is placed.”[9] I must see the wound not as redemptive, but as an awakening to suffering. I must feel tied to death and allow it to bring something new to life. I must allow it to awaken in me a need to acknowledge the wounds, acknowledge the suffering, and then to actively work toward good. I must, like Foer, practice making something better without forgetting what, or who, has passed. However I can, I must allow interaction with woundings to move me to healing, not to erasure.
Tree of Codes is both an act of remembrance, but it is also an act of creation – one undertaken by both Foer and each individual reader. Moreover, in the book’s requirement of active participation from the reader, and its insistence that it should not, perhaps even cannot, be read only one particular way, it allows us to reside for a moment in that space where death and life are inseparable, indeed that they are threaded through each other bringing new meaning. Allowing the wounds to heal properly means letting them breathe and be visible, as Rambo demonstrates, rather than fester and pollute the body and mind of individuals or collectives. In all forms of grief be it personal or communal – and be that community national or international, we have to bring our conscious engagement to the gaps, the wounds and absences, that grief creates. We must see the uncertainty it brings and reconcile ourselves to new formations of meaning, that can bring creative space whilst still commemorating loss.
[1] Heather Walton, Literature, theology and feminisim. Manchester University Press, 2007.
[2] There is a video on YouTube, linked here, that shows the process. It is beautiful in it’s own right.
Hayles, N Katherine. “Combining Close and Distant Reading: Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Tree of Codes” and the Aesthetic of Bookishness.” 2013. PMLA, 128(1), 226-231.
[3] Shelley Rambo, Resurrecting Wounds: Living in the Aftermath of Trauma, Baylor University Press, 2017, 7.
[4] Jonathan Safran Foer, Tree of Codes, Visual Editions, 2010, 88.
[5] Rambo, 73.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid., 76.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.
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