Father Richard shares the universal need to express our grief:
The human instinct is to block suffering and pain. This is especially true in the West where we have been influenced by the “rationalism” of the Enlightenment. As anyone who has experienced grief can attest, it isn’t rational. We really don’t know how to hurt! We simply don’t know what to do with our pain.
The great wisdom traditions are trying to teach us that grief isn’t something from which to run. It’s a liminal space, a time of transformation. In fact, we can’t risk getting rid of our pain until we’ve learned what it has to teach us, and it—grief, suffering, loss, pain—always has something to teach us! Unfortunately, many of us have been taught that grief and sadness are something to repress, deny, or avoid. We would much rather be angry than sad.
Perhaps the simplest and most inclusive definition of grief is “unfinished hurt.” It feels like a demon spinning around inside of us and it hurts too much, so we immediately look for someone else to blame. We have to learn to remain open to our grief, to wait in patient expectation for what it has to teach us. When we close in too tightly around our sadness or grief, when we try to fix it, control it, or understand it, we only deny ourselves its lessons.
Saint Ephrem the Syrian (303–373) considered tears to be sacramental signs of divine mercy. He instructs: “Give God weeping, and increase the tears in your eyes: through your tears and [God’s] goodness the soul which has been dead will be restored.” [1] What a different kind of human being than most of us! In the charismatic circles in which I participated during my early years of ministry, holy tears were a common experience. Saints Francis and Clare of Assisi reportedly wept all the time—for days on end!
The “weeping mode” is a different way of being in the world. It’s different than the fixing, explaining, or controlling mode. We’re finally free to feel the tragedy of things, the sadness of things. Tears cleanse our eyes both physically and spiritually so we can begin to see more clearly. Sometimes we have to cry for a very long time because we’re not seeing truthfully or well at all. Tears only come when we realize we can’t fix and we can’t change reality. The situation is absurd, it’s unjust, it’s wrong, it’s impossible. She should not have died; he should not have died. How could this happen? Only when we are led to the edges of our own resources are we finally free to move to the weeping mode.
The way we can tell our tears have cleansed us is that afterwards we don’t need to blame anybody, even ourselves. It’s an utter transformation and cleansing of the soul, and we know it came from God. It is what it is, and somehow God is in it.
Job’s Emotional Courage
Richard Rohr notes the lessons on grief and lament we can learn from Job:
In the Hebrew Scriptures, we find Job experiencing some of the common emotions of grief, including denial and anger. The first seven days of Job’s time on the “dung heap” (Job 2:8) of pain are spent in silence, what we might call shock or denial. Then he taps into anger; in verse after verse Job shouts and curses at God. He says, in effect, “This so-called life I have is not really life, God, it’s death. So why should I be happy about being born?”
Perhaps some of us have been there—so hurt and betrayed, so devastated by our losses that we echo Job’s cry about the day he was born, “May that day be darkness. May God on high have no thought for it, may no light shine on it. May murk and deep shadow claim it for their own” (Job 3:4–5). It’s beautiful, poetic imagery. He’s saying: “Uncreate that day. Make it not a day of light, but darkness. Let clouds hang over it, eclipse swoop down on it.” Where God in Genesis speaks “Let there be light,” Job insists “Let there be darkness.” A day of uncreation, of anti-creation. We probably have to have experienced true depression, betrayal, or injustice to understand such a feeling.
There’s a part of each of us that feels and speaks that sadness. Not every day, thank goodness. But if we’re willing to feel and participate in the pain of the world, part of us will suffer that kind of despair. If we want to walk with Job, with Jesus, and in solidarity with much of the world, we must allow grace to lead us there as the events of life show themselves. I believe this is exactly what we mean by conformity to Christ (Romans 8:29).
We must go through the stages of feeling, not only the last death but all the earlier little (and not-so-little) deaths. If we bypass these emotional stages by easy answers, all they do is take a deeper form of disguise and come out in another way. Many people learn that the hard way—through depression, addictions, irritability, and misdirected anger—because they refuse to let their emotions run their course or to find some appropriate place to share them. Job is unafraid to feel his feelings. He acts and speaks them out. Emotions ought to be allowed to run their course. They are not right or wrong; they are merely indicators of what is happening.
I am convinced that people who do not feel deeply finally do not know deeply either. It is only because Job is willing to feel his emotions that he is able to come to grips with the mystery in his head and heart and gut. He understands holistically and therefore his experience of grief becomes both whole and holy.
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| Whom Must We Love? |
| An expert in Jewish religious law came to Jesus with a simple but important question: “What must I do to live with God forever?” In response, Jesus asked him, “What do the Scriptures say?” The man gave a wonderful answer that Jesus affirmed: Love the Lord with all of your heart…and love your neighbor as yourself. But that was not the end of his questions. He wanted to know the minimum requirement to fulfill these commands. What is a passing grade to graduate into God’s kingdom? So he asked Jesus, who qualifies as his neighbor?He was not the first person to wrestle with this question. Since being subjugated first by Greeks and then Romans, many Jews debated the extent of the command in Leviticus 19:18 to love one’s neighbor. At the time, popular teaching excluded any non-Jews from the category of “neighbor,” and another school of thought said any personal enemy (Jew or non-Jew) was to be hated and not loved. In the first century, many Pharisees did not consider non-Pharisees their neighbors, and another rabbinical teaching said “heretics, informers, and renegades” should be left to die in ditches. Given this diversity of opinion over who qualified as one’s neighbor, the man wanted to know where Jesus drew the line. Who exactly are we called to love?We will explore Jesus’ response over the coming days, but to begin I want to share a story told by former president Jimmy Carter that captures the spirit of Jesus’ answer.Before his political career, Carter served on an evangelistic mission trip to share the gospel with poor, Spanish-speaking families in Springfield, Massachusetts. His partner was a Cuban-American pastor from Brooklyn named Eloy Cruz. Carter was amazed by Cruz’s gentle spirit and ability to connect with everyone they met. At the end of their week together, Carter asked Cruz what made him so effective as a Christian witness. Cruz replied that he tried to live by a simple rule: “You only have to have two loves in your life—for God, and for the person in front of you at any particular time.”In his autobiography, Carter said, “I still refer on occasion to the books on my shelves by Karl Barth, Reinhold and H. Richard Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Rudolf Bultmann, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Hans Kung, and other theologians, but Eloy Cruz’s simple words express a profound and challenging theology that has meant more to me than those of all the great scholars.”Like the religious expert who questioned Jesus, sometimes we can become so enamored with understanding deep theological truths that we lose sight of what’s most important. When we stand before God someday, our theology will come to nothing if we have failed to love those created in his image who stand before us today. DAILY SCRIPTURE LUKE 10:25-29 MATTHEW 5:43-48 LEVITICUS 19:17-18 WEEKLY PRAYER From Norwich Cathedral, England O God, whose Son Jesus Christ cared for the welfare of everyone and went about doing good; grant us the imagination and perseverance to create in this country and throughout the world a just and loving society for the family of man; and make us agents of your compassion to the suffering, the persecuted and the oppressed, through the Spirit of your Son, who shared the sufferings of men, our pattern and our redeemer, Jesus Christ. Amen. |
