Eddie S. Glaude Jr. at Princeton University recently wrote about the impact of coronavirus. (Opinion | Those who survive this pandemic will have to learn to live with grief ) He urged us to grieve:
Americans have to find a way to grapple with and make sense of what is happening to us. Maybe we need periodic days of national mourning and prayer — some public ritual to acknowledge our collective sorrow. Perhaps a daily reading of the names of those who have died. Maybe we need to talk about a memorial to those who sacrifice their lives to save others. We have to do something as a country to confront all those bodies in the grave … We must attend to our national grief … The dead are not yours and yours alone. They are ours — all of them. No matter the color of their skin, the people they loved, their Zip code, the language they spoke, or the political party they supported — they are ours. We just have to figure out what ours will mean when colored by such unimaginable grief.
The same day Glaude’s piece was published I read this lament on Twitter:
My Dad died this morning from covid-19 and many of my christian friends have made me feel bad about feeling bad. I should “rejoice he is in heaven with jesus”, I should “be glad for the time I had with him” but honestly, I just want permission to sit and cry.
How sad that our Christian response to suffering is to make people feel bad for feeling bad.
In this series we’re exploring how to live into the truth that we are rooted and grounded in love (Eph. 3:17). Two practices feel especially important in helping us experience this. They are two sides of one coin: grief and gratitude. One the one hand, we must name and attend to those times and circumstances that leave us feeling ungrounded and uprooted, the opposite of loved. To ignore them or dismiss them or simply try to sweep them away is to prevent ourselves from ever experiencing life as rooted and grounded in love. And, on the other hand, we must also name and attend to those times and circumstances when we feel deeply loved and cherished. Grief and gratitude are two invaluable practices.
Let’s talk about grief.
Richard Beck—a professor at Abilene Christian University—writes that many of us pursue a prayer life in which grief is never voiced. Specifically, Beck writes that some of us operate with a “polar model” of prayer. In this model, “faith” or “faithfulness” is one end of the continuum and “lament” or “complaint” is at the opposite end. If lament or complaint in our prayers increase, this means we are moving farther and farther away from faith and trust in God. But if faith and trust in God increases in our prayers, this means we are moving farther and farther away from lament and complaint. Only the spiritually immature and those of puny faith groan or moan in prayer. And since we want to be spiritually mature and to be characterized as faithful, we rarely allow complaining in our prayers.
This, however, overlooks the fundamental role that grief plays in the prayers of the Bible. At least half of the prayers of the Psalms are lament. Jesus himself prayed with tremendous grief. Of the ten prayers of Jesus saved for us by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, three are laments or complaints. There are at least ten times when the Gospels give us the actual words that Jesus prayed in a prayer. Of these ten prayers, three are easily characterized as laments or complaints.
Jesus’ grief is evident in the Garden of Gethsemane. Notice the descriptions from Matthew:
• Jesus is “sorrowful and troubled” (Matt. 26:37).
• Jesus confesses being “very sorrowful, even to death” (Matt. 26:38).
• Jesus falls on his face (Matt. 26:39).
Jesus is not expressing mild anxiety or a slight fear. He is expressing intense feelings of despair and discouragement. He is dealing with tremendously high levels of anxiety.
Matthew’s peers agree with his assessment of the emotional state of Jesus. Mark describes Jesus as “greatly distressed” (Mk. 14:33). Luke, the doctor, diagnoses Jesus as “being in agony” and observes that Jesus’ “sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground” (Lk. 22:44).
Even the name of the place in which this spiritual wrestling match takes place reveals the gravity of the situation. The word “Gethsemane” suggests an “oil press” where olives are squeezed until their insides turn out. In the same way, Jesus is now being squeezed until his insides turn out. This is life at its most painful. Jesus grieves.
Mark D. Roberts writes in No Holds Barred (4-7):
Initially, the phrase no holds barred had nothing to do with conversation. It was a term used in wrestling to describe a match that isn’t constrained by official rules. If you’ve ever seen a serious wrestling match, in the Olympics, for example, you know that many holds are prohibited. You won’t see any strangleholds, unlike what you might observe in a “professional” wrestling free-for-all. Our typical approach to God brings to mind Olympic wrestling, in which every move is governed by detailed rules. Our communication with God is cautious, controlled, disciplined, and relentlessly boring. Fearful that we’ll do something wrong or that God won’t accept our true selves, we tame our prayers to the point that we actually hide ourselves from the Lord. We pray without energy, without passion, and without honesty…Whether crying out in agony, complaining with bitterness, begging for deliverance, or praising with joy, the psalmists consistently accepted God’s invitation to bold prayer. Whether desperate with need or bursting with thanks, they didn’t hold anything back.
The Bible calls us to pray without holding anything back. It calls us to grieve.
Walter Brueggemann writes this:
It is a curious fact that the church has, by and large, continued to sing songs of orientation in a world increasingly experienced as disoriented. That may be commendable. It could be that such relentlessness is an act of bold defiance in which these psalms of order and reliability are flung in the face of the disorder…It is my judgment that this action of the church is less a defiance guided by faith and founded in the good news, and much more a frightened, numb denial and deception that does not want to acknowledge or experience the disorientation of life…I think that serious religious use of the complaint psalms has been minimal because we have believed that faith does not mean to acknowledge and embrace negativity. We have thought that acknowledgment of negativity was somehow an act of unfaith. ( Spirituality of the Psalms, 25-26)
Faith, a good friend of mine has commented, is not opposed to feelings. Acknowledgement of negativity is not an act of unfaith. It is, instead, the ultimate act of faith. It is the stubborn belief that God exists and God is big enough to handle whatever we need to say or feel about what’s happening.
Diane Langberg, in Suffering and the Heart of God, shares four broad steps toward dealing with grief. Consider which of these you may need to practice today:
- Admit the loss that has taken place. Acceptance of loss takes time. People may push us by telling us “You just have to accept it.” But we need to give ourselves time to live and feel our way into the new reality of loss. Naming, with specificity, the loss is important. Acknowledging in concrete ways what has painfully passed is critical. Perhaps today, in a verbal prayer, or in a journal, you need to create some kind of record of the losses impacting you right now.
- Experience and express all the emotions and thoughts accompanying the loss. Pain needs to be given a voice. Suppressing it or trying to stuff it down is unhealthy. Feel what you are feeling. Name the emotions you are experiencing. If you’re not sure how to voice your pain, use the words of the lament psalms ( Community laments: Psalms 12, 44, 58, 60, 74, 79, 80, 83, 85, 89, 90, 94, 123, 126, 129; Individual laments Psalms 3, 4, 5, 7, 9-10, 13, 14, 17, 22, 25, 26, 27*, 28, 31, 36, 39, 40:12-17, 41, 42-43, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 59, 61, 64, 70, 71, 77, 86, 89, 120, 139, 141, 142). In the Appendix of her book, Diane Langberg has written a helpful lament prayer that uses the language of much of the lament psalms.
- Find a way to let go or say good-bye. When we experience the loss of a loved one, a funeral provides a tangible way to express a good-bye. Many of the other losses in our lives need some similar type of ritual. What could you do today to symbolically say good-bye to something or someone you’ve lost? Perhaps you’ll need multiple “funerals” along the process of grief.
- Learn to reinvest the emotional and mental energy consumed by grieving in new relationships, endeavors, people and projects. This is not “getting over it” as many may try to push us to do early in the grief process. It is something that can only come in the latter phase of grief. Most grieving, Langberg notes, is resolved in two to four years. Give yourself space. Give others time. And as you reach those latter stages, learn to reinvest in these new things.
Grief and Gratitude are needed in order to live into the reality of being rooted and grounded in love. God gives you permission to grieve. He urges you to grieve. He grieves with you.
What do you need to do today to practice grief?
