After a loss, grief inhabits our lives, affecting work, home, recreation, and worship. It’s unavoidable. Naturally, others sense this. They may feel uncomfortable, yet still struggle to offer words of consolation. Bless them for trying.
A recent Gallup poll found that one third of us will seek counsel from spiritual leaders in times of death and sorrow. What should be a positive act is occasionally the opposite. Many clergy are working with mistaken or out-dated information about grief, reports Joyce Davidson, an authority on spirituality and mourning. This can in turn hinder ecclesiastical consolation and may complicate the struggle with loss.
Mourners speak of feeling spiritually disconnected. They often ask hard questions and sometimes reject the notion of a compassionate God. Yet clergy and fellow parishioners may insist that they should not be so upset because their loved one is with God, it is the will of God, etc. Hearing this, I am reminded of C. S. Lewis’s frustration when well-meaning consolers assured him his dead wife is at peace, that he ought to be happy she is in heaven. “She would be equally a fact whether you liked it or not,” he says to himself. “Your preferences have not been considered.” Such platitudes from friends and clergy can ring false, seem insensitive, and lead to feelings of spiritual disenfranchisement.
As a bereavement support group facilitator, I frequently hear of shockingly insensitive consolations, usually from within the mourner’s congregation. We make a list of the best and worst things people say. More often than not, entries under the “No, they did not” side of the list sound helpful at first, but come off like variations of your grief is inconvenient to me or simply stop bringing everybody down. Yet in sorrow, our spiritual needs do not disappear with a few helpful or unhelpful words. I keep a quote from Rabbi Earl Grollman in my notebook to share with the group when we discuss such comments:
So often I am asked, “What is the greatest loss—the death of a child, a parent, a spouse, a sibling, or what? . . . What’s the worst loss?” It’s when it happens to you, whatever the circumstances or relationship. In other words, each loss must be recognized and validated.
Researchers have found that spiritual beliefs may facilitate comfort and provide meaning and purpose. At the same time, detrimental aspects include significant bouts of depression among those who relied heavily on religious coping, including a struggle with perceived control and the loss of social support in their faith community after the death. In this regard, a relationship with God, and our desperate pleas for help, may feel like a blessing and a curse.
Mental health counselor Kenneth Doka with the College of New Rochelle suggests that religious belief can at times be a double-edged sword that promises reunion or retribution, forgiveness or guilt. Yet he says that the existential ache associated with loss is a natural part of our struggle with grief. Doka and his colleague, Terry Martin (Hood College), find that religious discussions can be alienating in two cases: when others attempt to impose their beliefs on the bereaved; or when mourners feel that spiritual experiences, particularly sensing the presence of their dead, are ignored or dismissed. Neither response is helpful. “The very nature of the death may challenge assumptions about a benign and loving God or the fairness of the universe,” they write. “Here the critical issue is the way one reconstructs one’s belief system in the face of the loss.”
Because of this, mourners often seek spiritual consolation where it is most useful.
Eminent New Testament historian Elaine Pagels, a bereaved mother and widow, finds solace in the Gnostic gospels, Nag Hammadi codices, and other esoteric writings. Before we raise a dismissive brow, we may pause to consider that thousands of believers in the early centuries of the Christian church discovered similar comfort. Admittedly, these works can strike us as odd, fanciful, or downright weird. But then I recall the many years I lived in Asia.
The Gnostic gospels may sound as strange to us as much of the Bible sounded to Buddhists on first hearing. A carpenter they could understand—they too had a mythic history of underdogs who made good—but symbolic sacramental cannibalism of his body and blood? Never mind the books of Ezekiel and Revelation, which those outside the Judeo-Christian milieu may justifiably read as bizarre.
We may be unjust in judging early Christians by modern standards. In those heady decades after the death of Jesus, believers had little more than the Hebrew Bible, faith, hope, grief, and desperation. There was no New Testament. The First Council of Nicaea’s codified theology of 325 AD was a few centuries away. So they began to write.
Then as now, some composed versions of religious texts for political or financial gain. But overall most early believers sought to free their souls from material entrapments. We may not agree with everything we read in non-canonical scrolls, but the writers were as sincere in their search as we are today. Shall we dismiss out of hand their honest words because they do not jibe with modern views? Pagels isn’t so sure.
When others tell Pagels that they cannot imagine what it is like to lose a child, she replies, “Like being burned alive.” After her husband dies in a climbing accident, she spends his first memorial day at a Colorado monastery. There she prays with two monks in a brick chapel: “As the silence enveloped us, the meditation went deeper.” She experiences an emotional, and perhaps spiritual, epiphany that dramatically affects her views on religion.
Pagels seeks spiritual counsel from books that were known as secret writings. “The true gospel is joy,” she reads in the Gospel of Truth, “to those who receive from the Father the grace of knowing him!” She discovers writers that saw suffering not as punishment, but as part of life, interconnected and inseparable from every moment of our existence. “Recovering such lost and silenced voices,” she says, “reminds us that even our clearest insights are more like glimpses ‘seen through a glass darkly’ than maps of complete and indelible truth.”
Today looking with joy at the son and daughter left to her, Pagels recalls an ancient Jewish prayer: Blessed art Thou, Lord God of the Universe, that you have brought us alive to see this day. She says she feels the invisible bond that connects us with this world and what lies beyond. “However it happens, sometimes hearts do heal, through what I can only call grace.”
Early Christians sought in sorrow to explain the inexplicable, account for the unaccountable, describe the indescribable. Their words are steeped in mystery, more allusion than assertion. “The ‘ineffable’ itself structures language,” writes French Jesuit Michel de Certeau. “It is not a hole in language or a source of leakage. It becomes, rather, something in relation to which language is redefined.” This emptiness between words is a vital part of the sacred quiet of grief, as demonstrated by fellow mourner and bereaved father Friedrich Rückert:
When your heart dwells on crowded thoughts— “What if this had happened?”— when, alas, it did not, say, when chance turned one way rather than turning another; the doubts never end, if they do not end your faith: happiness in this life is not left to chance; for chance itself is of necessity part of an unending web, whose net spans the globe, whose fixed strands follow an unknowable course; straining from the center and returning to it.
Rückert is borrowing from Christian Arabs who use the term chance to express the will of God. Rather than perceiving chance as a blind force, they see true blindness as a refusal to accept that each event—any event—is an expression of God’s intent. Believers show wisdom by acknowledging what is.
The idea is not necessarily at odds with Western ideology, though we usually prefer the phrase act of God over chance. In either case, mourners are often forced to see reality and the divine as they are, not as we wish they could be or think they should be. Sometimes we want nothing more than to be heard by our friends, our families, and our God. Dennis Klass, professor emeritus at Webster University, suggests that adapting to this new relationship with fellow survivors helps us to navigate the landscape of grief.
For example, churches that accept loss as part of life can provide a safe, calm space to share heartbreak and experience God, says Reverend Dale Kuhn, a clinical social worker with Eden Theological Seminary. Another counselor, Richard Leliaert with Abbott Northwestern Hospital, says that in our pastoral rush to console with words of reunion and resurrection, we shouldn’t forget the human element: “To suggest that faith itself can drive out the pain of bereavement is to counsel badly.” Questions of belief are vitally important to Paul Irion, grief expert and champion of Hospice care. He reminds us that comfort means to make strong. “A person’s faith is a source of strength to cope, rather than an easy way out,” he writes. The church can be an ideal place to experience faith as a resource in our sorrow.
We serve mourners best when we welcome their cries of pain. Clinical psychologist Patrick M. Del Zoppo cites Psalm 102 as an example of believers’ shared history of mourning that is at once personal and communal:
Adonai, hear my prayer. Let my cry for help reach you. Don’t hide your face from me when I am in such distress. Turn your ear toward me; when I call, be quick to reply. For my days are vanishing like smoke, my bones are burning like a furnace. I am stricken and withered like grass; I forget to eat my food. Because of my loud groaning, I am just skin and bones. I am like a great owl in the desert, I’ve become like an owl in the ruins. I lie awake and become like a bird alone on the roof.
Del Zoppo notes that this hymn speaks to the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual reality of grief. The psalmist cries for companionship and understanding. Congregations that offer homecoming to these feelings of hurt, anger, questioning, and loneliness are often enriched by the sense of communion that follows. Del Zoppo suggests that standing in the same candlelight, reciting the same prayers, and sitting together in silence can be a gift to the bereaved and the spiritual community as a whole. It is also basic to healthy grief. “The spiritual dimension is not a frill,” he concludes. “The living relationship of extended spiritual care calls a community to be strong, loving, and wise.” It may be that true consolation is best expressed in the unspoken message of our silent presence: We’re here. We’re not going anywhere. We can handle your pain and fear. We are listening.
Death often challenges our view of the physical and invisible worlds. Like Pagels, we might find comfort in the early Christian belief that all life is connected and eternal. Perhaps this same web-like interlacing assures us that in the unknowable course of God’s will chance is merely an illusion, as Rückert believed. Or we may join the psalmist in asking only that Adonai hears our cries. Each of us finds a way to live with our loss. We are all in search of solace.
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