From Brokenness to Hope: Good Grief

When I read the second half of Lamentations 3, I am transported to the trauma ER, where a family has just learned that their youth, with all of his life ahead of him, is fighting for his next heartbeat. The tears, the anger, the prayers, the cries, the confusion, the insistence that I just let them go see him: what could I say as they clutched desperately for hope, looking for any glimmer of light in their pit of despair, trying to grasp what the doctor had said, what they could piece together about what had happened, Eikah. HOW, how? How, O Lord?

These words from the prayer strike me as the mutterings of the faithful grandmother, trying to calm her own jangled nerves. “The Lord is good to those who wait for him. It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord. For the Lord will not reject forever. Although God allows grief, he will have compassion, for he does not willingly afflict or grieve anyone.” And then she would remember, that was her grandbaby boy – is that IS her boy. “Lord, do you not see it? Could you not stop it? Are you not all powerful – the one who speaks all things into being? I know he got himself into this. Why should I complain about the consequences of his sins?”
Over the hours that we would be together in that closet-sized family waiting room, quiet would fall, and cries erupt, like waves on the shore, but the tears never stopped. “My eyes will flow without ceasing, without a lull, until the Lord from heaven looks down and sees.” And in time, the shock wore off and the anger burned, “I called on your name, O Lord, from the depths of this pit; you heard my plea, “Don’t you close your ear to my cry for help! Give me relief!” and after a breath, “You came near when I called on you; you said, “Do not fear!” and after another breath, the anger rose again – whose fault was it? “Pay them back for their deeds, O Lord. Give them anguish of heart; your curse be on them!”

It was messy and disorderly and unpredictable and – real. Too real, some thought. Raw emotions just out all over the place. We don’t do that well. His father apologized for his tears as he tried to ask me questions and make sense of the answers. He tried to calm his wife, to get his mother to stay quiet. “You are drawing attention to yourselves,” he warned. They didn’t care. Some would give them grace because of course they “were in shock.”

Grief, in our culture, is taboo. I’ve noticed several headlines over the last several weeks of moments that the Royals “broke” and showed emotions at their mother and grandmother and great-grandmother’s death. Really, they are just times they wiped a tear from the corner of their eye – we don’t encourage people to show their emotions. And it is impacting our society.

We are finding with preschoolers now that they don’t know how they feel. They don’t know what happy is, or what sad is. They don’t know how express anger. We are teaching through pictures of people smiling or crying what happy and sad look like. Because for generations we have not allowed ourselves to emote, to show our emotions. And since our children haven’t seen us show emotion, they don’t even know how to identify it.

In 1969 Elisabeth Kubler-Ross first described the five stages of grief. Most of you probably could say them with me: denial-anger-bargaining-depression-acceptance are all part of the journey from brokenness to hope. What has been misunderstood about the journey is that it was numbered. First, denial; second, anger; and then beyond that most of us forgot what the other stages were. Here’s the problem: the journey isn’t linear and the stages aren’t defined. It might have been better if she had called them 5 experiences of grief rather than stages. Stages sounds like you finish one and move on the the next. They are all jumbled up together. You may not experience all of them. There is no order. Of course.

It is as predictable as the Southern way of caring for a family after someone dies. Most of the time, denial knocks first, with shock and fear – bearing a casserole that is much too much to eat. It is a biological protection system. We can only handle some things “sinking in” rather than “hitting us head on.” Bargaining brings an your favorite guilty dessert. “What if…” “If only…” “I should have…” “I’d give anything…” Anger may be bringing the paper products – something to serve all this guilt on. Pretty unpredictable – sometimes you get cups, but no napkins, and when you go to the drawer to get out napkins, you are met with the birthday napkins from your loved one’s last birthday party and it is all you can do not to wad them up and start throwing them as the tears spill. The postman brings anxiety daily, more unknown, unwelcome, overwhelming minutes and hours that eventually stretch into days. Helplessness has no answer as over and over again people ask “What can I do?” Finally, acceptance comes. Acceptance does not bring with it a sense that we are “OK” with what has happened, but that we accept the reality of what has happened. It really happened, and there is no going back and making it not happen. We can only go forward and look for meaning and purpose.

Grief is messy, but it is normal. And it is the only way to move from brokenness to hope. Unfortunately, our culture tells us that “real men don’t cry,” “suck it up, buttercup,” to “keep a stiff upper lip.” We stoically try to hide or ignore our emotional pain. I have had several folks comment to me how they didn’t really know the book of Lamentations until this sermon series. I wonder if most of Lamentations gets left out of the lectionary – in the 3 year cycle, it only appears 4 times and 3 of those are the center part of Chapter 3, the hopeful part – because we have been raised to approach God respectfully, rather than honestly. Not to be angry. Not to cry out.

These are prayers that the Hebrew people memorized to pray when everything fell apart, went sideways, and there was no way Humpty-Dumpty was going back together again. We may not need to memorize them, but we need to know where they are (just after Jeremiah, before Ezekiel). We need to know that God hears these kind of prayers. God expects them from us – relationships are built on trust, and trust can only build up where there is honesty. These prayers are honest!

Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann writes that passages of Scripture like this, like the psalms of lament, “may be judged by the world to be acts of unfaith and failure, but for the trusting community, their use is an act of bold faith….it insists that the world must be experienced as it really is and not in some pretend way.” AND …it insists that all the terrible, traumatic, painful suffering we endure is “a proper subject for discourse with God. There is nothing out of bounds,…nothing inappropriate” to talk to God about.

Thanks be to God who is always more eager to hear than we are to pray, Amen.