11/1/19 “Grief as Sacrament” by Nancy Petty
Text: Jeremiah 31:15, Matthew 5:4
The image depicts humanity at life’s most vulnerable moment: Rachel weeping over her children, unable to be consoled, refusing to be comforted because they are no more. Her voice, heard throughout the land, is the sound of bitter weeping. The writer wants us to understand that this weeping is from a place of profound hurt, possibly even justified anger, some sort of unfair, unjust treatment has taken the ones she loves. For Rachel, life has dealt a devastating blow forcing her to her knees, with her body trembling, weeping, loudly, in a posture that is inconsolable. Grief.
Six times in my 35 years of ministry, six times too many, I have sat beside parents holding their lifeless baby in their arms weeping, inconsolable, gasping for their own breath, as they try and comprehend that what was to be their greatest joy is now their deepest sorrow and grief. I have heard their bitter weeping. I have sat by the bedside with an elderly wife and held her hand and felt it go limp as her husband exhaled his last breath. I have heard the sound of bitter weeping. I have stood by the bedside with a young man as he said goodbye to his young wife and listened as his bitter weeping filled the hospital room. I have accompanied a young woman to the ER where her husband and children were air lifted from I-40 after a transfer truck ran over their car on their way to daycare and work. I heard her bitter screams as the doctor told her her husband didn’t make it; and I wept beside her as she told her two young children that their daddy wouldn’t be coming home with them. That he was now a star in the sky watching over them. She didn’t say that because she believed it. She said that because what else are you going to say to two young children whose father has been killed by a distracted truck driver?
But grief is not only for the death of loved ones. Grief accompanies us through all of life. We grieve over lost dreams and hopes. We grieve who we thought we were but come to accept we are not. We grieve for our children when life’s disappointments come and there is nothing we can do. We grieve the family we thought would love us no matter what but that rejects us when we don’t live up to their expectation, or fit their image of who we should be. We grieve the mother or father relationship that never came to be. We grieve a nation that is not what we thought it was, that was never what we were taught it was. We grieve our innocence. We grieve the loss of physical strength as our bodies age and change. We grieve the loss of memory as we grow older. We grieve. We weep. And sometimes we weep bitterly. As someone said in lectionary group this week, “Grief is the universal emotion.”
I wonder if Jesus was trying to tell us this truth, that grief is the universal emotion, when he gave his most famous sermon: the Sermon on the Mount. In a nine-point sermon—(now let me pause here and say y’all don’t know how lucky you are that over time that got cut down to three points and a poem)—but back to my point, in this nine-point sermon, Jesus’ second point was on grief: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.”
This Greek word for “mourn,” pentheo, is the strongest word that Jesus could have used to express deep emotional grief—the kind of grief that brings about profound sorrow, lasting lamenting, and inconsolable weeping. It seems, maybe, that he was trying to tell us that grief and grieving is and will be a significant part of our life and a life of faith.
Franciscan friar Richard Rohr writes, “Weeping is a natural and essential part of being human.” He goes on to explain that “The Greek and Latin Fathers tended to filter the Gospel through the head; [while] they Syrian Fathers’ theology was much more localized in the body. They actually proposed that tears be a sacrament in the Church. Saint Ephrem went so far as to say until you have cried you don’t know God.”
Rohr goes on to say: “Most of us think we know God—and ourselves—through ideas. Yet corporeal, embodied theology acknowledges that perhaps weeping will allow us to know God much better than ideas. In this Beatitude, Jesus praises those who can enter into solidarity with the pain of the world and not try to remove or isolate themselves from its suffering. This is why Jesus says the rich person often can’t see the Kingdom, because they spend too much time trying to make tears unnecessary and even impossible.”
I want to go back to this idea of grief as sacrament. However, before I go there, I want to offer a cautious word. We must be careful to not glorify our grieving or the suffering that leads us to our grieving. I don’t know anyone who would willingly choose grief over joy. And I can’t believe it has ever been God’s plan to cause us grief so that we might know God better. And still, as we have heard from Katie this morning, signs of hope can come to us, find us when we are grieving.
Katie, I experienced those signs of hope in 2009 as I journeyed with my own grief. In 2009 I traveled to Oxford to be with my friend and colleague Malkhaz. He was there working on his PhD when he learned that his adopted son back home in the Republic of Georgia had been accidentally shot and killed while working on a computer at the police department. An officer sitting across the room was cleaning his gun and it dislodged and fired a bullet that struck Benny and killed him instantly. Malkhaz had traveled home to bury Benny and then returned to Oxford. As we talked weekly I could tell that Malkhazs’ grief was deepening and he was struggling to find ways to express it. Sensing that he could use the support of a friend I offered to fly to Oxford to spend some time with him. (For those of you who know me you know that was heartfelt offer not a thought out offer because it meant boarding an airplane.) Malkhaz quickly accepted my offer. My journey had me landing in London, spending two nights there, before taking the train to Oxford on the morning of the third day. It was my first full day in London that my journey to be with Malkhaz in his grief took an unexpected turn.
My first day in London was the anniversary of a dear friend and mentor’s death. Bonnie Stone had been my spiritual guide, a pastor of sorts to the pastor. She was my biggest supporter and my toughest critic. Her death, one year to the date of me landing in London, had come at a difficult time in my own life—a time of personal struggle and grieving. There were days I felt lost in my grief wishing for just one more conversation with Bonnie.
As I awakened that first morning and tried to prepare myself for a beautiful day exploring London, the tears wouldn’t stop as I thought of Bonnie. I tried talking the tears away. Be strong, Nancy. You can do this. You have a beautiful day before you to explore a beautiful city. No matter what I did—the wet cold washcloth to my eyes, the deep breathing, the lecturing myself, opening the door to go out only to close it and retreat to the bed face down—I couldn’t stop the tears. My delayed grief, one year later, had finally caught up with me. Finally, I declared to myself, the only thing left to do was to walk the streets of London crying. And that is what I did for the next 8 hours. I walked and cried. I cried and I walked. And I walked some more and cried some more. I didn’t try and hold back the tears. It wasn’t like I was going to run into anyone I knew so I just walked and cried. I saw the beauty of London through my tears that day. It was the only way. Sometimes the only way we can see the world is through our tears and our grief.
I rested well that night, exhausted from all the walking and crying and grieving. The next morning I boarded the train to Oxford where I would experience Malkhaz’ grieving embrace. For the next ten days, Malkhaz and I walked the streets of Oxford sharing grief. It’s funny, as I think back on that time, how conservative we were when it came to using our words to talk about our grief. It wasn’t that we didn’t talk about our grief. We did in very vulnerable and profound ways. But mostly, we shared our tears. Our ritual was to go to the local movie theatre and buy a huge bucket of popcorn, take it back to his apartment and watch movies. Don’t ask me why we didn’t make our own popcorn. I never asked Malkhaz that question. This seemed like something he did regularly. But we would sit that huge bucket of buttered popcorn between us and lose ourselves watching movies—movies that would make us cry tears of sorrow, like Shadowlands (a film about the relationship between C.S. Lewis and American poet, Joy Davidman, her death from cancer, and how it challenged Lewis’s Christian faith). And movies that would make us cry tears of laughter, Monty Python’s Life of Brian. We would laugh tears at that line “blessed are the cheesemakers.” Day after day, we shed our tears of pain and joy, all mingled together, sometimes the two of us not knowing which was which. Tears. Grief. Sacrament.
Sacrament is defined as a ritual regarded as imparting divine grace. From my own experience with grief, I can testify to the fact that those tears and the grief Malkhaz and I shared on that journey were sacrament. It feels almost impossible to explain, the divine grace that was imparted in the sharing of our tears and our grief. But it was real and hopeful and strengthening for whatever was to come next.
Grief—there is an aspect to it that is lonely and can’t fully be share. Grief—there is an aspect to it that must be shared, that can’t be carried alone. Grief—it can leave us feeling hopeless one minute and it can lead us to signs of hope the next minute. It is unpredictable. It comes on its’ own time. The mystics say until you have cried you don’t know God. I don’t know. But I do know that our tears and our grief can impart God’s divine grace and lead us to places that are hopeful. “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” In a faith tradition that doesn’t have sacraments maybe we should initiate just one: The Sacrament of Grief and Tears for such a sacrament, I believe, could lead us to the comfort we so long for when we grieve?
“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” In the midst of our grief and tears may we discover together ways to bless and be comforted!
