In grief, acceptance and rebellion intertwine, and meaning emerges from tears, faith, and the hope that death does not have the last word.
I sometimes wonder what death looks like from Heaven. What do the angels feel when they see so many of us crouching in pain over a pit where we are forced to bury a part of our soul? Do they ever worry when they see the illusion that we will never die, crumbling for each and every one of us? And do they breathe a sigh of relief when they see us discovering, mixed in with our tears, drops of a Truth that was inaccessible to us before grief?
Birth, baptism, marriage, and death are rites of passage so didactically drilled into us in the early years of schooling that it is not surprising that only direct confrontation with them frees them from the imprisonment of cliché and unfolds them in the fullness of their solemnity. We begin to understand life better than ever before when we are confronted directly and non-negotiably with death: first other people’s, then our own.
In the face of death’s inexorable decision, “acceptance” seems to be the ultimate balance we can achieve in grief. “Acceptance is the ultimate goal because there is nothing we can do to bring back the person,” wrote a marriage and family therapist on the website of a children’s hospital in the United States.
The flatness of this phrase makes it profoundly rude to say to someone who is grieving: “You’ll get used to it in time. It’ll pass.” Yet that doesn’t make it any less true, or any less powerful, especially when we see its implications in another context where acceptance is the only healthy way forward: forgiveness.
The healing role of forgiveness in grief
When I forgive, I accept the loss without taking revenge on the one who has wronged me. Acceptance in this case means recognising and expressing the brokenness of my heart and the legitimacy of my suffering. (I have every right to cry because it hurts. I have every right to hurt because I have loved). Then forgiveness also means admitting the reasonable: that my loss is irreversible, and no amount of suffering by the one who caused my loss will change that irreversibility, nor give me back what I have lost.
If revolt in the face of death is as irresistible as revenge, it is also absurd. What then? Should we attempt to forgive the earth for swallowing up our loved ones? Or should we replace the expression: “May God forgive them” [a Romanian expression of condolence—Ed.] with a blasphemous “May we forgive God”? How dare we, those whose addiction to the insignificant (most easily seen in the way we spend our time) is a daily affront to the beauty of life as a follower of Christ?
Believing in God even when we don’t understand Him
Acceptance is also precious because it protects us from the danger of wronging God. In Scripture we find several situations where grieving people cast their bitterness at the feet of a God who is high up on a throne from which He doesn’t seem to want to lean down toward them. These are people who come to God and dare to tell Him that their suffering is disproportionate to anything, especially to the idea of a God who cares enough to want to do something about it.
And God listens. He doesn’t send them to some prison for the wicked, but responds to them in different ways, each time by being on their side. To someone like the prophet Jonah, He shows above all a fatherly patience, a willingness to work through even the most immature of outbursts. To someone like Job, He widens the horizon of human vision of the past to suggest that the horizon of the future can also be widened.
To Jonah, God says: “You would have done the same thing.” To Job He says: “You do not know how I made the world out of nothing, so you cannot know how I will make the future out of your present.” And thousands of years later, Job’s future is still being written in the impact of his book on the lives of those who read it. God invites both of them to reject the possibility that they could understand Him, and instead to make room in their hearts for the belief that He seeks only good in all that He does.
Since Viktor Frankl, psychologists of various schools have argued that the ability to extract or make meaning out of any situation can help us withstand hardship and stabilise us in the face of adversity. Even in grief, psychologists believe that the ability to find meaning is important for healing. That is why it can be so natural for some to rebel against God when someone dies—for, to them, God alone is responsible for the terrible meaning that arises in the face of the unmanageable unknown of death.
Excruciating pain, which affects us spiritually as well as physically and socially, can diminish the mourner’s willingness to tolerate the idea that God, the All-Knowing, has allowed this loss. Pain is real, doctrine is often abstract. Thus, in most cases, the meaning of mourning does not come naturally, but requires a costly contribution on the part of the bereaved.
Opposing death to the highest expression of life
One ally that many of us may not instinctively turn to in times of grief is the most powerful of all the ways we can avenge our losses: creativity.
The American actor Ethan Hawke made a powerful plea for the spiritual bonding power of art of all kinds. Athough, he said, in the average person’s experience, art starts out as an afterthought among life’s priorities, it doesn’t take long for it to reveal its power to hold the human soul together when life tears it apart. “Most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about poetry, right? They have a life to live, and they’re not really that concerned with Allen Ginsberg’s poems or anybody’s poems. Until… their father dies. They go to a funeral. You lose a child. Somebody breaks your heart… And all of a sudden you’re desperate for making sense out of this life. And has anybody ever felt this bad before? How did they come out of this cloud?”… And that’s when art’s not a luxury, it’s actually sustenance. We need it!”
Connected, even in suffering
Music, literature, poetry, painting, sculpture and even some branches of scientific research create invisible bonds of friendship between people of different times and places, allowing a timeless transmission of humanity and resilience.
Especially when we are the beneficiaries of this exchange, but even when we are not, the need to make sense of tragedy comes with an acute need to express the pain experienced. “Whether we are an introvert or an extrovert, whether we are someone who naturally knows how to express themselves emotionally or finds it difficult—every one of us needs to find a way of expressing our grief and loss,” says British grief psychologist Julia Samuel.
“Some people can only connect with themselves when they are connected to other people. For others they need to work out first what they feel on their own.” Either way, says the psychotherapist, the idea is to “find a way of connecting to the feelings we have inside, try and name them, and then find a way to express them.”
Returning to life
Millions of Christians have found solace in the apostle John’s expression of a divine promise found, ironically, in a book with a title that could not be “scarier”: the Book of the Apocalypse (more commonly called the Book of Revelation in English, from the Greek word apokalypsis, which means ‘unveiling’ or ‘revelation’). This promise has become for many a solid foundation for the meaning of God’s will: “He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death.”
We can’t understand the Infinite God, not even on sunny days, except by feeling our way, even though the “intoxication of life” (as Leo Tolstoy put it) makes us believe otherwise. On stormy days, however, it becomes undeniable how little we really know. In fortunate cases, this creates in us an unimaginable hunger for the Word that reveals God to us. We realise that the closeness we thought we had to God is still not so great that we feel safe when difficulties come. And we seek Him more intentionally, with more perseverance to break through our own blockages. For we seek Him with our lives.
In one of the parables He told His listeners, Jesus compared God the Father to a human father, saying that if an imperfect father gives good gifts to his child, so much more will the heavenly Father do so. If this comparison is permissible, let me imagine that just as I look with pride at my child who learns to get up after a hard fall, so the angels in heaven look with pride at us who, after the hardest and most crushing fall, get up, however slowly, receive the Father’s comfort and then, wiser in our own pain, return to life.
Alina Kartman is a senior editor at Signs of the Times Romania and ST Network.
