Living two states away was an amazing adventure, but it comes with some baggage. In 1986 I moved from Tulsa, Oklahoma to Carlsbad, New Mexico to become their senior minister. That’s 651 miles away, which is 9 hours and 48 minutes if you drove the speed limit from what you called home. This experience taught me about what I call hidden baggage.
This baggage got heavier than mileage and time. My precious church family that I had been with for over twelve years as youth minister and a deacon was left behind. I moved from Green Country USA to Brown (desert) Country America! What a big adjustment! Someone died in Tulsa and you didn’t get to say that last, fully-present goodbye, and you grieve. Church family members celebrate a birthday, or the whole church family celebrates a wedding, or a birth of a newborn baby; they grieve a death, a wonderful friend gives birth to a stillborn baby and you’re not there for any of it. It all happens again and again, and you cry.
Grieving gets old, annoying, time consuming and exhausting. What if it becomes easier to just not grieve? To not let others grieve? I’ll tell you what happens: Grief itself gets outlawed and a curse descends. What if everyone learns that some emotions are spiritual and some are forbidden?
Has your grief ever been outlawed? Have you ever felt that your sadness or grief was “wrong and not very spiritual” and you should “be over this by now"? If so, I am very sorry. The prohibition of grief is a terrible curse. Sometimes it’s outright, “Don’t cry, it’ll all be okay.” But oftentimes, it’s more subtle (and spiritual) than that. It’s the good-hearted person who says, “It’s not really goodbye, it’s see you later” or “You know, all things work together for good.”
What if your precious youth group kids get married or have a beautiful baby, or a wonderful elderly person who was like your grandparent dies? What if you miss green grass when you're surrounded by brown sand, and then someone tells you, “It’s for God,” or “It’ll be okay someday; you’ll look back on this as one of the best things that ever happened to you.” What if you tell them that?
Grief gets banned, and what was meant as a balm becomes a bomb, ticking. The intended salve starts searing. When loss happens, why must we minimize it? Why are we so uncomfortable with letting the sadness sit? Are we afraid of grief? We sometimes act as if you can’t have grief and faith at the same time. Sometimes, shutting down grief seems spiritual. We tell others, and ourselves, “Forget the past and press on. God’s got a plan. God is sovereign.” We use Bible verses.
Banning grief is not biblical, and it’s not unspiritual. Maybe we feel that grieving a loss of something or someone shows that we don’t have all our treasures in heaven. Perhaps if we delude ourselves with this twisted notion, our treasures would be safe, and we’d never experience loss. Although this is crazy talk, we speak it to others and ourselves.
Does grieving really signal a lack of faith? Would the truly faithful person simply know the goodness of God and cast him or herself on that goodness? No one would say it, but we sometimes treat the sovereignty of God as an excuse to outlaw grief. I mean, how could we question the plan of God by crying?
We may feel that grieving a loss that was caused by someone else (through neglect or abuse) shows a lack of forgiveness. Although we know it’s not true, we act as if once a person’s truly forgiven an offender, the painful effects and memories disappear forever.
Remember, grieving isn’t equal to sinning. Sometimes, outlawed grief goes underground. It becomes a tectonic plate, storing energy, swaying, resisting movement, and then exploding in unanticipated and unpredictable ways. A tectonic plate can store a heck of a lot of energy - sort of like grief, once outlawed. It descends below the surface, and sometimes heaving tectonic plates cause destruction far away. Really smart people with ever smarter machines have to do smart things to pinpoint the actual location of the destructive shift.
Have you ever experienced an earthquake like this, caused by buried grief? It might not be obvious at first, but after a little bit of digging, you realize that the pressure and tension had been building for a long time. So please, allow grief in your own heart and in the hearts of your family members around you to slow and be released in a healthy fashion. If you’re uncomfortable with other peoples’ grief (or your own), you might want to look deep down in your own soul and see if there’s some long-outlawed, long-buried grief. If you find some, begin gently to see it, vent it, and feel it. Begin talking about it, slowly, with a good listener.
And if you come across someone who’s grieving a loss, please remember that they probably don’t need a lecture, a Bible verse, or a pity party, but they could maybe use a hug.
John T. Catrett, III Scissortail Hospice Chaplain
124 East Broadway, PO Box 1216
Drumright, OK. 74030 918.352.3080