Ernest Becker
If You’re Dealing with Complicated Grief, Seek First Your Therapist, Not Your Pastor
Ernest Becker proposes that depressed individuals (specifically those depressed from death) suffer both doubt in their faith and doubt their value within their worldview. In other words, grieving people often doubt God and they doubt His purpose for them.
Kenneth Doka suggests that “one of the most significant tasks in grief is to reconstruct faith or philosophical systems, now challenged by the loss” (Loss of the Assumptive World; 49). All forms of grief, normal, complicated and especially traumatic grief produce doubts about one’s faith.
If you’re dealing with grief, your entire worldview is probably being challenged. It’s only natural that we attempt to seek council in such times; but, it might not be your best choice to seek your church and pastor’s help.
As many of you know, I’ve battled depression this past year; and while grief and depression are different, there’s many similarities. As I’ve adjusted to life with depression, there’s a number of things that I’ve learned and this is one of them: Most churches and pastors (and religious friends) aren’t equipped to recognize and address the depressed. We should not expect them to be equipped. But we do. They haven’t been trained to understand the psychosomatic nature of depression; nor have they a background in tasks of mourning or grief work models; the different types of grief and how each one should be approached.
And it’s okay to recognize the limitations in our religious community.
Today’s church speaks the language of affirmation, the language of light (cataphatic theology as opposed apophatic theology) to such a degree that doubt and darkness can sometimes be viewed as sin.
Depression, for some religious communities, is sometimes seen as a curse of God.
And grief is something that God might not feel, so neither should we (at least for an extended period of time).
And while some churches can be understanding of grief, and the doubt and depression that comes with it, few are prepared to understand how said grief, doubt and depression affects you.
We can become more course, more rigid and more … unacceptable. And, honestly, it’s possible that we do indeed become unacceptable for many churches, as our darkness and our doubt takes us out of the comfort realm for many within the church.
Indeed, many pastors recognize the limits of their training and can recommend professionals to help with your grief, etc., but some don’t recognize their limits. They can provide first or second level assessment (i.e., “you need some professional guidance”), but the deeper levels of assessment and counsel should be left to those grief specialists.
Unless your church or pastor has a professional background in understanding depression and/or grief, I think we do both our pastors, our religious friends and ourselves a great service by seeing someone who is professionally trained.
Comfort Cliches as Defense Mechanism
For Ernest Becker, the idea of transference is central to understanding the human condition. We are fallible and finite, destined to death and our works are destined to destruction. In order to escape these bleak, nihilistic feelings, humanity much find a person or object to which we can transfer our fear of death. A parent, so to speak, who can quell our fears by the might of their power. Once we have this person or object in place, we can find stability in knowing that our life can live on through them.
God, for instance, is an object/person where humanity places their fears, believing that He can enable meaning for life, rendering death meaningless. So, we ignore the harsh reality of death and dying through our conception of God. God enables our defense mechanism of transference. Which, I might add, isn’t an evil per se, but — like everything — can have unintended and hurtful consequences.
The other factor, says Becker, in understanding the human condition is repression. Repression, in the context of death denial, means the attempt to gain power as an immortality project, thus repressing our weakness in mortality. We can repress our fears, our insecurities, our finitude by finding building our own everlasting kingdom or symbol. And once our kingdom is established, we can live on, albeit, through our legacy of might, thus repressing the mortality reality.
Repression and transference are opposites: one seeks power for oneself (Becker and others call this “Eros”), while the other seeks to embed oneself in another (Becker calls this “Agape”). But, the two come together in perfect unison when we greet the bereaved family at a viewing and say something that both attempts to repress the reality of death and make it all better through religious verbiage.
The reason comfort clichés can be so offensive is that those who are experiencing grief have had their walls of repression and transference broken. They are sensitive to the reality of the human condition and the loneliness that comes with it. And here you come, attempting to minimalize their fears and pain with a cliché that’s meant more so to help you feel good than give real encouragement to the family.
When people use comfort cliches, they are often more concerned with comforting themselves than comforting the bereaved.
And when you’re throwing clichés around as a defense mechanism, the bereaved will often know … and this, my friends, is what they hear:
I don’t want to hear your story. I don’t want your pains to become a part of my life. My life is painful enough. It doesn’t need to be disturbed by your story.
Man, I can’t imagine your pain. In fact, I might be able to imagine your pain. Honestly, I don’t want to imagine your pain.
Your grief is your grief; it’s not mine. I can’t walk this dark path with you. Honestly, though, when I think about it, I could walk this path with you, I just don’t want to. My life is good right now. I like my view and I don’t like yours.
Here, instead of hearing you out and walking with you, I’m going to make myself feel good. It’s important that I still see myself as a good person. I’m not heartless, so let me make you a cake and leave it at your door.
Let me send you a card.
Let give you a Bible verse.
I think I read something about how time heals grief. Let me tell you that.
Let me tell you how God has plans in this death.
I need to tell you something, give you something so that I can feel good about myself. I can’t feel guilty, so I’ll half-ass comfort you so that I can feel good while you feel like shit.
“God is love.”
“Time will heal your wounds.”
“You can get through this.”
“You are still young … you can have more children.”
Defense mechanisms. All. In the Spector of death, we use them too much.
If we want to be good communicators with those experiencing death and dying, we need to recognize both the repression and transference in our own lives and silence them for the sake of the bereaved. Instead of denying the reality of death, accept it and listen to the grieving who are walking through it. Instead of trivializing death as something “God has overcome”, be willing to enter the loneliness that comes with grief. Enter the holy space of holy Saturday, and – at the risk of your faith – accept doubt and silence as real possibilities.
If you can’t do this … if you’re unwilling to do this, if you’re set on denying the reality of death, then do yourself and the bereaved a favor, and just stay away from it and those it’s touching.
Symbolic Immortality and the Hatred of Others
I’ve often asked a variation of this question: Why do Christians fight each other so much? Think Rob Bell, John Piper and Mark Driscoll.
I have a couple theories.
The main one is this: selfishness. Egotism. Narcissism. Sin. Whatever you want to call it. That wrongful attitude that puts the almighty ME above everything else. Even though we claim to be like Jesus, our selfishness proves otherwise.
But there’s a couple other theories as well:
Two: we become tribalistic and smear on the hate to all the “others” who aren’t a part of the “evangelical” tribe, or the “American” tribe, etc.
The third theory is the sibling rivalry theory; that those closest to us are usually the ones who have the greatest potential to receive our love and, when we disagree, our hate.
My main theory for us evangelical /protestant types is that we’ve simply vested too much of the Christian life into orthodoxy and too little into orthopraxis and orthopathos, so that any small disagreement warrants hate mail.
But here’s another theory that’s right up my ally, that few of us — including myself — have heard of.
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It comes from Pulitzer Prize winner Ernest Becker. Becker combines the denial of death, symbolic immortality and — at least in this discussion — religion to offer an explanation for hatred. And if you’re interested in Becker’s theory, here’s the short of it:
Denial of death, according to Becker, is an all encompassing explanation for human endeavors.
Death, though, for Becker has two levels of meaning: The first level is phyiscal death. After all, how many times a day do we attempt to distance ourselves from death? Do you eat healthy? Do you wear a seat belt? Do you stand more than 14 inches away from the microwave, and put on a radiation suit if you must go within the 14 inch safe zone?
The second understanding of death plays more into our discussion. This type of death can occur during life. It’s the type of death that takes place when we experience a loss of meaning, worth or affirmation.
On a corporate/community/national level, Becker would say that religion, war, art, science … nearly every human endeavor is an attempt to save us from this second understanding of death … from the void of nothingness … the forgotteness that comes when we’re simply a nobody.
And this type of denial of death … of being apart of something meaningful … is a symbolic immortality, as its something that will live on beyond us.
Robert J. Lifton coined the phrase “symbolic immortality” and he posits five ways we attempt to obtain this type of immortality:
Through the produce of our lovemaking. Ex.: Children, grandchildren, our family.
Through our art work, scientific discover or our product. Ex. Ford, Mozart, Darwin, etc.
Through the well-being of nature. “So that our children can live better than we do”; the green movement.
Through a transcendent experience. Buddhism, the born again experience, nirvana
Through our involvement with a community larger than ourselves. Political party, religion, etc.
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The hatred of others, posits Becker, occurs when somebody else’s symbol starts to tread on ours. If you threaten my children, you threaten my significance … my contribution to the world … my stake in something greater … my symbolic immortality.
If you threaten the work of my hands, you threaten the mark I’ve made in this world. You’ve questioned my worth and contribution and you’ve essentially diminished and cut off my contribution … the thing that’s made me significant.
And finally, if you threaten my religion … if your community of faith overtakes my community of faith, you’ve questioned my/our story. You’ve diminished our chance for meaning in the history of humanity. If you question us, you call into question our meaning … our worth … our contribution … and for that, we will fight you.
