Grief
“They’ll be happy”
Says my grandfather as he looks at the handsome face of a 13 year old boy lying motionless on our stretcher.
The last time the family saw him was a couple days before Easter.
Now, a day removed from Easter, they will view the body of their son one final time before he’s taken to the crematory.
Mothers dread walking into their son’s room and finding their boy making out with a girl. They don’t look forward to walking into their son’s room and finding them with cigarette in hand.
But few mothers have experienced this: walking into your son’s room to find him lying on the floor with his face distorted and discolored from livor mortis. It was a heart problem that the doctors said was under the control of proper medication.
The mother came through our door with a laugh, trailed by her husband (the father), their son and a couple friends.
They couldn’t have done this alone. “Thank God for the blessings of friends and family” I think to myself.
Those laughs are now tears as they cut some of the locks of his hair and place them neatly in our small keepsake bags. My dad walks past me and says, “Hardest thing I have to see today.” That after he embalmed a 47 year old cancer patient in the morning and then held the hand of the cancer patient’s wife while she made arrangements.
Silence.
10 minutes pass.
15.
Tears communicate instead of their words.
My dad walks past me again, this time exhaling a massive sigh.
“He looks so good”, one of them says.
We’ve done what we can to remove the livor, leaving his facial skin looking like that of a china doll. And once they begin walking away from the stretcher, the laughter begins again.
I go back and forth with myself in my head:
“It’s got to be unhealthy for them to be laughing.”
“Maybe, but how would you feel when the last time you saw your son’s face it was discolored?”
“But this is so unnatural! The whole thing … the death itself, the way they found him and now … laughter?!?”
“Imagine all the darkness they’ve seen … and now this little glimmer of light … small as it may be … they can see their son one last time the way they remember him. Something as simple as his cleared up skin may be the brightest thought they’ve had for days. Let them laugh now … there will be plenty of crying to do later. They’ve confronted their fears just now. They remember the love they shared. Let them have this moment.”
And with that I consoled myself; reassuring myself that when a child dies, sometimes, somehow … it can be natural for parents to leave the funeral home happy.
****
As with all my post, circumstances have been changed and rearranged so as to protect the privacy of this family.
Worshiping God through Our Sorrow
Van Gogh’s “Old Man in Sorrow.” It’s interesting that the posture of sorrow is similar to a posture of worship.
Few Christians are familiar with the term “orthopathos.”
We’re familiar with orthodoxy, which is “thinking like Jesus”. And many of us hope to be “orthodox.”
Some of us have heard of the term orthopraxy, which is “acting like Jesus”.
But orthopathos, which means “feeling the feelings of Jesus” is an idea that few of us are familiar with because so few of us believe He actually feels.
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It’s said that we become like the object/person we worship. And when you worship God, you become like who or what you think He is.
Do you worship God as patient?
Do you worship God as just?
Do you worship God as love?
You will eventually become all these things if you believe they are apart of God’s character.
What happens when you see God as immutable … as unchangeable?
What happens when you see God as impassible … as emotionless?
So many Christian traditions believe that God is utterly unable to change and utterly unaffected by emotion. Should it be a surprise that so many of us become unmoved and emotionally repressed?
So, when we say “orthopathos” most Christians think that the “proper way to feel like God” is to feel nothing at all. To never grieve, to never have joy, to never get angry … because the One they worship, the One they are trying to reflect has no emotion Himself.
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The ultimate example of orthopathos is found on the cross. The prophet Isaiah, in what is perhaps one of the more powerful prophetic utterances of the Old Testament writes,
“He was despised and rejected by mankind,
a man of suffering,
and familiar with pain. …
Surely he took up our pain
and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God,
stricken by him, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities ….
This laying on of the iniquity, bearing of our suffering, this taking of our pain, this familiarity with pain, this man of suffering who took so much of the world’s grief into his heart that it’s recorded in Mark 13:34:
“”My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death”.
Overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death!
This wasn’t Jesus being punished by the Father per se, but Jesus taking the heart of the Father in human form by seeing what God sees, acting as God would act and ultimately feeling like God feels. It was the ultimate act of representing the Father in human form!
And then, I believe, Jesus died, not from the wounds of the cross, but from the wounds of the heart.
Sure, we can begin to understand right thinking, we can begin to understand right action, but who can feel the heart of God and live?
*****
Why don’t Christians feel sorrow? There’s a couple reasons: 1.) our theology doesn’t allow for it and so 2.), we think it’s unlike our God if we do so.
Wendell Berry’s famed literature character “Jayber Crow” states this:
I prayed to know in my heart His love for the world, and this was my most prideful, foolish, and dangerous prayer. It was my step into the abyss. As soon as I prayed it, I knew that I would die. I knew the old wrong and the death that lay in the world. Just a good man would not coerce the love of his wife, God does not coerce the love of His human creatures, not for Himself or for the world or for one another. To allow that love to exist fully and freely, He must allow it not to exist at all. His love is suffering. It is our freedom and His sorrow. …. And yet all the good I know is in this, that a man might so love this world that it would break his heart.
Some of us will feel God’s missional love for the world, but all of us will feel the sorrow of death. And it’s high time that we as Christians believe it’s okay to sorrow. It’s high time we believe it’s okay to weep, for when we do so we aren’t becoming unlike our God; we are, in fact, worshiping.
No One Understands …
Probably one of the more insensitive things you can say to the bereaved at a funeral is, “I understand what you’re going through, and you’ll get through it.”
You don’t really understand.
Maybe you experienced the death of child, or a spouse, or a parent, but each person’s grief is different..
I had the unpleasant duty of picking up a baby who died shortly after birth from the hospital the other day. The security guard and I were talking about what it must feel like to lose a child and we were debating if we would rather lose a child at birth or when the child was older. We decided that we didn’t want either.
He said, “I never really could understand what it must feel like to lose a child until I had one of my own. The thought of losing him would kill me.”
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In Death, No One Understands …
A cliché I hear from young people goes something like this, “You don’t know what I have to deal with … you don’t know what I’m going through … you just don’t understand!”
This statement is particularly true in death.
Relationships are special, individual and irreplaceable. What you have with a loved one is only between you and them and it can never be fully understood by someone else.
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No One Can Understand … Except maybe God.
In some sense, God shares a special relationship with everyone in the world. You could say that each of us, whether we want him or not, are his children.
Nicolas Wolterstoff stated, while journaling about the loss of his son, that the tears of God are the meaning of history.
In other words, the heart wrenching pain that God feels when He loses a son or a daughter is His very motivation to move and change history. You can almost picture God as a wondering and dejected parent looking for his children to bring them back home. It’s a frightening picture.
In some sense, God understands.
A couple years back, a parent who lost his child wrote a poem that he handed out during his child’s funeral. The poem was almost a diatribe against God. He wrote something to the effect of, “God if you knew what it was like to lose a child, maybe you would have cared enough to have spared mine.”
The more we think about God’s experience as recorded in the Bible, there’s little pain He hasn’t experienced.
He’s lost a son.
He’s been rejected.
He’s lost what He called His wife (Israel was his wife in the Old Testament).
Joseph, the husband of Mary, most likely died when Jesus was young. Jesus probably had to financially provide for His mother.
In the end, Jesus was murdered after an atrociously unjust court hearing.
God has been as subject to pain as we have been. Even with His great power, He’s still unable to escape the hurt that is involved with intimacy.
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He Understands and Has the Strength to Help Us
He’s experienced all the effects of sin, all the injustice and pain, just like us; yet, he’s never sinned, very much unlike us. That’s why we can say He understands our pain and yet He, unlike so many others, has the fortitude of character to lead us out of it.
