Several years ago a group of doctors known as neuropsychiatrists met for their annual session. It was my pleasure to be present and one of the papers read was entitled “Grief Reaction.” It interested me to know that these doctors were concerned with what happens to a member of the family when the shock of bereavement strikes, and I felt that here was a theme to which a minister might well give thought. So our topic has to do with the problem of grief.
It is a somber subject of course. There is a line in Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,”
Never morning wore
To evening, but some heart did break
and who knows when you may be forced to face the burden of sudden bereavement? Moreover, it is possible that there are those who do not see the beauty of this day because past grief shuts out the sunshine. In looking for light upon our darkness we go back to a text from our Lord: “In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).
I
Christ wants us to learn to accept grief as one of the facts of life. There is a false way of looking at things which would have us believe that life is all sweetness and light, and that any trouble which intrudes upon our happiness is not real and has no place in the scheme of things. But our Lord could not be hoodwinked by any such juggling of the truth. He looked the facts in the face and he saw that in the kind of world in which we live trouble is bound to come. He said it as plainly as words can make it: “In the world we shall have tribulation”-period. There is no way you can shuffle the cards and deal it out. It is there, and it is there to stay; and the part of wisdom is to see it, and to accept it, and to make up your mind calmly that grief is bound to come.
I wonder if you saw that amusing touch one of the writers reporting the Walker Cup Golf Matches in Scotland gave his article? He said that the American players would face not only the hazards of the Old Course at St. Andrews, but also cold and probable rain and a lazy wind. He went on to describe a lazy wind as one that was too lazy to go around and so it went right through you. It is not otherwise with the trouble that causes grief; it may go around you for a time, but sooner or later it will go right through you. In the world, whether you wish it or not, “ye shall have tribulation.”
I went once to visit a friend whom I had known in college. In the meantime he had married and established his home where there were two children. He told me that several years before he and his wife had lost a child, just two years old. At first he was bitter and said over and over to himself, “Why did it have to happen to me and not to someone else?” Later on, he realized that there was no good reason why he should expect to be exempt, and that he then said to himself: “Why shouldn’t it happen to me?” Then he found not only the deep peace which comes from acceptance, but the strength of the presence of God, which his bitterness had formerly canceled.
So then in dealing with the problem of grief, the first step is to learn to accept it as something that is bound to come.
II
The second step lies in seeking to understand the nature of the experience.
Our doctor friends can help us by pointing out reactions which are altogether normal, and so make us willing to be patient with the slow healing process of time. I remember once having a conference with a wife who had lost her husband. She told me she had accepted the loss, but that her problem lay in having no interest in life. Later on I discovered that disinterestedness in life is altogether normal and to be expected. It made me wish I had known that fact at the time, for it would have helped her. As one expert puts it: “We should anticipate these stages in our emotional convalescence: unbearable pain, poignant grief, empty days, resistance to consolation, disinterestedness in life, gradually giving way under the healing sunlight of love, friendship, and social challenge, to a pattern of action and the acceptance of the irresistible challenge of life.”
Another characteristic of grief so common as to be mentioned by the doctors, is that often grief is accompanied by intense feelings of guilt. The sorrowing person blames himself for not giving the deceased proper care during a period of illness, for failure in some obligation, or for being responsible in some way for the cause of death. You would know how real is the anguish, if you had ever been with such a person at such a time, and had seen the look of agony on his face, and heard him say, “If only I had done this or that, it might not have happened.” The reminder that you were never consciously negligent and that you always did the best you knew, plus the remembrance that a sense of guilt is often a characteristic of grief, will help lessen the load.
Oftentimes I have found another form of the sense of guilt. We are so wedded to the Old Testament idea that adversity is necessarily a sign of sin that we suppose our sorrow is God’s punishment for some evil of ours. At that point it is well to remind yourself of this fact, that while all sin brings suffering, all suffering is not necessarily due to sin. The proof of that truth lies in the picture of Christ: he was sinless, but he was not without suffering. You will divide your grief in half if you can succeed in separating from it any sense of guilt
The doctors also tell us it is important that grief be allowed to express itself. It is an emotion, and if it is bottled up and not allowed to come out it will cause a nervous restiveness and do physical damage. Rabbi Liebman puts it like this: “When we face the loss of a dear one, we should allow our hearts full leeway in the expression of their pain. … After all, we were given tear ducts to use for just such hours of darkness.”
III
“In the world,” said Jesus, “ye shall have tribulation.” In the light of that fact, we would first of all accept, and then try to understand the nature of the experience. Our Lord does not stop there, however; he goes on to say this other thing: “But be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.” Having made allowance for the minus that is in life, he suggests that there is a plus, and he would have us accentuate the positive. When the first shock of grief is past, it is right to begin to think about the plus.
We should remember that whatever we lose, we can be grateful for what we have already had. I heard the late Dr. Albert W. Beaven of Rochester say what this truth meant to him. He said that his seven-year-old little girl died and he and Mrs. Beaven seemed altogether unable to overcome their grief. There were so many things around the house which reminded them of her-her room, her playthings, the vacant chair at the table; and whenever they saw these things they were reminded of their loss. He said their grief was leading them further and further into gloom, and he realized that something would have to be done to preserve their health. Somehow he got hold of our truth and he said to his wife: “Instead of thinking of what we have lost, let’s begin to think of what we have possessed. We have had seven years of joy from this little girl’s life, and nothing that has happened can take that away from us.” And so from then on the things that reminded them of their little one were made to speak of what they had possessed instead of what they had lost. On that ladder they climbed out of grief into gladness.
IV
There is a further fact which makes all the difference in the world for the Christian. Remember that if you have lost one whom you love, he is not lost. If this is really God’s world, then we are under his care whether we live or whether we die. Much as we miss those we love, we can rejoice that they have found their true home in the love of God. As Marcus Aurelius put it: “It is pleasant to die, if there be gods; and sad to live, if there is none.”
Here is a man named Walter Lowen who lost his wife and who wrote something of his experience for us in the March, 1955, Reader’s Digest. He says:
Let me tell you what the doctor who attended my wife did for me as I stood dazed and lost at the foot of her bed, knowing not only that the 37 years we had had together were over, but feeling also that all meaning had gone from life forever. He took my arm and held it for a moment. And then he said in a matter-of-fact voice: “You’ll see her again.” That was all.
But it was all I needed to hear. That simple gesture and eloquent statement reminded me of the one thing that has been given to us to help us bear such separations from our beloved: the resurgent and ever-present ability to believe in immortality.
The idea of immortality is the strongest lifeline to the grief-stricken. In my case I could, from his words on, think of the separation of Selma and myself as temporary. Everything that sustained that belief sustained me. Three of my friends somehow knew the almost morbid sensitivity that one in grief has; they sent flowering plants instead of cut flowers, so that the idea of continuance of life and not its brief blooming would be suggested.
As our Lord put it in the long ago: “I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.” What life is like in that land that is fairer than day we do not know, but we do not need to know; we know only that he is there, and that is enough. When a sharp pain struck the heart of Peter Marshall and he was being carried out into the night on a stretcher, he looked up into the face of his wife Catherine and said, “See you in the morning, Darling.” It is the Christian’s faith that though the night be dark and long, the morning will surely come, and with it a blessed reunion.
V
There is a fifth and final thing to be said. The belief in immortality is sound, and we have a right to strengthen ourselves in its assurance. Yet it is unnatural and unchristian and unhealthy to fold our hands and sit still and spend our time gazing into heaven. When our Lord stood with his men on the Mount of Olives and was taken up out of their sight, they went back to their job of carrying on for him. They did their best to do what he would have done had he remained with them. They were consciously loyal to the One they had lost and sought to continue his life vicariously in their own work. As they did so, they were saved from the dangers of self-pity and they found the genuine satisfaction of helping to make life better for other people. Here is something, I think, for the rest of us: we can become, as Rabbi Liebman puts it, “ambassadors of our departed, their messengers and their spokesmen, carrying out the mission for which they lived and strove, and which they bequeathed to us.”
The late Rufus Jones had only one son, Lowell, who died at the age of eleven, but the boy continued for forty-five years to be a dominant influence in that great man’s life. Jones’s study at Haverford included many photographs of the learned and famous, but the central place, over the mantel, was always occupied by the portrait of this boy. Rufus Jones felt that he had to live for both himself and his boy, and in this he succeeded to a remarkable degree. Writing more than forty years after the occasion of his sorrow, Rufus Jones told of the boy as follows: “I overheard him once talking to a group of playmates, when each one was telling what he wanted to be when grown up, and Lowell said when his turn came, ‘I want to grow up and be a man like my daddy.’ Few things in my life have ever touched me as these words did, or have given me a greater impulse to dedication.”
Here then is the problem of grief as seen in the light of our Christian faith. You can accept it as one of the facts of life and do your best to understand it. You can remind yourself of what you have possessed, instead of thinking only of what you have lost. You can rest in the Christian’s assurance of life after death and look forward to the morning of reunion. Then you can go back to your task as an ambassador of the departed. There is hardly anyone as far along as middle life who does not have one he loves there in the unseen. It may be a wife or a husband, or a mother or a father, or even a child, as it was with Rufus Jones. In the sacred silence of this moment you recall all the loveliness of that life and you know the things he would be doing were he here today in the flesh. There then is the final answer to your problem. You can substitute for him. You can step into his shoes and take his place and carry on for him. And as you do, the darkness will become light and the night will brighten into morning and you can say with our Lord, “I have overcome the world.”
Copyright © 1983 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
