Scripture
Psalm 34: 17 - 18
“The righteous cry out, and the Lord hears them; he delivers them from all their troubles. The Lord is close to the broken-hearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit”
Matthew 5: 4
“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”
Reflection
So, to be honest there has been a whole lot of grief experienced this last little while. Quite often we relate grief to death and loss and in some ways that is one of the most visible causes of grief in our lives, but the reality is that there are other ways in which we grieve. I have been wondering lately about how we deal with grief in the world today. I understand that there are many things in our lives that cause grief. We grieve over the loss of loved ones. We grieve over the loss of friendships. We grieve of the loss of possibility, or what we thought our lives should have been. Yet no matter why we are experiencing grief I believe that we deal with our grief in similar ways. In many ways each of us feel grief in our lives, but it appears as if the world is not comfortable with our grief. We therefore grieve in private. We hold our grief close to our hearts and in doing so we end up navigating our grief alone, or only with those who are close to us. But I want to share a story with you. This reflection is from “The Progeny of Love” written by April Tierney;
“A magnificent killer whale named Tahlequah gave birth and caught the world’s attention. Her calf died only thirty minutes after being born, each of those blessed moments a sacrament to the progeny of love. But the reason journalists and photographers and millions of viewers followed this mother’s story, was her willingness to grieve unbidden, to be a thing utterly governed by kinship.
After a year and a half of growing this enormous life insider of her belly, and the immense feat of labour, and a half hour of looking into one another’s eyes, Tahlequah proceeded to carry her dead baby on the tip of her nose for seventeen days, traveling more than a thousand miles all throughout the Salish Sea.
And some people think that grief is not inexplicably beautiful. But perhaps it’s because those people (who are us people) no longer see grieving enacted publicly as a plea for sanity, as a way of feeding that which grants us life.
There was not real grieving at my mother’s funeral—sniffling and shoving tears back up into our eyes, yes, but no keening. No collapsing into the bottomless cavern of one another’s trembling arms, no crying out into the insufferable heat of that late-summer day, and certainly no carrying my mom’s dead body as a hole procession all throughout the places she ever knew and loved..
So I continued to carry her mostly on my own. I wailed in the privacy of my own home long after the funeral was over, with on the hurting eyes of my husband to behold me—a kind of holding that was never meant to do alone.
I imagine that if killer whales were not endangered, Tahlequah would have swam those seventeen days with a grand procession of many other glistening, black and white giants all across the ocean.
Or perhaps she swam for one thousand miles to personify the loneliness of her grief in a world spinning toward oblivion.
And our savagery for not swimming alongside her, for taking pictures, for watching her exquisite ceremony on our little screens as if it were pure entertainment, as if that couldn’t be any one of us, carrying our dead children our into the dark and empty streets.”
We have come to understand that our grief is something which each of us must bear alone, when in fact we have been called into a blessed community. To grieve is to feel deeply the loss of love. It has been said that grief is not so much sadness but more accurately it is love that can no longer be expressed. Yet, we live in community and it is in community that we should be allowed to grieve. It is within community that we should be crying, wailing, keening, feeling the profound losses in our lives.
The reading from Psalm 34 speaks to the fact that the world is broken and as such we will be faced with grief throughout the course of our lives. This brokenness can leave us brokenhearted and crushed in spirit. Yet, this psalm also makes a stunning declaration, it states that no matter what we are facing, God is facing them with us. When we feel that grief is solely our burden to carry we insulate and isolate ourselves from others. We build walls, which we think will protect us, but in these walls keep others out. The reality is that we don’t have to be alone in our grief, for God is always with us, which we forget quite often, but we also forget that grief can and is corporate. Communities grieve losses as we grieve loss, communities support as our supports fail, communities journey with us when we feel alone. It is in community where we might find comfort when we need it most. I wonder if it is so normal for us to isolate in the midst of grief because we are afraid that we will become a burden on our communities. The challenge might be for us to remember that when we share the burden of our grief the load might just become more manageable for all of us as we share our grief with each other. To know that God and our communities are there for us and that our grief does not always to hide can free us to truly grieve what we lose and in doing so we might just learn to live again.
Prayer
God of Infinite Love, we ask that you be with us as we struggle with grief. We ask for the courage to be open enough to share our grief with our friends, family, and community. Give us the wisdom to be present to those around us who are struggling with their own grief. Help us find support in community and offer our support to the community in return. We ask this in the name of the one who cried with Mary and Martha, your son, Jesus. Amen.