Reading Scripture as the Mourning Do: When We Allow Grace for Those Facing Loss*

(*This long blog was originally given as a message at Northkirk Church on June 25, 2019. I have been asked to reproduce it here in a slightly different form)

I’d like to start with what I call a Tale of Two Interventions. Both happened at group meetings.

The first happened at a Christian Writers Conference. We were asked at the start to share what we were working on and why. Most shared about their overcoming books, how God was leading them to victories. When it came to me, I explained that I’d been writing a novel but that my son had taken his life and now I was writing about him and my grief. I explained that I didn’t really have any answers. The silence that followed was, after a few seconds, interrupted by a few expressions of sympathy. Later, after the meeting, one writer approached me and told me that she and her husband had lost their adult child in a similar way. It wasn’t quite suicide, but she knew how I felt. I thanked her. I started to say something but she began talking again, first quoting scripture. “For I know the plans I have for you, Saith the Lord,” she said. Then she talked about how she had the hope of seeing her child again, that her child was in heaven. Then she stared at me. Did I have the conviction that my son was in heaven? she asked. I should have that assurance too.

The second intervention happened at a Survivor’s of Suicide meeting, where the leaders are trained differently. They begin with a few rules. First, let the mourning talk. Let them say what is most on their hearts, and do not give advice or try to make them feel better. Do not even hand them a tissue, because that carries with it the suggestion that they should stop crying. And the leaders do not want to send anyone the message that they should stop crying. At my first meeting of SOS, I went in and out of crying, in part because of what had happened to others, and no one stopped me to tell me what I should believe or have assurance of. I was allowed to work through the absurdity and tragedy of what had happened to my family. 

These two recent experiences are about as different as they can be. Both, of course, showed people trying to show care. Both showed people acting on what they believe about death, dying, and suicide. While it felt like the woman in the first story was confronting me–at least she was willing to speak to me–she seemed to start from the premise that we should always believe and have hope. And we should always stand ready to give that hope to others who may need it. The second intervention moves from the premise that grief is messy. With permanent loss, especially the shocking and traumatic loss of a suicide, the best we can do is help others to grieve.

These two experiences perfectly capture the twin rails I’ve been riding for about 21 months, between idealism and positive thinking–between trying to understand how faith enters into my suffering–and then deep sadness. These twin rails that I’m riding on show the tension I would like us to inhabit, if we can, for the next few minutes.

To Mourn and to Hope
Two passages best highlight for me this same tension between our ideals and the messiness of our everyday lives. What I hope to demonstrate is that the messiness is where I believe we are most likely to find God’s grace, God’s compassion. First, there is Jesus’ statement in the beatitudes—those who mourn shall be comforted. This is given in no uncertain terms for the coming Kingdom he is announcing.

The second passage, also from Matthew, comes a couple of chapters after the Sermon on the Mount in a section of the Gospel where one miracle after another seems to happen. Jesus is becoming famous as a healing rabbi. He not only speaks with authority; he has authority, seemingly, over disease and death. The Kingdom of God has suddenly appeared, and it looks very different from any earthly kingdoms familiar to the average first century, Palestinian Jew. It is in this context, at the start of this passage, that we learn of a leader who has just lost his daughter. The mourners and flute players have come to his home. He is unnamed—he is simply identified as a synagogue leader—and he decides to approach Jesus. Just to show that I’ve done a little homework, I learned that there’s some suggestion from the manuscript evidence that the church community surrounding Matthew at the time this gospel was written had problems with synagogues and therefore with synagogue leaders. Scholars believe this because many of the Greek manuscripts omit that this man who lost his daughter was a leader of a local synagogue. They call him simply a leader. Manuscripts from other languages include that he was a synagogue leader. Scholars argue that Matthew would have been slow to acknowledge this because he would have been at odds with him. I don’t know what these two groups, Jewish synagogues and the early Christian community were fighting over—I often think it would be interesting to find out what the early church fights were about. The gospel writer doesn’t tell us what they were. That isn’t the focus here. The focus is that this man has come to Jesus, and Jesus responds by going to his house.

On the way, Jesus also encounters a woman who has been bleeding for 12 years. The gospel doesn’t tell us what caused it. We don’t learn her name either. The point seems to be that he heals her. He has compassion. And only after that healing, he comes to the home of the synagogue leader. The professional mourners are there. I’d like to pause here and ask what insight we might have into how this man felt? The gospel doesn’t go poetic on us. It doesn’t enter the mind of this man any more than into the woman with the blood flow for 12 years. Yet I think we can say both were suffering deeply. Could you imagine bleeding for 12 years? And the man, we only know that his daughter has died. I also think that we learn a lot from what he did. We know that he came before Jesus and asked his help. Here’s what I suspect he was most faced with: He wanted his daughter back. He knew only loss, and his first thought was how to get her back. Jesus, who is becoming a famous healer, seemed like the right man to talk to.

Two days after we lost Michael, this is how I was reading this scripture. I thought I could really understand what that synagogue leader felt. What I was feeling at the time was this: I wanted our son back. I was in complete shock and denial, and I wanted him back. In one of my Facebook posts from day 2, I said something typically modern, but I think it gets at what this synagogue leader was feeling: “I’m ready for that time machine now. I only need to go back about six days.” Like the synagogue leader, I was absurdly reaching out to whatever help there might be.

In the passage from Matthew, of course, Jesus tells the mourners to leave, that the girl is only sleeping. They laugh at him, and then after they leave, he heals her, gives her back to the synagogue leader. What a perfect ending. Jesus is really giving us a glimpse of his coming kingdom.

For my family, on the other hand, Jesus didn’t show up that way. He didn’t show up that way for all of our friends who lost loved ones. This is the tension I wish for us to contemplate, because I think we can learn from it. Since the day we’ve lost Michael, I’ve read this passage from Matthew a little differently than I used to. I pause it like a cassette tape at the point where Jesus enters but hasn’t yet kicked out the mourners. Because Jesus could raise the dead, and in his earthly ministry he did. But that isn’t what happened to us. We, like all of our friends, have been left to mourn. Now Jesus also said, Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

There is a real tension here, if we think about it as believers, between this injunction to mourn and the more triumphal passages where Jesus performs spectacular healings. Where should we land in all of this? Should we be triumphal, or mourn when we face loss? And if we do mourn, what does that look and feel like, and how do those of us who are friends help? What can we do to make things better?

After we lost Michael, a number of people at work and in other places would stop to speak to me and, essentially, try to cheer me up. It remains a solid fact that people don’t generally know what to do with the bereaved. I have placed stress on one word in that previous statement on purpose: do. We feel we have to act, to do something for someone else, and we also sense that we are helpless before the great loss that they might feel. Most of what I have said to mourning friends, always began with good intention—with a focus on trying to help, on recovery and on making things as they were before. But then we focus on what is neither possible—unless we have a time machine or some amnesiac available—nor helpful.

There is in all of this our central problem. What do we do? How do we show compassion? My answer is this: There is nothing we can do to make things better. There is only one thing we can do. We can help our friends to mourn. This is not something small. It isn’t quite what we think it is. We can learn it. And there is something very deeply compassionate and deeply Godly about it.

The Two Faces of Job’s Comforters
As for the church, generally, I have noticed that the one thing we do well is talk. I have decided that there may be two reasons for this, at least. Talk is the way we control ourselves and others. Even when I have sensed that I am not getting through to someone, for example, when discussing politics with a friend who holds a different position, or one of my children, I will keep talking. And when I stop talking, I am still thinking about the things I want to say. Perhaps if I reframe it, if I re-emphasize this angle, all will become clear. Even after I stop talking, I am still thinking, not about what the other is saying, but about what else I am going to say. What will I say to this person that will really get through to him or her?

Can I suggest that it is this that most of us will bring to the grieving among us? We bring in our talk what are really methods of control; no matter how gentle we think our words may be, they are our tools and methods, after all. This is how we have lived the life of faith. Suffering stands before us as something that might challenge that control.

Unfortunately, too many of the things that we say to the grieving, too many things that I have said to the grieving, can leave the impression that they are not really accepted in their current state. We tell them that their loved one is “in a better place,” or that “their loved one would not like to see them like this.” These are words of dismissal. They are words that tell the mourning to get over it, to move on.

Part of the need to talk may also come from our need for orthodoxy and to defend God. Especially in this context of suffering, when everything that has happened would seem to defy our expectations for a good life, and what we sometimes call the promises of God, we might be prone to defend God and put this experience in the proper light. In this context, we may feel that we need to speak for God. So many people have shared “overcoming” and “triumphal” words with me.

We may fail to recognize what we are really doing because we really don’t know how our friends feel in their loss. I would return us to that synagogue leader who has lost his daughter and his one thought is to get her back. And no amount of piety or scripture is going to take her place. In fact, we may not notice that our talk may be telling the grieving to deny their loss. If we want them to have hope and to put on good cheer, this goes in direct opposition to the experiences of the one who is suffering. In telling him to look on the bright side or accept that his daughter is in heaven, you are asking this person, in all of his stress, to somehow begin thinking about the conflict between what he experiences and all of your expectations for a good life that you are trying to get him or her to see. I can tell you that when I was told to just praise God anyway, I felt like I had sinned deeply because I missed my son.

Again, this will all happen if we have not tried to understand what the person is suffering.

The problem for those of us who would help is that the only concrete way to help would be to bring back their loved one, as Jesus does with the synagogue ruler’s daughter. Or, as in my more shallow Facebook cry out for a time machine to go back six days and keep my son from his actions. We all feel this, I think. Words, cards, these don’t do much in the balance against such a loss. And we know there are no clear-cut steps to this mourning process. There is no method to bring to helping those who mourn, not if it means making them feel better. There is, perhaps, only this. We can simply be with the other person and, rather than us doing the talking, letting them talk. Don’t tell them what to believe or how to feel. Don’t see the mourner as stubborn, willful, unrepentant, or full of pride and anger. Give up the idea that the magic of the right word or the caring voice should remedy all that ails them.

I want to suggest that this focus on what we shouldn’t do shows us what we can do. In fact, what I’ve found is that what we can do actually opens the way to God’s grace in the shadow of death. I came to understand this after attending a few Survivors meetings and listening to the instructions. This was the meeting I referenced in my second opening tale. We were instructed by the facilitator to observe a few rules for the group. First, we were not to interrupt another or to give them advice. We are to let the other talk until they are finished. Also important is that when someone begins to cry, it is not our place to hug them, touch them, or hand them a tissue. Such actions, especially handing them a tissue, suggests that we want them to stop crying. What is desired in the group is for everyone to be honest, forthcoming, and fully expressive of their grief. Even handing someone a tissue can be construed as a kind of denial.
Behind the pain of those who grieve is the real loss of a person we would like to have back. And that is what we can’t have. So we are faced with this most harsh journey. We must go on living without the one we love. We are the ones who must do it, and no one else should take that away from us or add to it. We must simply go forward with loss. This is mourning that Jesus says will be comforted. Do we have the faith to see and believe this? Do we believe that beatitude?

I stayed out of school the first week after we lost Michael. I returned the second week. I know people who have never returned to work. Their lives were shattered. The second day I was back, I had lunch with a friend. I began to weep. I couldn’t stop. I covered my head in shame. When I looked up, my friend was weeping with me. I apologized. He told me not to.

The next day, he sought me out for lunch. He wasn’t ashamed to sit with me through those moments and just to hear what it felt like.
I hope I’ve made plain what is the problem with approaching the grieving with our pet theories and sayings, with trying to help them. It’s best to set these aside and just sit with them and listen. It is really easier with the grieving than it seems. We don’t want advice or help. We don’t want to be brought to look on the bright side, to see the silver lining. For us, there is none of that. Cards and flowers are nice. Thoughts are nice. Prayers make a difference. But a friend is not afraid to spend time with the mourning, playing cards or doing whatever they would like to do, giving them some space to just be, and is there when sadness comes and when happiness comes. It’s always nice when someone tells me something they remember about my son. Wonderful memories of a lost loved one is encouraging, not triggering, and to simply listen is to be a friend. 

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For good advice on helping the grieving, check out the following link from the Website “What Not to Say at a Shivah (and What to Do and Say Instead) https://womensrabbinicnetwork.wordpress.com/2013/12/10/what-not-to-say-at-shiva-and-what-to-do-and-say-instead/