Hymn of the Day

Church this morning started out with an Introit (opening hymn by the choir) on grief...the humor was not lost on me...nor the friend who was sitting next to me. She said (and she's probably missed less than a dozen Sunday services in almost 60 years)..."I've never heard an Introit on the topic of grief before." We laughed a little laugh, and a small tear slid down my cheek...


Grief is a maudlin business, and not very many people can stay present with someone who is grieving. Most of us have a difficult time staying present to or own grieving, much less to the grief of another. Over many years and quite a few hours of professional counseling, I've learned that I haven't grieved well in my past experiences of loss...and the inevitable result is that the grief stays with you, as a sort of scabbed-over wound. Unless we give ourselves to the grief process, we don't heal completely. In Parker Palmer's words, we must confront our inward winters directly - regardless of whether the cause of winter is failure, betrayal, depression, death, or something else entirely...grief comes from many different experiences, but the feelings are very much the same.

We have to move into the thing we most want to avoid, because the only way to the other side of grief is directly through the middle of it. People often use Job as the example of someone who has lost everything, and is going through a horrific grieving process...friends and advisors come and go...all with their unique perspective on why Job ended up in his predicament, how he should respond to it...etc. Needless to say, these advisors brought little comfort to Job, however well-intentioned they might have been. Job had to simply live through it, to work through the stages of shock...denial... pain...anger...bargaining...depression...loneliness... and finally, acceptance & hope. Kubler-Ross' 7 stages of grief help to put words around a subject that is incredibly difficult to explain to someone who is not experiencing or has not experienced deep grief...it isn't a linear or logical process...but is often cyclical and confusing. Just as you believe you've moved through shock and denial and are making progress along the path, you can be thrown backwards into the process, only to experience the stages over again. It is so very hard to simply sit with someone and offer your presence as comfort, when what most of us want to do is fix it...reframe it...or even better, we would like for the person who is grieving to simply get over it and move on with life. Grief has it's own clock though, and the clock is different for every individual. One cannot set a timer on grief.

It reminds me of the bull rides I used to enjoy watching at the rodeo when I was a kid...while the bull jumps and bucks and writhes this way and that...the cowboy has strapped himself in...hoping to hang on for just 8 seconds...8 seconds! If only the bullride of grief would be over in 8 seconds! Like the cowboy who never really knows which way the bull will go...the person walking through grief is hard pressed to know which direction their emotions will take on any given day.

I finish tonight with the words from our "Hymn of Response" today, because it reminded me of the fact that grief, while it cannot be timed, does not allow us to check-out from the other responsibilities of life. The clock of life ticks on...grief or no grief, and so somehow, I have to learn how to honor both the grieving and the living of life...one does not yield to the other...nor should it.

When we are called to sing your praise with hearts so filled with pain
that we would rather sit and weep or stand up to complain,
remind us God, you understand the burdens that we bear;
you too have walked the shadowed way and know our deep despair.

When we are called to sing your praise and cannot find our voice, because our losses leave us now no reason to rejoice, remind us God, that you accept our sad laments in prayer; you too have walked the shadowed way and know our deep despair.