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 Matthew 11:28-30
I clearly remember the first time I saw the face of grief. It was on a Saturday morning when I was twelve years old. The doorbell rang, and I ran to buzz the visitor in, with my father, who was a minister, not far behind me. We lived on the second floor, and together we looked down to the landing at the bottom of the steps and saw a man named Tommy D'Ascanio, a longshoreman and a member of my father's church. I remember only his first two words. "Janice died," he said. Janice was his twelve-year-old daughter and she was my friend. We had been playmates together since we were toddlers.
The funeral was held on the following Saturday. I badly wanted to go. I wanted to experience grief with a family and a community, and I wanted to be there for my friend. But my parents thought I was too young. They sent me to a movie instead. I felt cheated. I still feel cheated. I needed to grieve somebody I cared about. I needed to learn how to handle loss.
I know this much for sure, that every person present in this sanctuary today is carrying some kind of grief. Every person knows about losing someone dear.
Years ago, when I was riding in a funeral car with a woman who had just been widowed, as we turned into the cemetery, she said, "Arthur, every gravestone represents a broken heart." Losing somebody we love has an impact on us, often more powerful than we realize.
I remember Lore, who died from cancer when she was in her middle fifties. I had known her for about twenty years as her pastor and her friend. Lore was a very sad, alone and lonely soul who was always struggling to connect. Often she would talk about what happened when she was four years old when her mother died. She remembers being in the funeral home and wanting to touch her dead mother's body to say goodbye. Her aunt, who subsequently raised her--a woman Lore would later describe as an angry and bitter woman--wouldn't allow it.
Looking back, Lore said she had needed to talk about her mother. She yearned to hear stories about her. But her aunt would say, "Don't think about her and don't talk about her. She's gone." When, in her forties, Lore got cancer, she wondered if it had to do with the grief that was never processed. Grief can be powerful. The effect of loss is often huge.
The other day I talked with a young man in his early twenties. We hadn't seen one another for awhile, and he was catching me up on the events of his life. He reminded me it had been ten years since his father died. I remember the trauma of his father's death, how bonded the two of them had been. Then he reminded me of the deep depression he suffered in the following years, which became so severe that he was hospitalized.
When I asked how he was doing presently, he said, "I haven't had any anti-depressants for two years. I am doing pretty well."
"Do you have any idea what brought on the depression?" I asked.
He replied, "I believe it had something to do with not grieving my father's death properly."
When we lose somebody important, when we lose a job, when a relationship ends, we need to process the hurt. We need to experience the loss, and then grieve. A couple of years ago I was grieving when I had to give up my boat because of aging eyes and macular degeneration. Sometimes people grieve the loss of youth. A few years ago when I was at the marina and the gate was locked I jumped over a little fence, as I had done hundreds of times, and fell flat. I realized, "Arthur, you are not young anymore." These are realities.
Many of you are aware that just a few months ago I lost my younger son. I have experienced the grief that is only understood by people who have lost a child. The pain is awful, as bad as anything I have ever known.
I have lost my mother. I have grieved her loss, and the loss of my father. Both of my brothers have died, and many friends. But there is nothing to touch the grief of losing a child.
After 9/11, I went back to a therapist I had seen in the past. I am glad I did because I have stayed with him. Later, when my son died just before I went away for the summer, he said, "Arthur, we need to be on the phone every week, sometimes two and three times a week," which we were. The one thing he kept saying to me was, "Arthur, you must not allow yourself to be distracted from grieving. You must grieve. You must live into the pain. You need to talk about every level of hurt and nuance of your pain. You have got to cry."
So we had counseling sessions by telephone where I did all of those things, living into the pain. Did it take the pain away? No. Did anything I did take the pain away? No. But it did help me to know that I was dealing openly and legitimately with my feelings.
When we are grieving we must not put away, hide from, or closet our feelings. It is counterproductive. It will only come back at us in other ways. We must not allow ourselves to be distracted.
But what do we do with our grief? Where is the blessing in the kind of grief I am going through now? I think I can say, at least for myself, where the blessing is. It is in the Christian faith--the fact that the God I follow, the God I worship, the Jesus who is the Lord of my life, is one who is "acquainted with grief."
Isaiah, to me, is a most wondrous, brilliant, spiritual and intellectual presence. In the 53rd chapter of Isaiah he talks about the coming Messiah, he describes the Messiah as the "suffering servant acquainted with our grief, taking on our infirmities." When Jesus actually appears as the Messiah, He is kind, sensitive, gentle, tender, compassionate, and empathetic. His words of invitation bring enormous comfort: "Come unto me, you who have heavy burdens and are weary." Indeed, He is close to us in our grief.
What I experience from Jesus' words is: "I will hold you. I am gentle and I will embrace you. I will let you know I am here for you." It helps me to know Jesus had His own grief. Lazarus, his friend, was ill, and he suddenly died. When Jesus was with Lazarus' family and friends in the midst of their mourning, the gospel story describes Him as crying.
Most dramatic, to me, is what happened with Jesus the night before He died, when He was praying in the Garden of Gethsemane. The gospel writer said that His agony was such that the sweat from His brow was as big as drops of blood. He was grieving the loss of support of his friends, who had let Him down, and He was grieving His own death. Indeed, Jesus was one acquainted with grief.
Not long before He died, Jesus taught His disciples about the big picture of grief which included what happens after properly grieving a loss: "A little while, and you will no longer see me?Very truly, I tell you, you will weep and mourn." He was preparing them for His death, when they would feel a void in their lives, when grief would seem insurmountable. But then He gives a word of hope: "Your pain will turn into joy." After the grief, after the sorrow, joy will come. One day I expect the joy to come back into my life.
But for now, there is something else going on. What I am discovering in my grieving is that God is trying to say something I have not heard before. I am becoming aware of an activity of God that is sometimes hard to understand.
Let me introduce it this way, in a story I tell from time to time. When I first read this story I said to myself, "This is a nice, neat story." I thought maybe an editor's hand had made the story as nice as it is. But when I told the story in Chicago once, somebody came to me after the talk and said, "I know the family where that happened." This is a true story.
It is about a little girl named Saatchi, four years old. Young Saatchi's mother had just brought her new baby brother home from the hospital. Eager to spend some time alone with him, she kept insisting on it. Her parents resisted, thinking she might have feelings of sibling rivalry and might do something to disturb or hurt the child. Her persistence wore them down and they allowed her to go alone into her baby brother's room. They kept the door open a crack to look in on her.
This is what they saw: little Saatchi leaning over the crib and saying to her brother, "Tell me what God feels like. I'm starting to forget."
Most of us know certain sensitive children have an experience of God that is clear and pure. What this says to me is something that I learned a number of years ago which has changed my life. Tielhard de Chardin describes who we humans really are, that we are not human beings having a spiritual experience, beings who are seeking God. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. We come from a spiritual place, and we are given this human journey. This explains a great deal to me. I have come to believe the sole purpose of our being human is to grow spiritually.
Sophy Burnham is the woman who wrote A Book of Angels, the extraordinarily popular book that re-ignited the nation's interest in angels. In a succeeding book, The Ecstatic Journey, she says:
They say that when the student is ready the teacher appears. They say that it is not the soul that struggles first toward God, but this Universe of Love which is fishing for us. God puts the longing in our hearts so that we will leap upstream, like a spawning salmon that throws itself against the river current, leaping up waterfalls in its passionate urge to reach the source...
This passionate struggle is our response to God's search for us, which is frequently awakened by pain and loss.
Morton Kelsey, teacher and writer, said:
So often Christians are guilty of preaching a brand of painless love that doesn't bring healing. Instead it buries resentments deep inside where they fester and emerge months, if not years, later.
This is true of so many of us in Christianity--we want the quick and simple answer. We want the problem to be taken away. Yet we know that life is not like that. That's not the way of Isaiah's suffering servant. That's not the way of Jesus.
I believe God is saying to me, "Arthur, I need your humility. I need you to experience grace. I need you to experience my presence and surrender to me."
Francis Thompson, a 19th-century English poet, who spent three years homeless and destitute on the streets of London before being recognized for his poetry, wrote The Hound of Heaven. See if it doesn't connect with you.
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
The rest of the poem tells how God's footsteps, steady, patient, and determined, are following him. Finally, the footsteps reach him and he hears God's voice. As I read this poem, Thompson is surrendering: "I am yours, God. Do with me as you will."
Any time we suffer, we can use our suffering to help others. There is a wonderful one-act play by Thornton Wilder about a physician with an infirmity who went to a healing pool hoping to be cured so he could give all his energy to healing other people. As he was about to go into the water, an angel stopped him and said, "You cannot go into the water. You cannot, you will not, be healed. In love's service only wounded healers will do." When we suffer greatly, we are experiencing what others in the world are experiencing, and we can be there for them.
When people ask me how I am doing, generally I say, "I'm all right, but I cry a lot." It connects me to the reality of my pain and grief. I am in process and holding on to the promises of God in my faith journey. I believe in what Francis Thompson says in his poem--that God is in pursuit of me. And I am trying to remember that in love's service only the wounded healer will do. Let us pray.
LORD, be with us in our grief. Help us where we have not grieved. And, Lord, help us to come closer and closer to the suffering servant, to the one who is acquainted with our grief, who has taken on our pain, and leads us forth. AMEN.
(This sermon is in loving memory of Charles Caliandro. |
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