SINES OF THE TIMES CHRISTINE SINE
Hope in the Midst of Difficult Places This last year has been one of the most difficult of my life. Just a year ago my stepson Clint died. Though Clint had been ill for some time, his death was sudden and unexpected.Tom and I were devastated and struggled to understand where God was in the midst of our grief. A month later I visited my parents in Australia. In many ways it was just as painful. My mother is 82 and my father 87.They still live in the house I grew up in, but it now looks a little like a refugee camp in the middle of one of Sydney’s wealthiest suburbs. As my father has aged he has become more eccentric, irrational, and violent. Because of his violence my mother lives unquestioningly with the irrationality. Half the house has no electricity. Most of the time there is no water because in his irrational state the only solution to a leaky faucet over the kitchen sink is to turn off the water except for an hour a day. He also refused to turn on the heat—even though one morning it was 45 degrees inside. Following both of these painful episodes, friends rallied round, offering support and comfort. Many struggled with their own losses and the grief buried deep inside. They shared stories of loved ones who had died prematurely in accidents or from addictions and illnesses. Some shared the anguish of alienation from family members who rejected them because of simple misunderstandings that grew into major conflicts. Others carried the burden of their own debilitating illnesses or addictions or struggled with unfulfilled hopes and expectations due to lost jobs or failure. Many had bottled up their grief for years,
afraid or ashamed to share their pain with people they felt only wanted to hear about the good parts of life. Following Clint’s death I appreciated people just hanging around.They didn’t need to speak. They allowed us to cry on their shoulders and gave us space to acknowledge the incredible depth of our loss.Their support was a tremendous help through those first few terrible weeks. Surprisingly, these tragedies resurfaced memories of past tragedies. My father’s violence during my childhood, images of starving children dying in my arms in Thai refugee camps, the horrors of recent terrorist attacks surfaced. In the midst of this new agony, I realized that healing is a lifelong process. We slowly peel away the layers of pain and find new levels of God’s freedom and wholeness. None of us ever fully recovers from the loss of loved ones or from the grief of other tragedies we experience. At times we are all overwhelmed by loss and can spiral down into depression and despair. We are engulfed by anger and confused by a God who allows bad things to happen to good people. By the grace of God, as we struggle with these issues we do find much healing and in the process learn more about our God and hopefully about our faith. The risen Christ still bore the scars of his crucifixion. In fact, they were part of what enabled his disciples to identify him. Pain and grief are an integral part of life, an ever present reminder of the brokenness of humanity and our constant need for Christ’s healing power to transform us. Unfortunately, we don’t deal well with pain and loss. In a culture that has no place for grief, we alleviate physical pain with a couple of aspirin and mask our emotional struggles with a smiling face and a prescription for antidepressants. Even within the church we avoid people who are grieving.Tears and depression make us uncomfortable. We lack PRISM 2007
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the spiritual resources needed to draw closer to God through these encounters. But ignoring grief only makes it fester and grow. Only when we expose our pain and anguish to God and to others can we experience healing. In the process grief can be transformed into joy. So how can we process our own grief and help others come to terms with theirs? First, we need to talk about our grief, our anger, and even our sense of God’s abandonment. The Christian faith leaves no room for pretending that we are strong and independent. For those who have friends who are bereaved, it is important just to be there to listen and allow people to be vulnerable. Providing a comforting hug is invaluable to a grieving friend. Lectio divina is one particularly useful practice for those struggling with grief. It helps move the Word of God off the page and into our hearts so that it becomes living and active in our lives. We read the Scripture (lectio), not just in a cursory way, but over and over in an atmosphere of prayer for insight. This challenges us to memorize passages until they resonate in our spirits. In the days following my stepson’s death, I was drawn to those psalms in which David spoke of his anguish in the midst of the many tragedies of his life. Lamentations also came to life as I read about how often these great men cried out their grief and pain before God. I found it particularly helpful to read the Scriptures aloud and then journal my thoughts and ideas.The words resounded deep in my being as they stimulated not just my sight but also my hearing and my muscles, moving the words quickly from my head to my heart, from my heart to the pen in my hand. The second step in lectio divina is meditation (meditatio). This moves us beyond the information shared in Scripture to the inspiration of our imagination through which God’s spirit can
speak. As Richard Foster says,“Christian meditation leads us to the inner wholeness necessary to give ourselves to God freely.” After Clint’s death I meditated frequently on Lamentations 3: 31, 32— “For the Lord will not reject forever. Although he causes grief, he will have compassion according to the abundance of his steadfast love.” The comfort of these words brought me close to God in a way that nothing else seemed to and led me naturally to the third step in lectio divina, which is prayer (oratio). In this part of the discipline we literally converse with God about the Scripture. We listen to God, gain direction, guidance, and comfort. Sometimes we are convicted of sin and seek forgiveness. Through this kind of prayer our lives can be transformed. This has certainly been the case for me. Though I still struggle greatly with the whys and wherefores, this kind of prayer brings a nearness to God that has transformed
my grief into peace. The last step in lectio divina is contemplation, which moves beyond a passive response to the Scripture to an active one. Contemplation encourages us to direct our thoughts outward so that we become Jesus’ hands, eyes, feet, and heart. My own grief has produced a growing sensitivity to the pain and suffering of others. I am aware of how inadequately in the past I responded to the pain of my friends and neighbors. I want to more ably extend to them the comfort God has extended to me. In the aftermath of Clint’s death, the reality of the resurrection has become a more certain and longed-for reality for me. For the memorial service I wrote a liturgy that included the lines “Into the cycle of living and dying and rising again we lay Clint down.” I return frequently to those words, reciting them over and over again. The hope they bring of that longed-for future that the early Christians glimpsed in Christ and
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modeled in their new way of life is incredible. Life is a constant cycle of living and dying and rising again. Out of our broken dreams and grief can come the hope and joy of a whole new life. This was graphically brought home to me on Christmas morning, when Ricci and Eliacin Rosario, who live in our basement apartment, gave birth to a beautiful baby boy. The miracle of new birth is the most incredible and joyful event imaginable, yet it does not come without pain. I am reminded once more that for there to be life there must first be death, and for there to be resurrection there must first be crucifixion. There comes a time in the midst of death and loss when we enter once again into the miracle of the new life of God’s redemption and healing. Grief remains, but as a new foundation for wholeness, not just for us but for others as well. ■ Visit Christine and Tom Sine’s Mustard Seed Associates website at www.msainfo.org.