Rev. Eugene N. Nelson, Jr.
The Community Church of Sebastopol
November 4, 2007 All Saints Sunday
Romans 8: 31-39
On this All Saints Sunday I would like to begin with two poems, reflections on loss. The first poem,
Sorting Mother’s Things by Marilyn Boe
She’d raked her house clean,
given away old jackets, shoes,
extra pots and pans
before moving to the lake three months ago.
My hands felt dishonest opening dresser drawers I’d never opened,
and my hands were uneasy as I lifted her underclothes
from their private darkness, took crisp,
cotton housedresses from her closet, left wire hangers to swing naked.
I tried not to disturb her kitchen.
To be there without her was grief enough,
and, I told myself, Dad will need everything when he returns
next week
to cook his own supper for the first time
and eat it alone.
But I opened three red Hill Bros. coffee cans filled with gingersnaps,
recently slipped from her cookie sheets,
ready for grandchildren.
I could not eat them,
nor could I throw them out and leave my life forever empty,
my hand still reaching for her steady supply.
Tis a Fearful Thing by Eleh Ezkarah
Tis a fearful thing
to love
what death can touch.
To love, to hope to dream, and oh, to lose.
But a holy thing to love.
For your life has lived in me,
Your laugh once lifted me,
Your word was a gift to me.
To remember this brings painful joy.
‘Tis a human thing, love,
A holy thing,
To love
What death can touch.
All Saints Sunday, a day to remember, to give thanks for, to celebrate God’s gift of the saints, those Christians who have walked the path of faith before us and passed on to us their legacy of faith and faithfulness. Indeed a day for us to remember all those saints, family and friends, who have touched and shaped our lives and who are no longer with us. But I believe also a day for us, here in this sanctuary, worshiping under the sheltering wings of God’s love, to reflect on the painful reality of grief and loss, on what a fearful thing it is to love, to hope, to dream, and then, oh to lose.
“’I’m so ashamed,’” the young woman told her pastor over the phone as she wept softly. She had called about a support group for young women, newly widowed. Her husband had died of cancer at 38, after only three years of marriage. In the words of her pastor, “Her tears were occasioned not by the pain of her horrible loss, nor even the ubiquitous fears for the future that stalk the newly bereaved. The shame, embarrassment and humiliation she felt, the ‘feeling that there something wrong with me,’ arose from her inability to stop grieving, no matter how much those around her told her she should. Her parents and friends, she said, had grown impatient with her crying and her incessant talking about her dead husband. She wanted to accommodate them, but the tears kept flowing, and she saw no hope of ending them soon.”
Her experience is not unique. We live in a culture which is uncomfortable with expressions of grief. Says Anna Quindlen, “Grief remains one of the few things that has the power to silence us. It is a whisper in the world and a clamor within. More than sex, more than faith, more than death, grief is unspoken, publicly ignored, except for those moments at the funeral that are over too quickly.”
And yet, to live is to know grief, for we all take that great risk of daring to love that which death can touch. A loved one dies: we feel we will never be truly alive again, that life will now be forever gray, incomplete, that even if we go on, our journey through life will somehow be diminished. And to some extent, I suppose, that is true. As Nicholas Wolterstorff wrote following the accidental death of his son, “When we gather there is always someone missing. His absence as present as our presence, his silence as loud as our speech…When we’re all together, we’re not all together.”
I love the honesty of the Psalms and I need to go back there from time to time because in the Psalter, we often see faith struggling with the hard and painful realities of life.
Psalm 77: I cry aloud to God, that he may here me.
In the day of my trouble I seek the Lord;
In the night my hand is stretched out without wearying;
my soul refuses to be comforted.
I think of God, and I moan; I meditate, and my spirit faints.
Not a bad description of grief: the loneliness, the hopelessness, the despair, the feeling that even God has deserted me. The Psalmist confronts it all, as we must. In thinking about grief, how we are to confront it and deal with it, it is so important for us to be honest about the pain we feel, and then to make this place, of all places, a place where it is safe place to grieve. Which isn’t easy to do.
As I said earlier, that young widow’s impatient parents are a reflection of the culture in which we live. We are not really a very patient people. We like to get on with it, to move ahead, to let the past be the past. We like closure, clean endings with no rough edges, no loose ends. But grief is none of that. In fact, grief is all loose ends. There is no timetable for grieving, no deadlines for closure, no moment when you can say I’m over with it, as if it were a sinus infection. How tempting it is to tell a grieving person, “be strong,” as though grief were a sign of weakness, or “you doing better?” It sounds sympathetic, but carries an accent of impatience, “when are you going to get better?” How tempting, even for pastors who ought to know better, to say after a funeral or memorial service, “Well, that hopefully will give you a sense of closure,” as if the benediction marked the end of an acceptable period of grief. But, as I once heard, hearts heal faster from surgery than from grief. We have to give each other, and ourselves, time and space, for grieving. There is no quick fix. Our grief does not mean we are weak, or crazy or faithless. I hear people say ‘if only I believed in God more, I wouldn’t feel this way.’ No, no, no…. it means we are human.
Again, I think of the Psalmist’s honesty about his own pain. And that is such an important part of grief. This isn’t easy to say, but I believe we need to allow ourselves to experience the full, painful enormity of our loss. When Henri Nouwen’s mother died, he wrote this to his father: “Real grief is not healed by time…I really want to console you in this letter, but not by suggesting that time will take away your pain and that in one, two, three years, you will not miss her so much anymore. I would not only be telling a lie, I would be diminishing the importance of mother’s life, underestimating the depth of your grief, and the power of the love that has bound mother and you together for forty-seven years. If time does anything, it deepens our grief. The longer we live, the more fully we become aware of who she was for us, and the more intimately we experience what her love meant for us…Is this a consolation? Is this comfort? Maybe these words will only increase your tears and deepen your grief. But for me, your son, who grieves with you, there is no other way. I want to comfort and console you, but not in a way that covers up real pain and avoids all wounds. I am writing you this letter in the sincere belief that consolation and comfort are to be found where our wounds hurt most.”
Consolation is found where our wounds hurt most. It sounds crazy, but Nouwen is saying, the Psalmist is saying, that any hope, any healing, any consolation come, not from denying what we are feeling, but by entering into it, feeling it, expressing it. My mother lived for ten years after my sister died from cancer. And yet, at Mom’s Memorial Service, we all agreed that much of her died that day in 1996 when my sister died. She wouldn’t talk about it, never wanted to talk about it, would not allow us to talk about it around her. And that frozen grief consumed her, deadened something within her. I’m no psychiatrist, but I truly believe that as my mother pushed down the pain, she also closed the door on any hope of comfort and consolation.
Over the years, experiencing my own griefs, even writing about them and preaching about them - you made it safe for me to grieve - I have discovered that grief, as difficult as it is, at least for me, has been an opening to a new future. It has slowly given me permission once again to say Yes to life. I affirm these words of religion professor, John Raines: “In sorrow we begin slowly to let the anger and the self-pity go. We begin to think that we can know happiness again – not an innocent happiness, but an adult and seasoned happiness. It is a happiness with shadows, but it has found a way to affirm those shadows. We begin to be grateful for what we have had, rather than just being angry for what we have lost. This difficult gratitude allows us to enjoy life once again and to become friends again with ourselves.” I believe that grief, as painful as it is, helps us to understand that if life is to be meaningful and satisfactory, we must attach ourselves deeply to others. This was the message of last night’s play, Tuesday With Morrie. We attach ourselves deeply to others knowing full well the finiteness of that attachment. For such love, in the words of the poet, remains a human thing, a holy thing.
And finally, I believe we need not fear to go to that place where our wounds hurt most, because in that place – so dark, so lonely, so fearful – there is One who holds out a hand that is all gracious, all caring; a hand to calm the ocean of our tears, warm what was chilled, and accompany us into a new future. This is One from whom nothing, nothing in life and nothing in death, can separate us, the One who receives our tears with compassion and promise and who bears it all with us. In the words of the Psalmist:
Out of the depths I cry to you, O God, God hear my voice.
I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope.
Hope in the Lord, for with the Lord there is steadfast love.
Steadfast love…in joy and in sorrow, in life and in death, steadfast love. This is a promise that is sure.