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
4
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