The Myth of Managing Grief

Here come the holidays. You know, "the most wonderful time of the year."

Alright, can we just say what everyone knows anyway? For a lot of people--many more than any of us will ever know--the holidays are horrible, a season in which the grief they carry around with them all of the time becomes that much more painful.

If that sounds autobiographical, that's because it is. But like so many people who hurt, I don't want to talk about it. Not here anyway. And not now.

The main reason I'm bringing this up at all is because not too long ago I was digging around in this wasteland called the Web when I came across the article that follows. It has a very specific context. It was first published on April 7, 2002, less than a year after the attacks of September 11, 2001. But its message is timeless.

And even though it appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, a secular newspaper located on the left coast no less, it contains a lot of insight and even a good bit of what might be called pastoral wisdom. I copy it here for what it's worth:

The myth of managing grief
by Stephanie Salter

Not long ago, a friend in New York said that she often feels cut off from the rest of the country because Sept. 11 is still so much with most New Yorkers.

"We've all gotten on with our lives, and if you don't go down to the (World Trade Center) site, there are no visible traces," she said. "But there's still so much grief and sadness hanging in the air."

People outside of New York can't really understand, said my friend.

"You talk with them and, if you didn't lose someone directly in the twin towers, it's like their tone says, 'Hey, shouldn't you be moving on?' They don't get that there's a collective grief. I actually prefer it when people don't even ask how it's going. It's easier."

Our American culture boasts many virtues and several strong suits, but grieving -- collectively or individually -- isn't one of them.

Unlike older societies, we have few formal grieving rituals in place to guide us. So, we try to tackle grief in our typical American way -- as if it's a problem to be solved, an illness to be cured, an unnatural, machine-gumming breakdown that needs to be fixed, ASAP.

Perhaps more phobic about suffering than any society in history, Americans tend to start the clock ticking early in "managing" grief. While solicitous and caring of the newly bereaved, we encourage heartbroken mates and parents to medicate themselves so they can "keep it together" through the funeral.

This ignores the fact that wailing and keening and "losing it" are a pretty accurate rendering of what humans inside feel like when someone we love dies or leaves us. But, in our culture, public wailing and keening are considered bad forms; they are seen as unwelcome reminders of pathology among "healthy" people.

Even the most devastating loss -- that of a child by a parent -- seems to carry an unwritten statute of limitations on grief, something I learned several years ago when I reported on an international organization called Compassionate Friends.

Founded in England in the late 1960s, the massive support network's chapters provide something that bereaved parents and siblings can't get from the rest of the world: "unconditional love and understanding" (as its informal credo states) with no expiration date.

As one member told me, she knew that a Compassionate Friends meeting was the one place she could go and never hear the unintentionally accusing question, "How many years ago did you say your child died?"

Grief is not like an illness, to be fought and cured with medicine or chemotherapy and radiation. Generalizations can be made about human behavioral tendencies, and time lines can be drawn for predicted "healing," but each person's grieving process is unique.

Some people never "get better." And nobody survives grief unchanged.

As Stephanie Ericsson wrote in "Companion Through the Darkness," grief is "a tidal wave that overtakes you, smashes down upon you with unimaginable force, sweeps you up into its darkness, where you tumble and crash against unidentifiable surfaces only to be thrown out on an unknown beach, bruised, reshaped."

Or, as a man who lost his 7-year-old son once confided, "I'd always thought of myself as a happy man, but that's gone now. We have moments of happiness, some of them long and filled with laughter, but the sense of what is lost is never far away."

In her book, Stephanie Ericsson also warned: "Grief makes what others think of you moot. It shears away the masks of normal life and forces brutal honesty out of your mouth before propriety can stop you. It shoves away friends and scares away so-called friends and rewrites your address book for you."

The Ascension of Jesus Christ, 1

According to the calendar used by most Christians, Thursday, May 1st will be the fortieth day following Easter. Acts 1:3 says that, after his suffering, Jesus appeared to the apostles giving many convincing proofs and speaking about the kingdom of God over a period of forty days. So this year, May 1st is "Ascension Day." (In some churches, the Ascension is celebrated on the Sunday following the fortieth day, which falls on May 4th of this year).

As we get closer to that day, I plan to post a few things about the ascension of the Lord Jesus. But today, a few personal reflections about holy days and the Christian calendar.

I didn't grow up hearing about or observing anything like Ascension Day. And that's the case for most everyone who, like me, has life-long connections to the Churches of Christ. In the church culture of my youth, if someone had referred to Ascension Day it would have been only to remark, "Scripture nowhere tells us that we should observe a religious holiday by that name. It's not scriptural." End of discussion.

And you can bet I got the message. I can still remember that during a months-long stint of fill-in preaching, at age 19, I was quite proud that on Easter Sunday I had spoken about "Noah, a Preacher of Righteousness."

But coming into my adult years, I began to look at some of these things differently. I came to think that such radical rejection of the huge majority of the Christian world had set us up for all sorts of alienation and inconsistency and just plain old weirdness. Maybe you've noticed that in some churches, having a Halloween party, mimicking the demonic, and scaring the wits out of children counts as "fellowship," while celebrating with Scripture the birth of Jesus is for some reason to be strictly avoided. That's begun to reverse itself over the last few years. But in recent memory what I've described is the way it was.

Now, people who know me know that I love and treasure my religious heritage, the legacy that is mine among the Churches of Christ. I'm blessed to be a washed-in-the-blood Christian. And I'm happy to be a dyed-in-the-wool "Campbellite." My group has so many great and godly people. And I love them. But that doesn't mean that I never get a little jealous of Christian groups who live and worship down the street from me. (How many white preachers have dreamed of preaching to a black church?) And I'll admit it. I have sometimes peeked into their backyards.

I first discovered a bit of the Christian calendar during the years I was attending an ecumenical divinity school. I was introduced back then to the common lectionary (an organized list of weekly Scripture readings), which I began to use in my preaching, mainly to keep it more balanced, and to have a ready-made plan that included options. One of the first things I realized was that, even if the adults in the Churches of Christ were opposed to the Christian calendar, their children were secretly "observing" it. Take a look at the Bible school curriculum used for the children in your church. What you'll likely see is that it follows the common lectionary, which is more less linked to the Christian calendar (especially Christmas and Easter).

This was ironic to me. I mean, it's not a stretch to say that in some congregations of the Churches of Christ, the song leader might be considered "too liberal" if he leads "Joy to the World" or "Away in the Manger" within a few weeks of Christmas. June, being six months separated, is the safest time. However, over in the educational wing of many of those same congregations, on the Sunday before Christmas the text for the children's class will be one of the infancy narratives. (Although many members of Churches of Christ might be loath to admit it, my theory is that the curriculum and hymnody that we've mostly borrowed from older, bigger Protestant groups has done a lot to keep our theology in line).

When I was first discovering the lectionary and the calendar, I secretly regretted that they had been excluded from the faith of my fathers. And, although I still have little experience with the calendar, I just suspect that there's something about the spiritual and religious rhythm of its annual cycle that, in its own peculiar way, moors the faith of those who follow it. I can still remember how I envied Dietrich Bonhoeffer on his way to the gallows. Imprisoned, with hardly any connection to the outside, he was able to maintain a sense of holy time by marking the Christian dates he knew so well. How appropriate.

In one of my favorite hymns, "Father of Mercies," we sing to God: "The rolling seasons, as they move, proclaim to all Thy constant care." Might that be true of a Christian calendar as well as the natural cycle? I know, something like the calendar shouldn't be forced on a congregation that doesn't know or want it. But on the other hand, Romans 14 also leaves it open to the individual to observe special days if he wants. The only requirement is, "Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind" (v. 5). This time of year, I want to focus on the Ascension of Jesus Christ.

Thoughts? Observations? Questions?