I have an uncle who, many years ago, boarded a flight in Sydney headed for a work conference in Europe, and after he was seated one of the flight attendants stopped and said to him, “Are you OK? You don’t look very well.”
“Oh. I’m fine,” said my uncle. “Totally fine. It was a bit of a rush getting to the flight.”
“Ok,” she said, “But I’ll check on you after take-off.
Sure enough, she came back. “Are you sure you are ok?” “Totally!” said my uncle, “Totally OK. Works been busy, life’s been busy, but I’ve got the next 17 or so hours to relax. I’m totally fine.”
“OK,” she said, “But you don’t look very well to me. I’ll check on you again.”
A few minutes later she was back again, “You are not well,” she said, “Despite what you are saying. I am telling the pilot to land in Brisbane.”
And they landed and an ambulance took him to straight to hospital where he had a triple by-pass. An attentive flight attendant saved his life.
We are currently working through a series based on Sarah Bessey’s book, Field Notes for the Wilderness, and chapter 6 she calls “Tell the truth and learn to lament”.
In our lives, she says, we experience loss and grief and disorientation, and if “we are simply carrying on, carrying on, even cracking jokes, modelling our resistance” [note she says modelling resilience, not developing resilience] – like my uncle saying ‘I’m fine’ on that plane – “somewhere our bodies, our spirits, know that it’s not quite that simple….The only way to begin healing is to acknowledge the wound.”
She quotes David Kessler who co-wrote with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross the very well-known work, On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief though the Five Stages of Loss, and who has written a new book adding another stage to the process, Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief. In the interview he says, “We tell ourselves things like, I feel sad, but I shouldn’t feel that; other people have it worse. We can – we should – stop at the first feeling. I feel sad. Let me go for five minutes to feel sad. Your work is to feel your sadness and fear and anger…. “
That work of grief moves through different stages, according to Kubler-Ross and Kessler, but we need to know that “the stages aren’t linear and may not happen in this order.” It might look less like this… and much more like this…
As Bessey writes, “There is a wandering nature to this grief work…. You’re not meant to hit every stage and check the experience off a list; you’re charting a new map of your life by living into it.”
There is denial. Just like my uncle sitting on that aeroplane, “I’m fine. I’m totally fine. Life’s just been a bit busy.” And there is a positive side to denial. It can help us get through periods of our lives when, yes, life is busy, but there comes a time, Bessey says, when “if we don’t deal with our trauma or our sadness or our anger, it begins to deal with us.”
There is anger. And sometimes our anger catches us by surprise. Mine did, I confess, on Monday night in the meeting with the Assembly Council reps. Their belief that we can create tiers of holiness within our congregations without doing terrible damage to people’s spirits and lives and to our community and our witness to the gospel boggles my mind! John Clark told me I was looking very red in the face!
Sometimes we shy away from our anger. Particularly, can I say as women. “I thought,” Bessey comments, “hiding my anger made me a better lady-Christian.” That’s what we’ve been told, isn’t it. But anger is a feeling that must be felt, and anger expressed, as Aristotle says, “with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way” can be very constructive anger. He also adds that this is not easy. And we are not perfect, but anger is part of us discovering who we are and honouring who we are.
There is bargaining. Oh boy! Have I done this! Promising God I would pray more, give more, do more, be more if only God would do this one thing for me. Or beating myself up afterwards. If only I had prayed more, given more, done more, been more God would have done that thing. This is a normal stage of dealing with grief and loss.
And there is depression when periods of sadness or moodiness that we all experience last longer and are felt much more intensely. “When what you are going through,” Bessey writes, “is terribly depressing, it makes sense to be depressed….[but] it is good and holy to seek help. Like, real proper help. Go see a therapist. Talk to your doctor.” Here in Australia, we’d put that the other way round. Go see your doctor. Your doctor will help you work out a mental health plan that may involve a psychologist or psychiatrist. But please, if you are feeling depressed, see a doctor. Remember, “It is good and holy to seek real proper help.”
And then there is acceptance which, as Bessey says, is one of the more misunderstood stages. “We tend to think…one day we magically come to be at peace with what has happened….” But our losses don’t disappear. Life doesn’t go ‘back to normal’. It is about learning to live with the losses, coming to terms with how grief has changed us and accepting the person we have become. And I love this line from Bessey. “Part of what we are invited to learn out here in the wilderness is how to metabolise that loss into compassion rather than bitterness, into welcome rather than caution.”
Which is where the sixth stage that Kessler has added comes in – finding meaning. Can we, as we move through or as we move around different stages of grief, can we find meaning, life, hope, new flourishing in this experience?
I love how this is illustrated in our reading from Exodus this morning. The people of Israel have escaped slavery, they have passed through the Red Sea, they have sung their songs of deliverance and then they find themselves in the wilderness, and after three days there, they become bitter and so they come to a place called bitterness.
That makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it. We have all come to that place. We have all had experiences of escaping trauma and discovering that the impacts of trauma, the outworkings of trauma, are still with us.
And Moses cries out to God for them. He laments. “How long, O Lord?” He feels the feelings they are internalising into bitterness. And God shows him a piece of wood that he throws into the water and the water becomes sweet.
Now all that sounds a bit magical doesn’t it. But what the Jewish commentators say is that the piece of wood represents is the Torah, the law. In fact, the verb in verse 25 “the Lord showed him” is the verb form of Torah. The text is saying that God ‘torahed’ or instructed Moses a tree.
What I take away from this is that moving through grief to a place of acceptance or new meaning is not achieved by some magic trick, but by doing the work of grief – which is also the work of faith; doubt and denial, anger, bargaining and wrestling, sadness and lamenting, acceptance and trust in our God who is our doctor, our GP who promises, “I am the Lord who heals you,” and leads us into life and new meaning.
If you’re wondering what’s going on in verse 27, the 12 springs of water and the 70 palm trees; 12 refers to the 12 tribes of Israel, and 70 (7 x 10) symbolises perfect completeness (7 meaning perfection and 10 meaning completeness). In other words, the text says, after the ‘torahing’ they came to a place that would provide for all of them completely.
As we wander in the wilderness, we, are also being ‘torahed’, learning to do the grief work of telling the truth about our grief. We are being ‘torahed’ (or we could say discipled) in learning how to lament. We are being ‘torahed’ or discipled in trusting that even though our experiences will change us, God desires our wholeness and healing, our perfect completeness – an Elim, if you like, an oasis, in the wilderness.
And Bessey suggests it can be helpful for us, as human beings, to engage in the practice of ritual as we search for meaning in the stages of grief. She gives the example of a spiritual director who invited her to put a jar of water on her desk and a pile of salt, and each time she felt grief – “rather than distracting herself or pretending to be fine” – to drop some of the salt into the water.
“Each grain of salt,” she writes, “reminded me of what the Psalmist wrote, “You keep track of all my sorrows. You have collected all my tears in your bottle. You have recorded each on in your book.” She gives another example, a communal example, of an online church who use the winter solstice, the longest night of the year, to gather and honour the practice of lament.
Each year I attend a retreat for the ministers of the central city Baptist churches of Australia and New Zealand. It is a really valuable time to think about, with a group who are travelling similar journeys, where you were last year and where you are now. Last year we met in Wellington, New Zealand, hosted by Elliott and Sarah Rice, the co-lead pastors of Central Baptist, and as an opening exercise – or practice of ritual – Sarah invited us to acknowledge our grief from the past year by placing our hands in a bowl of water, a bowl of tears, she said. And, then, if we wanted to, to also take a flower from the vase as a sign of new life and meaning that we were discovering. She did not provide a towel. We had to leave our hands wet, because, she said, our tears do eventually dry. And it was true.
A few years ago we did a series on lament in this church and I told the story of a group in Cologne, Germany, Catholic Scouts who hid Jewish fugitives in underground passages under old buildings during the war. It is not known what happened to them, but round on the wall of one of these rooms are the words:
I believe in the sun, though it be dark;
I believe in God, though he be silent;
I believe in neighbourly love, though it be unable to reveal itself.
Keith Blackburn told me after the service that there is choir piece by Norwegian composer Kim André Arnesen in which the words are transcribed slightly differently.
I believe in the sun even when it’s not shining. I believe in love when I feel it not I believe in God even when he is silent.
Let’s listen to that now – and can I invite you – if you would like to come and place your hands in this bowl acknowledging your griefs and, if you would like, to take away a sprig of flowers as a symbol of new life and meaning.