Talking Tuesday: Grief Observed

Over the weekend, I had the rare opportunity for a substantive conversation with a friend who lives a state away.  She was visiting the area for the weekend and our kids were happily occupied for a goodly stretch of time, giving us the chance to actually talk.  The conversation ranged over a number of topics, but she spoke of grief, and how people's reactions to her recent grief drove her insane.  She felt that the pat responses given ("she's looking down on you now," she's in a better place," she's an angel now") not only denied the reality of what she feels, but also failed to be of any comfort to her. 

I think as we get older, death becomes more present, and we are more respectful of its place in our lives and its power to hurt us.  When we are young, death seems remote, something that happens to other people, not to us or anyone around us (and yes, I know there are exceptions; my experience is that people who experience death at a young age tend to grow up faster, and have more gravity to them).  But then you get older.  Your parents age, your grandparents begin to die, perhaps you bury a child born too soon.  Out of the blue, it seems, death has found you.  And then you are clenched in the jaws of its fury, wailing at the frailty of human life, at the briefness of existence. 

The truth is, even for those of us who are believers, and have some framework for understanding the afterlife, there is no ontological way to prove such an existence.  There is no proof for God, only the absence.  We have to take a risky leap of faith that such things are real, do exist, and there is a place waiting for us when we die.  That our lives have meaning, and that we are in need of saving. 

In some ways, the New Atheists live a more comfortable mental existence with regard to death.  If this life is all there is, then this life is where you can focus your energies.  You can acknowledge that the world is basically a messed up place without having to howl at the wind for a God who allows evil to flourish.  It simply is.

If there is a heaven and a hell, and God exists and wants us to follow Him, to be like Him, as we Christians believe, then there is constantly the tension between the knowledge that you can never attain that which you seek on your own, nor can you have tangible assurance that things are as you believe them to be.  Faith is a risk indeed.

I suppose it is a risk we keep taking, a leap we continue to make, because I think most of us who hold on to belief have at least had some flash of something bigger than ourselves, some emotional sense that God is present and fills all things.  In life's hard seasons, when God seems absolutely silent and remote, it can feel like He doesn't exist, and certainly doesn't care about our puny existence or petty problems. 

But then I think about what God did for the sake of everyone and everything in the cosmos.  A cosmos that is riddled with death and destruction and decay.  God came to earth in human form, as a man.  A real, historical man, at a real historical place and time.  A man with human frailties and longings.  A man whose passions and nature were perfectly ordered with God's, because He was God.  But merely coming to earth as a man wasn't enough.  It wasn't enough to be a good teacher, or a crack philosopher.  He had to go and get himself killed in a gruesome way by the local authorities.  He went down into the pits of death and destruction and fought the greatest battle there ever was against those forces.  He pulled Adam and Eve from that place of dark despair.  Then three days later, He returned to earth to tell everyone that He had done it.  Death was overcome. 

So we can hope.  We can hope in a better life to come.  We can rage at death, we can howl with grief, we can feel abandoned and alone.  But we can hope.