Acquainted with Grief

LuciusCommons Wikimedia

We suddenly find ourselves living through a time of a collective loss. Until now we never realized how much of our lives are marked in time and space by weekly schedules and commutes. Now that is gone. Every day feels like the next. If we are not looking at a calendar, we might even forget what day it is. My usually cheerful neighbor revealed his unease by saying, “this is crazy”.

We are also living through a collective loss of connection. Streets are empty. You can’t go anywhere except the grocery store. You are greeted by mask-wearing customers and empty shelves. You can’t visit family. You can’t shake hands. You can’t hug. You can’t kiss. You can’t see someone else’s face behind a mask. This is all very hard. This biggest loss for most of us is the sense of safety and control that we thought we had.

To the extent that the government has been a help and not a hindrance, it has prioritized economic relief for big business, limited relief for small business, and one month's living costs for the rest of us. To some degree that may help, but it won't replace a lost job. No government can compensate us for the loss of workplace routine, loss of purpose, the loss of camaraderie, the loss of loved ones, and the loss of milestones that mark and give meaning to our lives. That impact is profound because the reality is:

“We are all dealing with the collective loss of the world we knew. The world we knew is now gone forever” —David Kessler

We are suddenly inundated with this collective grief as we approach Easter and Passover. Normally we would approach this time looking forward to family gatherings. The spiritual meanings would have received a passing thought if indeed they are thought about at all. What is different now is that we can all relate to a collective grief and sorrow that we had not known before. Now we have made some acquaintance with the grief of Isaiah’s “suffering servant:”

“He was despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him” — Isaiah 53:3

To add to this grief, is the isolation of being “despised and rejected”. We live in a seriously divided country, with starkly different views of reality. If we voice our concerns regarding the nature of the pandemic, the need for social distancing, and the government’s handling of the crisis, we risk being ostracized from our social groups. We cannot hide our face from this grief. Now we know. Viscerally.

The reality of such mass grief and suffering is largely incomprehensible to those of us with some degree of privilege in the “Western” world. But to people of no privilege, few resources, people of marginalized groups, this is familiar territory. For the most part, the Western world does all it can to deny the inevitability of suffering. It is an irony crystallized in the symbol of the Christian faith:

"It is amazing to me that the cross or crucifix became the central Christian logo, when its rather obvious message of inevitable suffering is aggressively disbelieved in most Christian countries, individuals, and churches. We are clearly into ascent, achievement, and accumulation. The cross became a mere totem, a piece of jewelry. We made the Jesus symbol into a mechanical and distant substitutionary atonement theory instead of a very personal and intense at-one-ment process, the very reality of love’s unfolding." —Fr Richard Rohr

At some point in the future this crisis will be over, but the scars, financial and emotional, will remain. We are in shock now and we will be processing grief for the foreseeable future. We will have to turn to others for support.  We may find that support lacking because so many will be struggling with their own grief. It might have to suffice that we can get some emotional support on someone’s “good day” and they will find support from us on our good days. We should be open to the possibility of needing professional help.

When we come back together, it will be tentative. We will have spent so long developing the habits of separation that coming together again will feel strange and unsafe. We will have to go through the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. We need to be especially careful with the anger stage, that we don’t inflict harm on others. But we also have to be careful that we don’t hide or bury our grief. Instead we must allow our grief to be seen and witnessed, however difficult that may be.

"Each person's grief is as unique as their fingerprint. But what everyone has in common is that no matter how they grieve, they share a need for their grief to be witnessed. That doesn't mean needing someone to try to lessen it or reframe it for them. The need is for someone to be fully present to the magnitude of their loss without trying to point out the silver lining." —David Kessler

We have to develop habits of grace, both receiving it and giving it. We have to develop a receptivity to recognizing the grace all around us that we’ve ignored in the past. The sounds of birds singing, rays of sunshine peeking out from clouds, kind gestures from others, and most importantly, our life itself. We have to allow ourselves to receive grace. From that place we will be able to supply grace to others as they process their grief and try to reassemble their lives.

It is my hope that we will come out of this with a new gratitude towards life. May we gain a new appreciation for the “invisible people” that harvest our food, transport our goods, stock our shelves, collect our garbage, clean our streets, protect us from harm, and treat our sickness. May we learn to love and appreciate members of our families and be truly thankful for the time we have with them. And finally may we expect more of ourselves, more of our society, and more of our government.

The Sin of the World

Photo by Jmarchn  Wikimedia Commons

This Lenten season I find I am challenged to look at sin, not just my own, but the Sin of the World. It is awful and I desperately want to turn my gaze away from it. It is a knowledge and awareness that disturbs my peace.  In modern literature, few people crystalize this awareness better than author Stephen King, in the agony of condemned prisoner John Coffey:

"Mostly, I'm tired of people being ugly to each other. I'm tired of all the pain I feel and hear in the world...every day. There's too much of it. It's like pieces of glass in my head...all the time." 

To see “Sin of the World” is to see its oppression, its racism, its misogyny, its hatred, its cruelty. Distilled to a single word: its dehumanization. It is like the Medusa. Once you see it, truly see it, it changes you irrevocably. The full weight of it is a burden that is too much for any one person to bear. Even the Son of God, who “takes away the Sin of the World” (John 1:29), needed others to help him carry the weight of it in the Garden (Mark 14:34) and while carrying the cross on the Via-Dolarosa (Matthew 27:32).

I submit that the Sin of the World is the desecration of God's Image (Imago Dei) in other human beings. To desecrate what is human is to desecrate the Image of God. At the Crucifixion, that desecration was on full display. Most of us have been taught that Jesus dealt with the Sin of the World by dying on the cross, in our place. We have had that idea in our heads for a long time, yet it seems to have changed very few of us. We ignore the Gospel narrative that Jesus confronted the Sin of the World by challenging its dehumanization. He did so by re-humanizing those he encountered.

The man with leprosy. Peter’s mother-in-law. The demon-possessed men. Matthew. The sick women who spent all she had, whom Jesus not only saw, but called “daughter”. The man with a shriveled hand. The crowds he had compassion on to heal and feed.  Zaccheus. The woman at the well. The “sinners” and tax collectors with whom he ate. Finally, as Jesus was dying on the cross, he saw his mother Mary, a widow who was about to lose her son. Looking at John, Jesus said “here is your Son” and to John he said “here is your Mother”. In that poignant scene, Jesus saw not only those closest to him, but he saw their distress and accounted for it. He could not alleviate the grief of his mother, but he saw to it that she was cared for.

In each case, Jesus truly saw people. He took notice of their existence and their plight. Jesus rehumanized them. He showed us “a new self, renewed in knowledge of the Image of its Creator” (Colossians 3:10). He healed our blindness. He restored our ability to see God’s image in others.

Jesus was God’s “Yes” to Cain’s question:

"And the LORD said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” “I do not know!” Cain answered. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” "—Genesis 4:9

Cain’s nonchalant answer reflected his indifference to his brother's murder. Whatever happened to Abel, it was no concern of Cain’s. Indifference and dehumanization go hand-in-hand, because if we don’t reckon someone as human, we don’t care if they live or die:

"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference." —Eli Wiesel

The Scripture says that the blood of even one human being does not lay silent:

"Listen! Your brother's blood cries out to me from the ground!"—Genesis 4:10

If that is so, then the blood-soaked soil of the Earth, watered by countless murders, wars, and genocides, must scream to the ends of the universe. If any of us, who claim to know God, cannot sense God's grief at the sound of that cry, that scream, then can we really say we know God at all? Has not indifference to human suffering made us indifferent to God?

Dehumanization is desecration of that which is holy, God’s image in human beings. Once we have trampled that sacred representation of God’s image, our religious proclivities will demand a new object of worship. In America that object is wealth. My father used to say “money is god” here in the States and he was right. The wealthiest people in America are highly visible. The wealthy are revered by the media, the political establishment, and religion. It is no accident that the US spawned the "Prosperity Gospel". In such a system, wealth is the most visible sign of success and holiness, whereas poverty signifies failure and sinfulness. Poverty renders the poor invisible:

"If anyone wants to make himself invisible, there is no surer way than to become poor." —Simone Weil

The only answer to the Sin of the World is to have our sight restored:

"As Jesus and his disciples, together with a large crowd, were leaving the city, a blind man, Bartimaeus, was sitting by the roadside begging. When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”
Many rebuked him and told him to be quiet, but he shouted all the more, “Son of David, have mercy on me!”
Jesus stopped and said, “Call him.” So they called to the blind man, “Cheer up! On your feet! He’s calling you.” Throwing his cloak aside, he jumped to his feet and came to Jesus.
“What do you want me to do for you?” Jesus asked him.
The blind man said, “Rabbi, I want to see.” " —Mark 10:46-51

It would seem an odd question, to ask a blind man what he wanted after he had cried out for mercy. What mercy could he have possibly wanted other than to see? Perhaps it was the mercy of being seen. His blindness, his inability to navigate the world, had reduced him to begging, but also made him poor and hence, in this world, invisible. He not only couldn't see, he was not seen. It is not hard to imagine that countless people stepped over or around him as they scurried about their daily business.

It might be that our redemption from the Sin of the World, the redemption that enables us to see, is the redemption that enables us to be seen. Human vision is not a one-way street when it comes to other human beings. "Human beings strike echoes in each other." (James Baldwin). When we look each other in the eye and recognize each other as human, it creates a resonance:

"When we receive and empathize with the face of the other (especially the suffering face), it leads to transformation of our whole being. It creates a moral demand on our heart that is far more compelling than the Ten Commandments." —Fr Richard Rohr

I surmise that we shrink back from the cure of our blindness because it keeps us in a state of faux innocence:

"People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster" —James Baldwin

That may see harsh, but indifference is a form of nihilism. To remain in darkness is to remain in

"the blindness of a world that wants to end itself" — Thomas Merton

To be cured of our blindness means we accept God's "Yes" to Cain's question. We become responsible for our brothers' and our sisters' well-being. It means our prayers become a cry to Jesus, "Rabbi, I want to see!" It means we enact (live out) our faith by turning our gaze towards our fellow human beings in their distress and suffering. It means we look each other in the eye. This takes conscious effort, an effort that in Lent could be considered a penance. Perhaps the best answer to the question, "what are you giving up for Lent?" could be "I am giving up looking to myself, my image in the mirror, and I will look to others in their suffering, in the hope that we will see each other, and see in each other, the face of Christ and God's Image."