Wednesday, December 17, 2014

A Dear John Letter at Christmas

Someone, who has recently endured the loss of loved one, and is now going through a break up of sorts, asked me if there was any insight that might lighten his burden.  I wrote him a “Dear John letter” that hopefully speaks a better word than his ex did.

Dear John,
      I don't suppose any of us can prepare for break-ups, or death, or lessen either's impact.  Right now my family is wrestling with a newly diagnosed cancer, and nothing prepares us for such things.   The only comfort I can afford is of another sort.
       I begin by suggesting we should not try to lighten grief’s blow.   I think that's what addiction tries to do--dull the pain--and ignore what the pain is trying to say to us.  If we will let it, grief can drive us back to fundamental issues which we have often avoided.   Grief sends an unmistakable signal that all is not right with us or the world.  We need a resurrection reality to come and take over creation.  If we believe that in the resurrection God will set all things to rights--that puppies and parents and children and lovers can all be in healthy relationships, forgiven, reconciled, integrated into the life of God and all creation-- then we can grieve with hope.  And we must allow ourselves to be seized by that hope.  Then, grief, itself, becomes a kind of joy.  It’s a joy that knows all things are mysteriously going to turn out all right, painful though our losses may now be. 
        If we rather choose to believe that death has the final word about this world--if we believe that life is all a cruel joke—if our Mothers were lying to us when they tucked us in and told us that everything was going to be OK-- then I think there isn't much to live for.[i]  If there is no God of creation to keep covenant with us, why should we believe others will?  At that point usually what is left is bitterness.
      And, if this is the case, we had better attend to that bitterness, too.  Does not the fact of this bitterness stem from the deepest part of us that recoils at the process of death?  Deep down have we not been operating as if by a rumor that we might expect something else?  Don’t we all intuitively feel that death is a damned, unnatural mess which wrecks our hopes and makes a mockery of that creative love that brought us, against 13 billion years of bad odds, to awe-inspiring life? 
       Hurt, and rage--they both need to be felt-- because they point us in the same direction—to hope.  If there never was any hope, then what are we mad about? What else did we expect other than relational break-up and ultimate loss?  The eastern religions say that we have been pretending that there should be an answer to our problem of transience.  They say our desire to live, form attachments and to love deeply is what is unnatural.  It is this deep desire for ongoing distinctive relationship that must be given up.
        I think they are profoundly mistaken.   I think our hurt and our rage emerge from a legitimate, deep, and eternal place planted in each of our hearts.  The Ecclesiastical writer said, "He has also set eternity in the hearts of men." (3:11)   So, for Christians, grief is a form of joy--a joy which lets go of our loved ones in the hope that God holds the departed in his care. God holds them as he continues to hold us.  And in the end he will mysteriously hold all things on heaven and earth together.  All creation looks forward to this liberation from relational and corporeal decay.
      So, let yourself grieve, my friend. The God who is present in and with your suffering will give you strength.   Let yourself grieve this loss, and by extension, over time, you will have the courage to grieve all the other losses that are too big to even think about right now.  In time you will be able to own all your life's disappointments in the hope that they all will be swallowed up in Christ's victory.  
        Come see me.  I want to be with you.




[i] John Polkinghorne’s work talks of this archetypal mother-and-child communication.