This year at the first-ever online Annual Conference for the Church of the Brethren, there was understandably a good amount of discussion around the COVID-19 pandemic. There were mentions of the ways that it made it harder for us to connect, the ways it made our beloved traditions just a bit more complicated, and the ways that it impacted the ministers and congregations that wave together to form the tapestry that is the Church of the Brethren. However, in that discussion something was missing – something that I noticed and that others on social media also began to note as well. There was no mention at all of the half a million (and still rising) deaths caused by the pandemic; no real acknowledgment of the lives lost to the disease that has so drastically and irrevocably changed all our lives. I found that omission curious, but as I thought and reflected, one explanation stood out as so simple yet so true to the experiences of myself and countless others.
The fact of the matter is that we as the Church in America are pretty bad at grief. And we could do a whole lot better.
Now, I don’t mean “better” in the sense that we somehow must improve at grieving – make it more efficient and less emotional. In fact, I think that our cultural propensity to that approach is what makes us so bad at grief. We frequently cage in our emotional responses for a variety of reasons: fear, a need for control, and the desire to keep the emotional status quo. But in doing that, we fail to fully process and honor that sacredness found in the moments of deep and rich grief.
Allow me to illustrate:
One and a half years ago when this pandemic began, I was serving as a chaplain while finishing my seminary degree. During that time, I found myself walking alongside folks who were grieving and witnessing the different ways that people cope with death. Whether it was anger or sadness or anything in between, that grief always found a way to manifest itself and I always felt the hand of God moving in those most intimate emotional moments. I learned very quickly that people grieved in very different ways. In one particularly grief-filled evening, I walked alongside a woman who sat quietly sobbing at the death of her boyfriend. I had visited this woman earlier as her boyfriend was declining, and I felt my heart hit the bottom of my stomach when I saw his room number come up on my pager again. I walked back to that room and stood in the doorway, witnessing to the sadness and anger that he was gone, and watching her look up to the heavens, wishing beyond all hope for a few more minutes with him.
At any point in any of these moments, I could have said the typical empty platitudes of our culture – something like, “Oh, they’re in a better place now,” – but that would fail to honor the relationships that those people had with their deceased loved one. Or, I could have looked around uncomfortably and shuffled away. But instead, I drew closer to her, and she looked up at me with tears in her eyes, she said to me, “you know Chaplain, I really was hoping I wouldn’t see you again tonight.” And in that most tender moment, I responded in the only way I knew how, the only four words that came into my head:
“I know, me too.”
Grief is an inevitable and personal part of our lives. But also, grief is something felt by entire communities, especially congregations. However, it seems as if most communities of faith are still attempting to figure out how that grief will manifest itself. It is complicated when multiple people in the same community are potentially experiencing the grief of multiple deaths all at once. It is hard enough for a community to grieve when one space in the pews is empty, let alone when many are empty at once. Even further, this is complicated by the circumstances of this global pandemic. Almost every death in the past sixteen months has been difficult (if not impossible) to grieve in a safe and public manner. This creates a situation by which many people in congregations are physically acknowledging and beginning to grieve deaths from a year ago or longer – deaths which families have already had to grieve once before. And for people who were more involved with the Church, returning to in-person worship might open that grief up in a new and different way to those family members, much like returning to a relative’s house for the first time after their death. All of these factors make it a unique challenge to grief in a way that is authentic to the life and service of beloved members of faith communities while still being respectful to the relatives of the deceased. How can we process grief that feels fresh and new to us without re-opening the wounds of grief that a part of our beloved community already had to work through?
I do not have an answer to what that looks like, beyond the obvious acknowledgment that it will look different for every community and every death. It is often hard for us to acknowledge and talk about death in our culture. All too often, we treat the concept of death like something to be avoided at all costs instead of something that is inevitable for each one of us. But especially in the Church, we must be unafraid to acknowledge the grief of death and all of the complex emotions that come along with it. We claim to follow a resurrected Messiah and we proclaim our belief in a life beyond this one, so why do we fear death? As we sing in our hymnals, “we are pilgrims on the journey, we are travelers on the road.” This life is a journey, and if we truly believe that the destination is as good as we claim it to be then talking about the end of that journey in a spiritually and emotionally healthy manner should be an important part of our individual and communal walks with God.
So, my prayer for us, the Church, is that we can face our grief head-on and find ways to create both public and personal space for all of the appropriate rituals and reflections for the grief in our lives. May we not be so focused on the return to our designated seat in the sanctuary that we miss all of the seats that have been emptied due to this pandemic. We have an opportunity to create a great shift in the ways we handle grief as a body of faith, but we must be willing to have those deep and personal (and yes, a bit awkward) conversations about death and grief.
And maybe, once we learn to accept and process the reality of death, it will make what comes beyond all the more exciting.
May it be so, Cousins in Christ. May it be so.
Zechariah Houser is the Coordinator of Short-term Service for the Church of the Brethren. He previously served the Crest Manor Church of the Brethren in South Bend, Indiana. Houser is a graduate of Messiah College in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, where he earned a bachelor of arts degree in Youth Ministry and a minor in Peace and Conflict Studies. He holds a master of divinity degree from Duke Divinity School at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.
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