lent reading, week three
/To hear Brandi read this week’s essay, click here: https://youtu.be/Y8c6U0j31Ps
Week Three
Two years ago, I was frantically trying to reorder my family’s life so we could soak up every moment with my nephew Judah, who was dying as a tumor grew in his brain. When he died, the grief was utterly consuming. It still is on many days. He is talked about and longed for every single day.
My grief changed me. Is changing me. I’m different in the way I trust God and think about my community and wonder about what we are all doing here. Those questions are for another day though. Today I want to tell us that grief can change your body and your brain too. It can make you exhausted without knowing exactly why. It can consume you in a fog, making it impossible to think clearly, to remember what you are doing, or to stay focused on a thing. Grief distracts.
500,000 people have died in America in the last year from Covid. Millions of people have lost their jobs or closed their business, while millions of others feel their mental health fraying by the day. 300 million dreams of what the year ahead would offer have been disrupted. Grief abounds.
If you find yourself distracted, unable to focus, as if you are moving in slow motion through a fog, you might be swirling in grief. It comes uninvited. It lingers without explaining why. This week of Lent, I gently suggest you get in touch with your grief. It is not unfaithful to do so; students of lament know it to be a faithful act of worship. We suffer. We long for healing. We are made for eternity and our mortality wounds us, sometimes permanently.
As you explore your own grief, I do hope you will sense God’s gathering, comforting presence there. You might not, and that will hurt. You might find other bodies to grieve with though. You might ask for help, or notice someone else seems to hurt like you do. Henri Nouwen reminds us that we welcome and heal and sustain others through revealing our hurt, sitting with our pain, exposing our vulnerable spots. Healing doesn’t come only from our effort to reclaim our focus or in our determination to keep going. Often it comes from the communion of grieving with others. It is tempting to turn inward, knowing how overwhelmed you are, how incapable of connection you feel when you’re not your best self.
This week I hope you find new energy to lift your eyes and see that you aren’t alone in your grief. That in God’s design, you are comforted as you seek to comfort. Your capacity to receive love increases as you choose to love sacrificially. Perhaps the Beloved Community begins when we witness, move toward and help bear the staggering loads of others, staggering though we may be. If Nouwen is right then the pressure is off to understand who created our grief-burdens, how we efficiently manage them, or where/when/how we drop them. Maybe a way forward is to see the burden of another and then get so close that we begin to carry part of it just because we are there. Many of us are hurting, and I pray this week we see Lent as a time not just to renew our awareness of God, but to experience the fullness of God as we bring our distracted, overwhelmed, hurting selves into full relationship with wounded others.
Grief distracts. It is worth noticing if all the ugh you feel is actually rooted in grief. It is also worth bringing your distracted self to sit before God, around other hurting folks, and offer thanks that you aren’t alone.
To Ponder:
“To only have a theology of celebration at the cost of the theology of suffering is incomplete. The intersection of the two threads provides the opportunity to engage in the fullness of the gospel message. Lament and praise must go hand in hand.” -Soong Chan Rah
“Laying down your life means making your own faith and doubt, hope and despair, joy and sadness, courage and fear available to others as ways of getting in touch with the Lord of life.” –Henri Nouwen
To Read:
Mar 3 Job 42:1-3
Mar 4 Isaiah 40:21-31
Mar 5 Ps 142
Mar 6 Hosea 5:15-6:3
Mar 7 Luke 6:20-31
Mar 8 Ps 143:5-10
Mar 9 Ps 25:4-18; 19:7-14
