Copyright ©
Rev. Lisa Presley
READINGS: from The Book of Qualities, by J. Ruth Gendler
Before she came to this town Grief was a woman named Eliea. She was a potter, and she glazed her big-bellied pots with earth colors until they shone like dull bronze. She had four children. The daughters lived inland now in the distant foothills, and the oldest son left the family as soon as he could get away. It was the young boy with the golden curls and the laughing eyes who gave her great joy. He loved the ocean. He was barely walking when he learned to swim and not much older when he started to sail. One day about two years ago the sailors brought his boat home empty.
Never have I heard such sounds of weeping as when Grief found out her son had drowned. She screamed and howled. She stamped her feet and smashed her pot and bowls. She ate with all her fingers. She tore at her hair, and it grew wild and matted. She wandered from place to place with no sense of where she was or how she came there.
One day at the edge of the forest Grief heard another woman crying out. She spoke with her. She listened to her story. Grief was surprised. She had never met anyone else who had suffered as she had. Together the women sat in the clearing and mourned their children. Through the long afternoon, through the twilight, through the night, they wept and wept and wept and wept. In the morning Grief was washed clean of her tears. She came to our town and started to do her real work.
From A Grief Observed, by C.S. Lewis
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.
At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.
There are moments, most unexpectedly, when something inside me tries to assure me that I don’t really mind so much, not so very much, after all. Love is not the whole of a man’s life. I was happy before I ever met H. I’ve plenty of what are called “resources.” People get over these things. Come, I shan’t do so badly. One is ashamed to listen to this voice but it seems for a little to be making out a good case. Then comes a sudden jab of red-hot memory and all this “common-sense” vanishes like an ant in the mouth of a furnace.
On the rebound one passes into tears and pathos. Maudlin tears. I almost prefer the moments of agony. These are at least clean and honest. But the bath of self-pity, the wallow, the loathsome sticky-sweet pleasure of indulging it—that disgusts me. And even while I’m doing it I know it leads me to misrepresent H. herself. Give that mood its head and in a few minutes I shall have substituted for the real woman a mere doll to be blubbered over. Thank God the memory of her is still too strong (will it always be too strong?) to let me get away with it.
SERMON:
I knew I was in trouble when I lost my wallet for the third time in six weeks. The first two times, it wasn’t so bad. The first time, I left it on a shelf at my local Borders Books and Music, and of course one of the patrons turned it in, and I got it back okay. The second time, I left it at a donut shop frequented by the Southfield police. Again, no problem. The owner found it, held it for me, and I had it back within hours.
The third time, though, it was at a Wendy’s. And when I called them an hour later, no one had turned it in. They hadn’t seen it. So I cancelled all the cards, and replaced the driver’s license, and did all that lousy stuff we have to do when we lose all our important documents. Then, about a week later, Wendy’s called, and told me they had my wallet. The money, of course, was gone, but the cards were all there. I had gone through all of that nonsense for nothing, after all.
But the trouble I was in wasn’t about having to replace all those documents, or losing my money, or fearing for my credit cards. The trouble I knew I was in was that I had never really spent any time mourning my father’s death. The trouble I was in was that I was living in the midst of unacknowledged and unresolved grief.
My father died the third or fourth week of my new ministry in Southfield. It was unexpected. Several years before, we thought he was going to die after a stroke, but he came through that, as well as the bi-femoral bypass a year after that. But this time, this time he simply died without any warning.
It was a Friday night, and my Mom was visiting from Seattle. She had left Detroit shortly after my parents had divorced twenty years before, and that night we were hosting a party with many old friends who knew my family from when I was a child. There was no way to stop the party, so we greeted everyone with the news of my father’s death as they arrived, and lifted a cold one in Dad’s memory as we renewed old friendships.
Two days later I did my usual Sunday worship service, announcing somewhere within it that my father had died. My mom went home a day or so later, and I flew out to Connecticut to help my aunt with the details that always arise when dealing with death. I was gone a week or so, then came back. Three months later, in December, we held my Dad’s memorial service, once again back in Connecticut. It was a wonderful service, and it was good to know first hand what good ministry my UU colleagues do.
But other than that short time away, it was work as usual. Trying to understand the new congregation I was in, learning more and more about ministry, getting ready for the craziness of the holidays while trying to learn everyone’s name, and the names of everyone’s children. Cooking Thanksgiving dinner, figuring out what to do for Christmas and the like. It was a crazy time, and there wasn’t room for anything more.
So I was relieved, in a bizarre way, that I didn’t begin to lose my wallet until in the midst of the New Year and winter’s cold. By then, once we got into February, I could eke out some time for other things, and one of the things was losing my wallet. I hadn’t lost a wallet for over 20 years, and then three times in six weeks. I took pride that it only took three times before I realized something must be going on. What was going on, I realized, was that I had never spent any time mourning my father. I got up, looked at the bulletin board on the church wall outside of my office, and copied down the number for Hospice of Southeast Michigan’s grief support group. I punched in the number as I made the decision to go to the once-a-week group. It was one of the best decisions I made that year.
It was one of the best decisions, and yet, it took so much—losing my wallet three times in six weeks—for me to make that decision. For you see, I was dealing with grief and loss the way that we’re all expected to do so, by ignoring it and hoping it would go away, or that somehow I’d be all better just with the passage of time.
And yet, in real life, it’s not like that, even when we think it should be. Losing takes more out of us. We’re always, always losing people and things. Not the kind of losing like losing my wallet, but the kind of losing as in death, divorce, moving away, being fired, retiring, losing money, losing friends over silly arguments and through big important decisions. Losing dreams and ideas about how life will be, or should be, and losing the way we’re going. Losing possibilities, pets, friends, positions, relationships, you name it. We lose all sorts of things, all the time. Some are willing loses, and others are hard losses where there might have been some choice, but not real choice, and not good choices at all. Some are temporary losses, and others are permanent. The words we use, even, are such strange words, too—“lose” and “loss”—as if we have somehow misplaced something and we will be able to find it, pick it up, get it back somehow. The language itself lacks the finality we need.
Yet even though loss is a constant part of life and living, our deeper understanding of it is fairly recent. It really wasn’t until Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s seminal work on death and dying that we began to think about grief in any kind of systemic way. While working in hospices during the late 1950s and early 1960s, Kubler-Ross realized the grief of dying patients seemed to go through certain cycles and phases. Revolutionary then, now we all know the stages that she articulated—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance—and even though too often they are used as an unvarying road map of what “should” happen. Kubler-Ross’ work gave us a starting place from which to take grief and loss seriously. Now we know it’s not lock-step through these, but rather a cyclical dance.
Yet still, there’s that nagging sense in our world that grief is not appropriate for the public eye. These days, corporate policy often grants you only three days off for the death of a parent, maybe a little bit more for a spouse, and sometimes more for a child, but often not much more. We’re expected to deal with death quickly, then get back to our old ways and our old sense of being. I still remember, with outrage and incredulity, something that happened at a meeting of police chaplains. I mentioned I was sending flowers at Christmas time to a family whose daughter had been murdered, and one of the other chaplains asked me if I should be doing that. When I asked her what she meant, she asked whether it was appropriate to remind these parents of their murdered daughter at a festive time. My jaw dropped—I could not believe that any person of the cloth would think that a parent could ever forget their murdered child, or think that remembering that child with them would be a bad thing. Yet that example alone let me realize once again how unfriendly is our world to those who grieve.
Grieving has been turned into coping and getting back to “normal,” and this is where John Schneider says we have it wrong. John is a psychologist, retired from MSU, who is a member of our UU congregation in Traverse City. He is a specialist and expert in grief and grieving. For him, this emphasis on coping is all about getting back to where we were, rather than the more appropriate task of finding a way to reach beyond, to move into something different, and to find transformation through the process. For John, grief is not only about coping, it is also about hope, and the power of hope to transform our grief and loss and love into something that can help us move into a future made different by that loss.
There are three tasks, says John. The first task is to discover what is lost. We have to live into the grief, to know what it feels like, to taste it, see it, color it, be moved and touched by it. We have to know what it is that is gone, that is missing, that is no longer the same. This is hard work and hard to do well, especially because “lingering” in our grief (as it is often called) makes others uncomfortable. We’re not our usual happy-go-lucky selves, and instead we represent loss and death in its fullness and possibility.
But we need to know what it is that’s gone. So to be able to do this, we need safe places, sanctuaries. Sometimes the pressures of everyday needs get in the way—like happened to me after my dad died. But the grief didn’t go away, it merely hid. It took taking that time and space—and that grief support group, where it was not my job to be in charge—it took that place of safety and security to be able to look and see what was gone. To see not only how I missed my dad, but also how all the dreams I had about what could be or would be or might be were also torn asunder with his death. There was no longer the possibility for us to turn into best friends, or for him to be the “Father Knows Best” kind of dad a part of me always wanted. I needed to experience what it was I truly lost.
This is often where we get stuck. As I said, we’re not given the time and space to really sort this out, to know it, to understand with the depth of our being what it is we have lost. Those three days off from the work place don’t even begin to touch the time and space we need to feel all that we need to feel. This takes a long time, and when we don’t have that space, or can’t find that space, or can’t use that space, then sometimes the grief turns into depression. But more often it’s misdiagnosed as depression. It’s often easier—for others and ourselves—to be supported because we’re depressed. There are meds for that, and today it’s almost a status symbol to compare anti-depressants. But there are no meds for grief. We’re neither culturally attuned to nor culturally comfortable with grief. For that we need to take the time and space, to find, create, seek out, be supported by safety and sanctuary so we can complete this task of knowing what’s lost. That’s the first task, knowing the fullness of what is lost.
And then, after we know what’s lost, we need to find and discover what we have left, or what it is we can restore. This is a time when we need to use our whole selves in the process. This step is not just an intellectual process, or just an emotional process, or just a behavioural process, or just a values process, but a time and place where we have to bring our minds, hearts, actions and values to the table and see what is left. Discover what is possible. When we grieve, we’re dealing with the loss and destruction of attachments—to persons, beings, things, visions, ideas, and imaginings. We need to shift the focus to what attachments are still there, or can be put back together again. It is a sifting through the ruins, a kind of archeological study of the self to see what is there, layer after layer, and what can be patched together, what can be created anew from that which has been lost. And as is true with any shattered pot, some times the pieces come back together easily, and other times, jagged edges and whole sections are missing, but there is still something there. We discover what’s left, and then we can begin to move on.
This is the third task: to learn what is possible because of the loss. It is, in effect, a way of reframing, but not just as a psychological trick of words. It is not a letting go or forgetting or transcending the loss—getting better than it—but instead a transformation of the loss. It is making something different or new out of the old. Something that might be more resilient, might be stronger, might be better than ever, or maybe just might be different. It is a way that we can find self-empowerment, not through diminishment of the loss, but rather through changes in us and how we see and view the loss, how we decide to move on from here. We no longer have to hold on to the assumption that life is immutable, but instead realize that anything and everything will change.
And here’s where hope comes in. When we begin the task of grieving, the whole world seems bleak. We’re in the midst of discovering what has been lost, and in the midst of discovering what is left, and sometimes we can’t ever believe that things will be different, that they can be different, that we would even want them different. Hope is the furthest thing from our minds and hearts. Sometimes it is hiding so far away we can’t begin to see its glimmer. It is at this point when we can easily be misdiagnosed as depressed. Grief and depression are very similar, except in this one respect. If we have hope, we know we’re not depressed. Or, even when we don’t currently have hope, if we can conceive that maybe someday we could possibly hope again, then we are not depressed. This is the difference, for in depression there is no inkling that hope exists anywhere in the world.
Now it may be that in our grief we can’t hold that hope ourselves. This is a very real possibility. Then what we need is someone, or some place, that can hold the hope for us. It might be too soon for us to be hopeful, but perhaps someone else can hold the hope for you. Someone else can hold the hope for me. Somewhere, someone, or some place, can hold that hope. The hope that sometime, someday, somehow, this will be different, even when we’re not totally sure ourselves.
That’s what that grief support group was for me. The skilled facilitator, the other women in the group—each of us took turns holding the hope for each other. It was that intangible presence of the possibility of hope that let me, and them, struggle through the hard times. When we can no longer hope, and when we can no longer allow someone else to hold that hope for us when it is too far away from us, then we are sinking into depression, and then we may need help of meds and docs to help us get to a place where that hope can be reclaimed. Yet by allowing someone else, some place else, to hold that hope, we can become midwives to ourselves and our grieving process, and move from that which is lost, to that which is left, to that which carries us on, and move through grief rather than into depression. The alternative is to live in a world without hope, a place of bleakness where nothing makes sense, where there is no sense of possibility.
The words sound pretty, and the process sounds easy, but you all know that that’s not the case. Grieving is hard, some of the hardest work we do, and too often we find ourselves trying to take a shortcut, aided and abetted by our grieve-avoiding culture. Yet we cannot shortcut the process. We cannot deny grief its due, or we’ll find ourselves losing wallets, or worse, misplacing our sense of selves.
And we are never truly done with grieving. Each loss we have brings back the ones that have come before. When we learn something new about ourselves, or about that which was lost, or about our relationship to that which is lost, we go back again, and reevaluate everything in the light of that new information. We revisit the old hurts, the old haunts, looking again for the ways in which we can transform, not transcend, grief. We must, always, be able to know what is lost before we can truly see what is left, and how that might be transformed.
Let me give you another example.
Most people inside our Unitarian Universalist congregations didn’t grow up here. The most consistent statistic is that only about ten percent of us “caught” the bug early and ended up staying. So that means that about ninety percent of us came from some where else. These days, an increasing percentage come from no religious upbringing, but there are still a substantial percentage that comes from some other religious tradition. And out of both of these groups, many, many of those people come to Unitarian Universalism grieving.
Other than those of you who came to church “for the children,” it isn’t generally joy that brings us to religious community. Out of the over two hundred couples who’ve called me to help celebrate their weddings, and the over two dozen couples who’ve called me to help celebrate the birth of their children, only three of those couples have ever participated in and joined my congregation. I don’t know, perhaps they didn’t like the way I did the ceremony, but I tend to believe it isn’t joy that draws us into religious life. I believe that when life is going well, we don’t find ourselves pushing open the doors of change. It is when life feels hard that we seek companionship, solace and rest in religious communities. People bring their griefs—death of loved ones, loss of crucial relationships, job loss, a move to a new area while leaving connections behind, a battle in a previous religious home—these are the things that people bring with them.
And so we as religious communities reach out and nurture them in their loss, help them heal over the grief that brings them—brings us—through the door. Yet there is also another kind of grief that too often comes in unacknowledged and unbidden. And that is the grief of losing one’s previous religious home.
For you see, out of the people who come here, those who come from another religious tradition don’t seek us out because they are delighted with where they have been. If they were, they would have stayed there—simple enough. No, people come to a new religious home because there is something that has gone wrong at the one before. I remember when my family left the UU church of my childhood, it was because of a church fight. And the countless people who’ve joined the congregations I’ve served come to us because there is something in that “old place” that no longer speaks to them, or no longer holds them. Often times the change is theological. As we move through life our understanding of the universe and our place in it is changed and shaped by the days we live, and it is not always possible to stay in the same religious community. Sometimes we feel too betrayed—by doctrine or policy or clergy who have not seen us as real, viable, loveable human beings. Tired of being in a place that chafes our beings, that narrows our spirits, that injures our souls, we move out into the world, seeking new religious community. Then we stumble upon places, like this community here, where we in an instant feel as if we’ve come home.
This is a story that is repeated all around our religious movement. Hundreds of people come into our doors saying that Unitarian Universalism is where they’ve always belonged, they just didn’t know we existed. An interesting statistic—85 percent of people who join a religious community do so because they’ve been invited by a friend or family member. Yet Unitarian Universalists ask someone to church an average of once every 27 years! No wonder it feels like finding buried treasure when you first walk through the doors of your UU congregation.
But in that elation and the joy of having found home, too often people don’t always realize that behind the joy, and woven fine with it, is still a sense of loss. You used to be somewhere else that soothed your soul, or where your family was connected, or where you were baptized or bar or bat mitzvahed, married, or where you buried your dearest ones. You used to have another community that was home, where people knew your name, where you knew where to sit and where things were, and where you didn’t have to sort it all out again. A place before fights, betrayal, dogmatic insistence, theological struggle. There is real grief in leaving a religious community, and too often in the relief of finding a new home, we never take the time to do the work—to see what it is that has been lost, to see what can be salvaged, and to move on to a new future.
Two years ago, I worked with a congregation whose first minister had left. They didn’t know what was to become of them, and what they wanted most of all was to brazen their way forward into new life. But rather than going with this flow, they allowed themselves to fully grieve. They knew what they had lost—their founder, their stability, their ability to have full time ministry. They struggled to know the depths of this, and in the process they were able to discern for themselves what was left, and what they could carry forth. When I arrived, they had no hope—they did not know if they would close their doors, or if they would ever be able to find another minister to lead them on. During those months of discernment, of doing the hard work of grief, what my job was was to hold onto and hold out the hope. Every week, as we lit the flaming chalice at the start of the service, it was a clear reminder that somewhere, in their presence perhaps, hope still remained. Eventually, through the work together, they got to the place where they again could hold their own hope. They realized that they could move on, what it was they wanted to carry forward, and who they could become. Just a few months ago they celebrated the installation of their new full-time minister.
It was hard work, but one of the important things they learned in that process—we all learned in that process—was that although it was hard, they could do it again. They knew that there was a special place inside themselves where they held their old congregation—the way things had been—and that although it hurt, they could still find their way into saying goodbye, into grieving, into moving into another world. They knew the good things to bring forward, the unwanted things to leave behind. Although it hurt, they realized that they would never have given up the years with that first minister, for the gift of what could be were to valuable to lose.
Now I don’t tell you this story because it is a cautionary tale—as far as I know Brent is planning on being here with you for a long time to come! But rather I tell this story because of two things. First, we all need to grieve our religious losses, too, to be able to move on into better community. And second, because it is often the place of religion, of religious community, of ministers themselves to be the carriers of hope. Life is all about change. Today is not just like yesterday, and tomorrow itself will be different again. Anticipatory grief is just as real as actual grief, and every loss we have brings back the losses that went before, and presage the losses to come. Life is change, and in that change there is also always the possibility for transformation. Religious life, religious community, is about many things. It is a place to be joyful, to have those weddings and dedications and moments of true joy. And it is about providing the safety and sanctuary where we can grieve, where we can discover what is lost in all parts of our lives, where we can discover what is left, and where we can transform ourselves and the world. We come to religious community to celebrate the fullness of life. To be held in the balm of religious community, to be held, too, in the balm of the spirit, of god, of all that is that is bigger and wiser and greater than we. It is a place to feel the spirit.
But most of all, religious community is the place of hope. It is about hope. About holding out the hope, and holding onto the hope, and being the hope, with and for each other, in the presence of all that is holy, when we need each other and that other the most. As the words of one of our hymns puts it so well: “Joy and woe are woven fine, clothing for the soul divine.” And, as it continues, when this we rightly know, then safely, safely through the world we’ll go.
Go with love, with faith, and, most of all, with hope. Amen.
The Sermon “Of Grief and Loss”by Rev. Lisa Presley was originally delivered at
Paint Creek Unitarian Universalist Congregation on April 27, 2003