Our "Grief-Illiterate Culture"

In an interview on the Today Show this morning, Maria Shriver made a comment about our "grief-illiterate culture" that gave us pause.  My wife and I thought that was an interesting and pretty accurate observation.  While there are still some pockets in our society that seem to know what to do about grief and mourning, most of our 21st century American culture seems to be a vast wasteland when it comes to dealing with grief and loss.

We don't know how to deal with the emotions that come with grief.  We're taught to buck up, to shake it off, that big girls don't cry and that boys certainly don't.  When we see a person at a time of intense grief who is not crying, we say "he's holding up well"; when they cry we say "she broke down."

We think reason fixes everything.  So we come with lame explanations,  pitiful comments, measly excuses for comfort that do no good.  In truth, nothing can fix the loss or cure the grief.  It will likely always be there for the person whose loss it is, but over time they will discover their own ways to look at it, to come to terms with it, and perhaps even to embrace it.

It's not our grief, so we move on quickly.  Like driving past a man standing on the roadside with a cardboard sign "Homeless Vet," we may feel a twinge of pity for him for a moment but our own plans and commitments quickly put him in our rearview mirror.  We attend the wake or the funeral and quickly move on, expecting the grieving person to do the same and are surprised when they don't.

I think we respond to grief this way because we don't understand that grief is a holy place, a sacred space.  It is a place where people meet God, or they don't meet Him.  It is a place where they are angry with Him, or they are comforted by Him.  It is a place where they hate Him, or they know His love for them.  It is a place where they wrestle with Him, or they nestle into Him.  Grief is the Jabbok River to which each of us comes eventually (Genesis 32), and some fear crossing it more than they do crossing the Jordan.

But whether in our anger, our hate, our wrestling; our being comforted, our being loved, our being nestled; our meeting God or our not meeting God, grief is still a prime place where all this happens.  Certainly we can encounter God in other places and at other times; but when our defenses are down, our props are washed away, our self-structure is shattered, our composure has decomposed - these are the places where God comes to meet us.  These are the most sacred spaces of life for those who are in them.