“Everything happens for a reason.” “God’s got great things in store for you.” “God has a plan for your life.” These well-meant phrases were the bane of my existence when my husband endured an extended period of unemployment several years ago. I know when we say these things our hope is to point to God in the midst of disappointment, but in reality we minimize the person’s sorrow and eliminate their freedom to lament.

I’ve thought a lot about those years of endless upbeat words in the last few weeks, and wondered: Do Christians have a hard time expressing negative emotions?”

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“Grief and loss are familiar in these days of the coronavirus pandemic. Pain, injustice, and suffering are knocking at our doors in ways we cannot ignore. The Bible shows us a way to meet this deep pain and suffering through the practice of lament. In this toolkit, you’ll find a host of resources to help you and your church understand what lament is and how to practice lament. As we lament individually and in community, let us be joined together through both our hope-filled expectations and our calls for God to act swiftly to bring forth God’s kingdom this day.”

“Holy God, a cloud of grief hangs heavy over my head and I feel like I cannot breathe, so give me the strength to pray. I raise my hands toward the sky and I lift my eyes to the hills which is where my help comes from. Lord, when the names of people who have been choked, shot and assaulted is too many to count I know that not one soul has been forgotten by mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, cousins and friends. They remember…

…laughs and smiles,

…dreams and struggles,

…talents and personalities.

Now these men and women are gone. Father, how long must we listen to the cries and screams as blood stains the sidewalk? How many videos must we watch before we begin to see a change?

Help me, God. Help us. Help the people of St. Paul, MN. Help Baton Rouge, LA. Help our nation. Help us examine ourselves. Help those of us who are sad and angry not to let these deaths be in vain. We do not pray for vengeance, but we do thirst for justice. We hope for healing between neighbors and officers called to protect and serve. We long for the day when young men will live long enough to be old men and parents will not have to say ‘good-bye’ too soon.

My hope is in you, God. Deliver me from all my fears. O God, come quickly to help us. O Lord, come quickly to save us. In the name of the one who came that we might have life and have life more abundantly.

Amen.”

“According to the Institute for Collective Trauma and Growth, when a community experiences widespread trauma (like a pandemic outbreak), our immediate response can often resemble the “heroic.” We rise to the occasion. We imagine and execute a hundred creative solutions to problems that had not existed just days before. We master Facebook Live. We manage virtual meetings and even host virtual youth group.

After a few weeks we take a step back and marvel at what’s been accomplished.

But at the very moment we realize these victories, we realize something else too: We realize “I don’t really like virtual worship.” “I’m zoomed out.” “I have no idea if or when or how this will end.” In short, we realize this is really hard.

Some of us have managed to stay so busy in this “heroic” phase that we haven’t created much space to grieve the losses this pandemic has wrought.

Perhaps that makes sense. Some of our congregations and communities have been ravaged by the loss of loved ones, jobs, and security. For such folks, the grief is on the surface and unavoidable. But in many places, rates of infections and death aren’t so high. Our immediate family and friends are mostly healthy. Finances are precarious but we don’t know anyone personally who’s been financially ruined. Our losses are not necessarily actual and discrete losses (the death of a sibling, the permanent loss of a job). They are more like what psychologists call “ambiguous loss.”

Ambiguous loss is the kind of loss we associate with a loved one declining in the face of Alzheimer’s disease. It’s not that we lose that person entirely the day of their diagnosis. It’s that they and we lose little bits of each other gradually and imperceptibly over months, years, and even decades. Sometimes the loss is obvious, sometimes it’s subtle. But in either case, the losses pile up over time.

Many of our losses in the face of COVID-19 are ambiguous: the loss of human contact and touch, the accumulated loss of long absences from friends and family, the loss of security, the loss of a sense of freedom, the loss of future goals and milestones. For Christians, we’ve lost the hug on the way into church; the nursery volunteer eager to soothe our bawling child; the church ‘grandpa’ passing out candy to the children of mildly annoyed parents, the palpable grace of receiving the sacrament shoulder to shoulder with diverse brothers and sisters in Christ. These losses may be hard to name and articulate in the moment, but they are multiplying rapidly.

And these losses, too, need to be grieved. Because if they are not grieved now, their spiritual, physical, mental and emotional consequences will spasm for years to come. Just as epidemiologists fear our uneven response to this first wave of infections could lead to an even more dangerous second wave, so too, our attempts to “busy” and “hero” our way through this first wave of losses may lead to an even more dangerous second wave of grief.

Losses that are not grieved but stuffed down become fertile ground for all manner of harmful behavior: addiction, neglect, distance, and resentment.

What good news then, that our faith offers such good resources for articulating grief! At the heart of our faith is God’s Son enduring suffering and articulating despair. The psalms are packed with language of sorrow and loss. The most formative experiences of the Israelites included extended slavery and exile. One of the most defining realities of the early church was persecution and threat.

In other words, the Christian faith is not meant to be lived once we’ve moved past grief. It’s meant to be lived through grief. Just as surely as there is a time for God’s people to rejoice, there is a time to mourn.

What about You and Your Church?

So how are you embracing distinctly Christian grief work during this season? Are there practices your congregation has found helpful to name and grieve ambiguous losses? While we have established rituals to grieve the deaths of loved ones, for almost all other losses, we are without an agreed-upon playbook.

I’d love to hear how you have been doing this. Share your ideas and suggestions for how we and our congregations can grieve the losses that have occurred and prepare for the losses that are to come.”

“Prayers [like Psalm 88] indicate God’s understanding: he knows how people speak when they’re desperate; he identifies with us in our suffering.”

“How do we help a congregation lament and grieve when they are unable to gather for worship? This moment is pastorally more crucial for spiritual formation than a full docket of church education programs. How we handle it may say as much about the gospel we proclaim as a year’s worth of sermons.

James White was fond of recalling a certain Anglican rector, who, after the onslaught of a decimating flood, prayed the prayerbook as always without alteration. The collect of the day read: “Water your earth, O Lord, in due season.” Fortunately it’s obvious to most worship leaders that the tragedies that surround us require our sensitive and honest attention in worship, whatever form that worship takes today. Injustices must be identified. Enemies must be named. Solidarity with the suffering, dying, and grieving,and deep and soul-searching faith must be expressed.

But how? How can we express our anger, fear, and bewilderment? Let me suggest that we take the biblical psalms as our model. When faced with an utter loss of words and an oversupply of volatile emotions, we best rely not on our own stuttering speech, but on the reliable and profoundly relevant laments of the Hebrew Scriptures.”

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