Dear Friends,
The presence of God in grief: it’s an interesting question for (I think) there are two extremes, neither of which seems to me to fully express a Christian reality. On the one hand, there might be the complete erasure of grief (as if it were something to be ignored). I have occasionally come across this and it has seemed oddly inhuman. On the other hand, there is the opposite: allowing grief’s complete victory, and this feels wrong-fitting, too.
Like the two natures of Christ – fully human and divine, we say – a Christian approach to grief must pit a different course – not a ‘balance’, but rather a ‘both-and’.
For my money, the poet PJ Kavanagh finds a truer course, describing a remarkable experience of God he underwent during a period of bereavement. I note his opening description of the way grief ‘stalls’ us, takes the wind out of our sails. And then the shift to prayer, but a certain kind of prayer. And then the final meeting with God which does not take away his grief but, instead, contains it, and thereby somehow changes it…
Beyond Decoration
Stalled, in the middle of a rented room,
The couple who own it quarrelling in the yard
Outside, about which shade of Snowcem
They should use. (From the bed I’d heard
Her say she liked me in my dressing-gown
And heard her husband’s grunt of irritation.
Some ladies like sad men who are alone.)
But I am stalled, and sad is not the word.
Go out I cannot, nor can I stay in.
Becalmed mid-carpet, breathless, on the road
To nowhere and the road has petered out.
This was twenty years ago, and bad as that.
I must have moved at last, for I knelt down,
Which I had not before, nor thought I should.
It would not be exact to say I prayed;
What for? The one I wanted there was dead.
All I could do was kneel and so I did.
At once I entered dark so vast and warm
I wondered it could fit inside the room
When I looked round. The road I had to walk down
Was still there. From that moment it was mean
Beyond my strength to doubt what I had seen:
A heat at the heart of dark, so plainly shown,
A bowl, of two cupped hands, in which a pain
That filled a room could be engulfed and drown
And yet, for truth is in the bowl, remain…
Today I thought it time to write this down
Beyond decoration, humble, in plain rhyme,
As clear as I could, and as truthful, which I have done.
P.J.Kavanagh
Rev Dr Mark Laynesmith
Vicar Earley St Nicolas Church