[Note: This is a revised version of an article that originally appeared in Modern Psychotherapy, 4, no. 1(1984): 9-23.]
A voice is heard on high,
Lamentation, and bitter weeping:
Rachel, weeping for her children,
Refusing to be comforted for her children,
Because they are no more.
Thus says the Lord:
Refrain your voice from weeping,
And your eyes from tears.
Jeremiah 31:14-15
Suffering is our greatest stimulus to the search for a redemptive meaning in life. It is also the greatest threat to the realization of such a meaning. Perhaps no form of suffering poses a keener challenge to faith, or is anticipated with more dread, than grief over the loss of someone we love. Especially if this grief results from a tragic situation, a violent or untimely death, or one accompanied by much pain, it may seem that all notions of the "goodness of God" vanish like wishful fantasies or futile attempts to deny the true harsh nature of existence.
How can a good God - or any God - coexist with the reality of grief? The theology will be left for other chapters. When we are afflicted by grief we need more than a theological discussion: we need to know whether there is a response to grief that can preserve faith and heal the soul.
People who lose loved ones may find their faith beginning to crumble. They may be plunged into despair, every attempt to approach God seeming futile. How do they react? In their search for comfort, they may elaborate philosophies to impose a meaning on the tragic event. Or they may justify their indignation by "proving" that the event is meaningless. Or they may give up struggling and give in to resignation and defeat. Whatever they do, if they remain bitter and resentful, their search for healing has not been fulfilled.
What is the meaning of despair? Literally, "despair" means "without hope." Hope is a vision of good that has not yet materialized. It is looking towards the realization of what now seems only possible. It is a way into the future. Despair is a response to catastrophe that says, "There is no future." Those who are in despair have given up the struggle. Their plans have been shattered. They see no action that can transform their hopeless situation. They have lost their future.
Despair can be redeemed if it becomes an attitude of patient waiting. However, a certain danger, always present within despair, may threaten to emerge. Despair always risks giving way to a related condition with which it is often confused. This related condition is depression. On the surface, despair and depression have much in common. In both, the sufferer experiences a sense of powerlessness.
However, there is an important difference. Despair is a response to a situation that seems hopeless. Even though they may see no options, people in despair can face their experience. But when depression sets in, they lack the energy to respond. Depression, literally, means "pressing down." Depressed people are "pressed down"; they may want to strike out but cannot, and so may turn their energy against themselves. People in despair may continue to search. But those caught in the grip of depression are immobilized, anaesthetized, paralyzed.
Is there a way to prevent despair from becoming depression? Dare we hope for even more: to find a path from despair back to faith? Before attempting a response, we need to consider the possible reactions to grief.
Reactions to grief can become complicated, particularly if there are already other unresolved traumas in the person's life. The present loss can reawaken the experience of these traumas, giving to grief a kind of self-perpetuating energy. Attempts to resolve it bring only more pain. One may turn increasingly inward, alienating oneself from life, perhaps even using one's grief as a refuge.
It is also not uncommon, if the loss has been severe, to feel we have been thrown out of the divine scheme, no longer to have an active share in the life around us. It may even seem that if there truly is a God, then our suffering proves God's hatred of us. One way to preserve this God in the presence of our pain is to demonstrate our guilt. We search our imaginations for the roots of this guilt, which we are convinced must exist to justify what we cannot comprehend. We focus increasing attention on ourselves, assuming power and blame for what was really beyond our control.
Another way of preserving our image of God is to direct our anger against it. This can actually be healthy. Anger is naturally a result of grief, and it needs a place to go. God will not be harmed by it. However, this anger needs a way to resolve. It becomes complicated when we refuse to let go of it, when it becomes a continuing unwillingness to accept our experience, a flight into futility. We fight with God the way Quixote fought his windmill or Sisyphus his rock. We condemn God for not living up to our expectations. We become bitter in spirit.
This reaction may reveal certain assumptions we make about God: that God is a Being from whom we are entitled to support, who must conform to our standards of justice, but whose actions are arbitrary and capricious just like any human being's. Neverthess God must be on our side, must feel our pain, perhaps even cry with us. This God may die in the experience of grief. It is just as well, for this God has no reality, but is a servant of human desires.
Finally we may react to grief by trying to escape it completely. We may try to deny it, find ways to divert our attention from it, or insist to others and to ourselves that we are strong when in fact we may be on the verge of collapse. If this approach to grief does not lead to an actual breakdown, it may place us back on the road to depression.
Grief can be a heavy weight totally crushing the spirit, or a fire consuming the last particles of dross that separate the soul from an awareness of itself and its God. What determines which it will be? Is there a healthy response to grief that can preserve the consciousnsss of God?
When there seems to be no alternative to despair but depression, when every attempt to make sense out of life, to pray, to approach God, breaks down, then there is no longer any action that one can take to save one's spiritual life - except one. One can choose to face one's pain.
At first this sounds absurd: the very nature of one's plight seems to imply that one has no choice but to face it. However, as we have already noted, people have many ways of trying to escape their pain. But if one chooses to face one's pain fully, one may come again to know the capacity to appreciate life.
A word of caution. Facing the pain does not mean fixating on it and immersing oneself in self-pity. This is not really facing one's pain but trying to remove its sting by turning preoccupation with it into a pain-killing drug. To face one's experience means feeling the grief just as it is, neither diminishing it by denial nor embellishing it with self-serving fantasies. By enduring one's pain exactly as it comes, one prepares the way for three profoundly paradoxical consequences.
The first consequence is that, in the light of a receptive attitude, grief reveals the character of faith. What is faith? "Faith" is a word that has nearly died on the bloody battleground of religious dogmatism. Very often "faith" is confused with belief. However, belief is not decisive for the quality of spiritual life. The mind's assent to a given proposition is no guarantee of the inner transformation that comes with faith. Being a fearful or unloving believer is just as easy as being a fearful or unloving nonbeliever. Many people who believe demonstrate little spirituality or love. Historically, religious belief has often been used as a weapon to dominate others. Belief can even be used - and often is used - to escape the true awareness that comes from faith. Of itself, belief has no saving power.
Faith is the awareness of the power of eternity. Eternity is timeless, spaceless spiritual reality. It is what Jesus called the "Kingdom of Heaven." It is not accessible to the senses, but is described by the prophets in their visions, and all religious experience points toward it. Eternity is not "endlessness," since that is a concept defined in terms of human time. Eternity is God's original creation, from which our material universe derives. Eternity penetrates time; it dissolves time; it is the reality that lies beyond the veil of experience. Eternity comes as a flashing realization that "Many waters cannot quench love" (Song of Songs 8:12). When perceptions of eternity reach us we experience them as healing.
Those who are crushed by grief often have no perception of eternity. They do not begin their journey hearing voices of angels. They begin their journey on a path of darkness. Can the dark road lead to the light of faith? Instant enlightenment is an illusion: the dark road is the only road from experience to faith.
There is a universal tendency to place conditions on our experience. None of us wants to suffer. When we do, we may become angry, resentful, and bitter. Our tragedy seems monstrous, perhaps uniquely so, and should never have happened. We might condemn others whom we hold responsible for our suffering, or others who somehow escaped the pain. We might direct our anger towards God: either condemning God outright or defining God in a way that keeps us believing comfortably. All of these conditions that we place on our experience are limited human judgments, and all are attempts to avoid the dark road.
The dark road that leads to faith is the choice to experience one's pain without imposition of judgment or placement of conditions. Psychologists have described the first few steps along this road as "stages of grief": first may come shock, then denial, then anger, then withdrawal, then working through - but not necessarily peace and healing. The psychological journey must be accompanied by a spiritual one. Grief begins in the psychological world, the world of emotional pain and broken relationships. The journey ends in the world of awareness of eternal reality.
From here to there the gap may seem unbridgeable. But if our response is authentic, if we have truly allowed our former beliefs, judgments, and desires to be shattered by the hammer of grief, then we have already entered the circle of faith, even though we may not know it. We have let go of the temptation to define reality the way we want it to be - and this renunciation is not easy. Sometimes a self-serving use of grief seems the only comfort available to us. But there is something that gives us the power to do without it.
We now approach the center of the mystery of despair. Despair is a response to the non-fulfillment of our desires. If we accept our grief just as it comes to us, maintaining our silence before the temptation to judge our circumstances, then our desires no longer enslave us. We then become free of despair, for we suffer more from our judgments than from grief itself. The dark road seems dark because traveling it means giving up our vision of the world as we would have it be. Until now we may have looked towards this vision for solace. But giving up the dreams of the past is a step away from despair - it enables us, once the wind and the earthquake and the fire have passed, to become open to the sound of the still, small voice.
The acceptance of grief without judgment is the entrance to the circle of faith. What power makes this acceptance possible? What is it like - this God who still appears to us on the dark, isolated road, when we continue searching long after we have lost all sight of the God with whom we were once familiar? The answer is given by the second consequence of grief authentically received: grief reveals the character of love.
There are two possible reactions to a tragedy that are often confused. One is acceptance; the other is resignation. Outwardly both appear to face the situation, but there is a critical difference.
If we are resigned to our loss, our energy does not flow freely; there is a sense of paralysis. The love we felt for the one we have lost could still be an active force in our lives, but is blocked by powerless rage. The resigned person does not really give up the wish to judge or to deny the experience, although it may appear so. The wish survives but is concealed by a conviction of helplessness.
In contrast, those who can accept the tragic situation - who can face it without judging self, others, or God - have managed to keep this love alive within themselves, and to draw upon its energy to embrace a world whose apparent cruelty they may not understand.
We must now ask a difficult and critical question: What enables us to cross the bridge from resignation to acceptance? The answer lies in the paradox of grief and love: the very source of the intolerable sharpness of grief's pain is our essential resource in the struggle towards acceptance. This is the love one still feels for the one who has died.
Love is a source of strength, a wellspring of tremendous energy. It does not disappear after the one we loved is no longer with us. In fact, we are likely to experience our love towards that person with stinging intensity. No matter how we may try to prepare, nothing brings to our attention the sweetness of something beautiful as sharply as the pain of no longer having it. Nevertheless, if the love was genuine, a true appreciation of the other's individuality, then it can still be redeemed. It will supply the strength to save those who grieve from the paralysis of resignation.
The first step toward the redemption of love is facing the emotional experience. In the normal course of mourning it is helpful to allow oneself to relive one's memories in minute detail - a gradual and painful process. This is the beginning, but more is needed, since one still must deal with the fact that one's love can no longer be expressed towards the loved one in the way it was when he or she was alive.
The process of mourning brings with it a heightened tension between newly reawakened, resharpened feelings of love and the absence of the one toward whom these feelings are directed. We can respond to this tension by allowing our love to wither and die, a part of our soul dying with it. Or we can respond by allowing this love to channel itself back into life.
The fate of the love that seems to be lost forms the ground upon which the transcendence of grief stands or falls. To the extent the love was real - a true unconditional expression of goodness - it can continue to transform the life of the survivor. Love is more than emotion; it does not perish after we lose the source of good feeling in our lives. "Love is strong as death" (Song 8:6); even from beyond the grave those we have loved can inspire us to fulfill our lives. This preservation of love has nothing to do with the very common use of grief to justify living in the past. Reacting to the tragic loss with "My life is over now"; "Nothing will ever be as good" does not honor the dead. It taints their memory by using it to constrict one's life. In contrast, the love that now seems to be lost can become an inspiration to continue moving forward. It need not lead to fixation on the past but can be a way into the future.
How can one find once again the love that seems to be lost after the separation of death? Does one find it by seeking a new relationship? The love that has the power to survive death cannot be confined to any one relationship. Love wants to express goodness, and the goodness in a relationship interrupted by death still needs to express itself. Love does not perish, but we might obscure it by demanding a painless existence. Love does not ask to be spared the experience of pain (1 Corinthians 13:7). A mother embraces her newborn infant in spite of the pain that its birth has caused her. She wants only to be the first source of goodness her child discovers in a strange and lonely world. In the same way, the love that reaches beyond the grave does not insist on the absence of pain but desires to contribute creatively to life, even in the uncertain world of the aftermath of grief. What begins as love between two human beings finds fulfillment as a movement outward and towards the world. It is the same energy, transformed and grown. It provides strength to the weak survivor, "a spring of water, whose waters never fail" (Isaiah 58:11).
The experience of love's loss brings pain. The realization that love is not lost, that it continues to flourish and inspire growth even when no longer expressed in the same way, makes the pain bearable and provides the power to accept life after tragedy. In biblical terms, the love that survives a personal attachment may reappear as the presence of God itself. Rachel's love was originally a mother's love for her children, but it lived after her and became a heavenly voice inspiring Jeremiah to compose a beautiful hymn of consolation for a people who thought they had lost God's love.
Love's transformation and reemergence in the unsown wilderness prepares the way for the final, most paradoxical consequence of a grief faced with an open heart: grief reveals the character of joy.
Grief is not merely a painful experience; it is a journey. The journey begins with the experience of separation. In this sense the journey of grief is the journey of life itself. The book of Genesis, with its story of the separation from paradise, encapsulates the separations we must endure as human beings. The first of these is the separation at birth, the separation from mother. Afterwards, through the process that psychologists call "separation-individuation," we learn to perceive ourselves as individuals separate from one another. Thus the thought of separation becomes a basis for our understanding of the world - so basic that often we are not conscious of it. The perception of separation is also present in all forms of suffering. If we are separate as persons, then our interests are also separate - making fear and suspicion inevitable. The most acute experience of separation is grief: the apparent separation from sources of love.
But if separation were the ultimate state of reality, then there could be no consolation. Yet we extend wishes of consolation to those who are in grief, and we entertain hopes of consolation when it is we ourselves who are grieving. Perhaps the anticipation of consolation reveals something about grief, and finally about reality itself.
"With weeping they shall come, and with consolations I will lead them back; I will let them walk by brooks of water, in a straight path in which they shall not stumble" (Jeremiah 31:8). This is the journey of grief. What are these rivers of water, and from where do they come? They are the "living waters" that come when the response to grief makes no effort to avoid the darkness but follows it to the end. That response to grief is itself love, a love that is willing to bear the consequences of a death and so survives death's finality.
But a response to grief that tries to escape the darkness of separation will not find true relief. It cannot, because it does not become transformed in love. Instead it increases the sense of separation. It is only natural to ask "Why me?" but if we persist with that question, giving it the power of our resentment, it will create further division in our minds, even suggesting that somebody else's loss would not have been as tragic. Such reactions are a self-defeating grasp for comfort, keeping the energy of our attention focused on the self at a time when it needs to learn to redirect itself towards the world.
There is a response to grief that creates not separation but healing. We can respond to grief with faith if we allow it to shatter our judgments of what should be. We can respond to grief with love if we allow our love for the person we have lost to continue to inspire our lives. These two responses lead to a third, revealed through love's patience over the course of time but as inevitable as it is incomprehensible: we can respond to grief with joy.
Any loving relationship contains elements centered on the needs of the self, and also energies drawing the self beyond itself. To the extent that love participates in the spiritual - the love that is greater than the self - it transforms the one who loves even after the the one who is loved has been lost. The pain of grief is the measure of the gift that was shared. The response that most does justice to the gift - difficult to reach in the beginning, but gradually revealed by the transforming power of love - is gratitude. Gratitude can arise as we overcome our attachment to the specific form of love we have received, when we become fully aware of its value, and realize it never was our personal possession. Like grief, gratitude is more than an experience. It is the recognition that through the love that one shared, one has been touched by a reality deeper than separation. Gratitude is an understanding of the world that dissolves the appearance of separation, an understanding that love is not consumed by death. It is the sign that grief has finally been healed.
Gratitude is the pathway from grief to joy. The joy attendant upon grief's resolution preserves the love of the past without living in the past. Love actually knows neither past nor future; it is eternal. The joy of grief's resolution realizes the eternal in the love that once was associated with the past.
For most mourners gratitude does not - cannot - come right away. The road that leads to gratitude is long and dark, and traveling that road means giving up the false light of self-pity, anger, resentment, possibly even hatred, that may first seem to be grief's only solace. But at the end of the road we find it was dark only because of our inability to see. Eventually the day comes when we discover that consolation is inevitable. Grief alone testifies to a false reality, false because it is loveless.
"Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted" (Matthew 5:4). Who is the comforter? The comforter is the self-transcending love that remains after personal love has disappeared behind the curtain of death. Love cannot be confined within a single personal relationship. Its nature is to expand and to give. The love we experience within any given relationship reflects only a single facet of the principle of Love - which we call God - that governs the universe. If we become more interested in this greater Love than in the specific personal attachment through which we experienced love, we will find the specific attachment slowly evolving into a general attitude of love and compassion. This loving attitude does not depend on the existence of any particular personal relationship, and so is not threatened by its absence. It is the way into the future that was missing in the hopelessness of despair.
The healing of grief consists in this: that we can still use the love we experienced in our relationship with the loved one who has died. This love is still a living energy that can direct itself towards the world and can make us an expression of goodness to others. As we allow it to do so, it will bring us to unexpected new places, places of healing we could not have anticipated.
Faith is the awareness of eternity, an awareness that spans the chasm of separation. At the end of the road that begins in grief, our sense of separation is overcome by love - a love that grows from the very same love we fear we have lost. Allowing this new and greater love to flourish brings us to faith, because it brings us to the eternal through making contact with God's own nature.
Love outlasts every consequence of loss, because it is eternal. When grief is finally healed, our faith informs us that separation has no power, because it has no share in eternity. Our human needs and fears may forever tempt us to resist it or deny it, but the amazing paradox of grief and joy has been part of human consciousness since antiquity. Only the heart's secret knowledge of an eternal truth could preserve the song of consolation from the dust and ashes of the accumulation of time.
They who sow in tears
Shall reap in joy.
Though weeping they go forth,
Carrying seed to sow,
With song of joy they will return,
Bringing home their sheaves.
Psalm 126:5-6