“CONSOLATION?”

 

 

A post-homiletical discourse delivered by the Rev. Dr. James R. Beebe

Rector, St. Patrick’s Church, Incline Village, Nevada, January 3, 2010

 

 

     Imagine having this thought in your mind and on your lips every waking moment:  “I guess we’re going to die in this place.”

 

     You’ve been held in captivity in this foreign city, a thousand miles from home for the last forty years.  And now you have new conquerors, for the Persians have just defeated the very people who have led you here – the Babylonians.  No help there.  When all of a sudden, like a bolt out of the blue, the Persian king, Cyrus, tells you you’re free to go home.  A Persian, for crying out loud!

 

     And just when you’ve gotten to that stage in grief called, ”acceptance.”  Kubler-Ross called it that, at least.  Maybe it’s more like, “hopelessness.”  Then this.  Nobody – except maybe George Bonanno – could have seen it coming.

 

     [Abigail Zuger, M.D.)  Dr. Bonanno, a professor of clinical psychology at Columbia, had interviewed hundreds of bereaved people, following some for years before and after the fact, looking for patterns.  His conclusion: the bereaved are far more resilient than anyone would ever have imagined.  Don’t worry, he says. When the worst possible news breaks, you will almost certainly get through it unscathed.  Almost everyone does.  And if your friends and neighbors mutter that you aren’t grieving normally, don’t worry; you probably are.

 

     In other cultures, Dr. Bonanno points out, it is the ceremonies of death that are the focus of public attention – the paid wailers, the choreographed movements and clothing.   The community makes sure they are carried out with precision.  But in our own navel-inspecting society, it is the emotions of death that well-meaning observers focus on instead:  “Why isn’t that widow shedding at least one little tear? How could the boyfriend be off at the ballgame like that?  What is wrong with that bizarrely cheerful orphaned child?  Surely they all need therapy.”

 

     Not so, Dr. Bonanno maintains.  The natural sadness that actually follows a death is not a thick soup of tears and depression.  People can be sad at times, fine at other times.  Over all, we are hard-wired to move on.  We have the ability to smile through the worst of it.  We also use some other techniques:

 

*   Almost everyone idealizes the deceased and spends long solitary sessions remembering good qualities, overlooking bad ones.   Some talk to the deceased regularly.

 

*   Some indulge in what Dr. Bonanno calls “ugly coping” — anger at the darn doctors, that darn hospital or the stupid minister’s stupid eulogy can make the bereaved feel better about the loss.

 

*   And some realize early on that their lives have actually improved. The consuming worry about incurable illness is over.  Old dramas end.

 

     For some people, however — for an estimated 15 percent of the bereaved population, or more than a million people a year — grieving becomes what Dr. M. Katherine Shear, also a professor of psychiatry at Columbia, calls “a loop of suffering.” And these people, Dr. Shear added, can barely function.   This extreme form of grieving is called“prolonged grief disorder,”  and is supposed to be one of the new diagnoses in DSM-V, the American Psychiatric Association’s handbook for diagnosing mental disorders, due out in 2012.

    

     But I wonder if prolonged grieving even should be a diagnosis.  Sometimes it seems that we take something that is part of the human condition and, because it is uncomfortable, make it pathological.  You decide.  Once upon a time there was a portly and avuncular 54-year-old professor of medieval studies at a Magdalene College in Oxford, England.  He was, arguably, the most influential Christian apologist of the 20^th century, bringing challenging questions and theological clarity to millions throughout the world.  He was a confirmed bachelor by this time.  Well, almost.

 

     He met a woman who was 16 years younger than he, an American woman with whom he corresponded about her failing marriage and the fate of her two children.  Slowly, his manner towards women began to change.  He writes, “She was my daughter and my mother, my pupil and my teacher, my subject and my sovereign; and always, holding all these in solution, my truest comrade, friend, shipmate, fellow soldier.  My mistress, but at the same time all that any man friend has ever been to me.  Perhaps more.”

 

     She fled her abusive marriage in America and traveled to England.  There, they were married in a civil ceremony so that she and her two boys could have British citizenship.  It was strictly a marriage of convenience and they did not live together.  Later, all that would change.  Her name was Joy Gresham.  His was C.S. Lewis. 

 

     The following year Joy was diagnosed with a serious form of cancer.  That, coupled with their growing affection for each other, convinced the couple to have their marriage blessed by the church.  Although Joy went into remission for a brief period, the cancer returned with a vengeance.  Her last words to Lewis were:  “You have made me so happy.  I am at peace with God.” 

 

     Shortly after Joy’s death, Lewis was shocked to find that his well-reasoned and sophisticated Christian theology wasn’t helping.  He was angry.  Raging.  Here’s an excerpt from A Grief Observed: 

 

 “Go to God when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find?  A door slammed in your face and a sound of bolting and double-bolting on the inside.  After that, silence.”

 

     For years Lewis had been God’s greatest advocate in the face of human suffering, often writing that human pain was “God’s megaphone” to get our attention.  I assure you, in Lewis’ case, He did:  “Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly.  Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively.  But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.”

 

     C.S. Lewis lived for another five years.  But he never was able to navigate through the grief of Joy’s death.  He died on November 22, 1963, the same day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

 

     Turn the clock back 2,600 years.  Picture being captured by a savage foe, stripped of all your possessions, and led off to lead a life under house arrest in a foreign land.  Picture being separated from your family.  Picture losing your faith in God because, after all, He lived in that temple.  Or so they said.

 

     And now here’s the prophet Jeremiah, telling his imprisoned people that God would come to their rescue.  That they would be freed to return to their homes.  They would return, weeping, and with consolations God will lead them back.  “For the Lord has ransomed Jacob, and has redeemed him from hands too strong for him.”

 

     I wonder if they believed Jeremiah.  All of the evidence suggests that they would die in this place.  After all, who is going to physically spring them? 

 

Some Persian?