One of the effects of the recent church lockdowns is that many if not most churches are now using technology to broadcast Sunday services, as well as other online opportunities for members to get together.
Yesterday being Palm Sunday, my wife and I tuned in to three separate services using my laptop. The following are my observations:
The first service was very creative. It used a script of various characters describing from their perspective the events of the first Holy Week, from someone who had witnessed Jesus overturning the tables of the moneychangers, to the woman who anoints Jesus with expensive oil, to Judas who was to betray him. Curiously, no attempt was made to connect any of this to what we’re going through with the coronavirus, something presumably uppermost in people’s minds.
The second service offered a good sermon about how Holy Week naturally offends us with its stark depiction of suffering, violence, and death. The pastor pointed out how difficult it is for us to relive these experiences.
The Good News came in the form of a metaphor, that Holy Week (and presumably the struggles we’re currently undergoing) might be compared to an airliner encountering excessive turbulence during its descent. Though things in the short-term are unsettling, if not frightening, we can be assured that the plane eventually will land safely. That is God’s promise to us.
The third service, like the first, also avoided mentioning the virus. But it was inferred. The sermon focused exclusively on the truth of the Resurrection, that without confidence in this most basic of Christian beliefs, we have no reason for hope. Like the second service, the implication was that, in the end, we needn’t fear our current difficulties because of the ironclad promise of Calvary.
Now, all three messages were appropriate to the season and even well done. Yet I couldn’t avoid the sense that something crucial was missing.
(With these critiques and others, I guess I’m sort of like a toothless old dog barking at a passing parade, too infirm to join in the action! But bark I do!)
In any event, I’m reminded of a marvelous book published in 1983 by Martin Marty, noted Christian author and divinity professor for many years at the University of Chicago, entitled, A Cry of Absence: Reflections for the Winter of the Heart.
It was written in the aftermath of his wife’s struggle with cancer and her subsequent death. It’s similar to an earlier classic by C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed, also written after the death of his wife.
At the beginning of his book, Marty relates a surprising yet touching moment between him and his wife. As it was, they would take turns each night reading aloud one of the Bible’s 150 psalms.
One particular evening, after a day of unrelenting pain and extreme exhaustion, Marty was tasked with reading one of the bleakest of psalms, replete with talk about death and abandonment (not an uncommon theme within the Psalms!).
Marty fell silent, telling his wife he couldn’t do it, couldn’t read something so implacably dark and so utterly devoid of hope. Her response shocked him. Please, she begged, please read it. I really need it tonight.
Marty explains, in hindsight. He says there are two kinds of spirituality, “summer spirituality” and “winter spirituality.” Summer spirituality is easy, he notes, because it’s easy to believe in God when things are going well.
Winter spirituality, on the other hand, is the kind that finds solace and strength in suffering and even death. It grasps the paradoxical truth that ‘God is with us’ (Immanuel) perhaps especially when things are grim. God doesn’t promise us the absence of suffering, it says, but promises to be with us no matter how ruinous things get.
Summer spirituality doesn’t have the patience for this, viewing suffering as proof of God’s absence. Winter spirituality, on the other hand, finds inner peace not by avoiding suffering, but by embracing it fully. Like I said, it’s a paradox.
For years I led grief recovery groups. Over that time, I noticed a phenomenon that never seemed to vary.
There was a long hallway that led from the entrance of the church building to the room where we would meet. One couldn’t help noticing, almost without exception, how tentatively these attendees braved their first steps down that long hallway.
The fact is, most of them were terrified, in part because our culture is a death-denying one. The message most often heard is “stay busy and it’ll pass.” To attend a grief recovery group, in other words, is countercultural.
But there’s more to it than that. It’s that grief frequently causes us to question life itself. In such circumstances, people routinely entertain strange and sometimes alarming thoughts and feelings.
There is, of course, sadness, despair, and hopelessness. But it’s not atypical for people to also experience profound guilt, anger, relief, frighteningly abnormal thoughts about the deceased, as well as a maelstrom of incoherent fears and forebodings.
Because of this, those grieving are naturally terrified that someone else will discover this and decide they’re weird or perhaps not even an especially nice person. Besides, what will people think if I break down and cry?
In my experience, these fears tended to subside within minutes. The reason? For one, the participants would discover that others are going through the very same things they are (they’re not so weird after all!). The second reason is that they would discover that what they’re experiencing is perfectly normal, even their feelings of shame and guilt. Completely normal.
Early on, I realized that the greatest benefit of a grief recovery group is, simply, that it gives people PERMISSION to grieve, to acknowledge and experience openly what they’re going through. It offers the startling insight that it is both normal and healthy to grieve. Besides, others are grieving too. I’m not alone.
In no time, these once total strangers would begin to bond with each other. Trust would develop. Tears would flow with relative ease. And, yes, even laughter and good cheer would break out. Death, they would soon realize, is a part of life. No exceptions.
What’s unnatural, of course, is hiding our grief, pretending it doesn’t exist, burying it, and waiting for it to pass. Then again, it’s not in its nature to magically go away.
Grief, it was once described to me, is like a river that gets blocked by debris, by twigs and branches. Grief recovery is akin to removing each twig and branch, one by one, by facing pain and suffering head-on, not by denying it. In so doing, the river is allowed to flow freely once again.
In stuffing our grief we may dull the pain, but we also dull the joys of life. For when the flow of life within us is blocked, new life is prevented from blossoming forth from the ground of our erstwhile despair.
Martin Marty’s wife understood this, even if he at the time did not. To know pain and fear is normal and touches every life at some point or another. Redemption is found in knowing that God both understands and experiences our pain, not remotely from a distance, but personally, intimately, fully. It is this that gives us strength and inward peace, not denial or happy “summer” thoughts.
Perhaps the greatest lesson of Holy Week, then, is not so much the knowledge that the Resurrection is real and that one day we shall know eternal life, though this fact is foundational, and the undeniable source of all Christian consolation.
Put differently, it’s one thing to know intellectually, in our heads, that everything eventually will turn out right, but a different matter altogether knowing experientially that God both knows and experiences the very depths of our current sufferings.
Thus, perhaps the greater lesson of Holy Week is that there is no human experience, not even death itself, that is foreign to God and has not been suffered by Him. Our God, as I say, is not a remote, distant entity looking down sympathetically on our everyday sufferings, but One who has experienced the absolute worst of human sorrows and who thus is able to empathize with what we’re going through.
With this knowledge, the Resurrection reveals its greatest force – that not only is God with us in our suffering but that that suffering is not futile, but shall usher forth into new life, even life eternal.
In the end, Jesus weeps for Lazarus not because he doesn’t know Lazarus will ultimately rise (raising Lazarus is why Jesus is there, after all), but in order to teach us to weep. For in our weeping is revealed the hidden fact that we are never bereft of God, but fully and at all times embraced by Him.
That’s why Martin Marty’s wife insisted he read the bleakest of psalms in her time of despair. It’s the same reason the Bible is replete with countless such testimonies of pain and suffering and death. By giving ourselves over to their truths, we free ourselves from death’s spiritual grip, and awaken ourselves to the glory of Easter’s astonishing reversal, of new life blossoming forth from death.