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Friday's Faith
Child-Loss:
The Deepening Dimension
of Our Faith Requires
"Deep-Sea Diving"!
This new dimension into which we have been thrown (see this week's "Wednesday's Woe") also spills over into the area of religion and faith. Activities that were commonplace for us all our lives, attending Sunday School, attending church, being involved in the music ministries of the church, attending Bible studies, etc. - none of that seems to have an appeal any more. What has changed? Christ certainly hasn't!
In those settings, it seemed we all gathered together and shared a similar reality. But when you lose a child, you are thrown into such a depth of reality that others have no way of understanding, and it seems we no longer have anything much in common spiritually-speaking with these other brothers and sisters/church people. The ones we can connect with now are others who have lost a child, or who have suffered a traumatic loss of some kind.
This week, a child-loss griever on a Facebook grief group said:
"I am jealous of people of faith."
Another griever responded,
"I have posted before that I was in church all my life until losing (my son). Now I cannot make myself go back! Yet, I am very spiritual. Organized religion feels too constricting to me at this point!"
This griever's response is a fairly typical response that I read in the several grief groups I am in from those child-loss grievers who are Christian.
What is it about organized religion that does feel too constricting at this point in our lives?
First, consider the writings of Patsy Clairmont whose quotes are distributed throughout a grief devotional book we have called, Deeper Than Tears: Promises of Comfort and Hope (a book recommended by friends of ours who are Christian counselors living in California who had lost their teenage daughter about eight years before we lost Merry Katherine):
From Patsy's devotions called "The God of All Comfort," and "Our Hearts in His Hands":
The God of all comfort does not seem to extend his comfort to make us comfortable. Perhaps that's because our tendency would be to become La-Z-Boy believers, content to crank back our chairs, put up our feet, and snooze through the losses of others. Instead, he offers his comfort that we might be motivated by mercy to tenderly extend kindness to the hurting. . . .
If we don't feel, weep, talk, rage, grieve, and question, we will hide and be afraid of the parts of life that deepen us. They make us not only wiser but also gentler, more compassionate, less critical, and more Christlike.
To become tenderhearted, insightful, and responsive to the Lord and others, we must first wade through our losses. That means a willingness to feel the effects of our loss, to examine our hearts under the tutelage of the Holy Spirit, to release tears, and to relinquish our rights to understand.
In doing so, we will feel the pain, but we'll learn appropriate ways to express it. Sometimes it will be through the healing release of tears, prayer, some form of art or words (spoken or written).
The grieving process is much like . . . surgery. When we allow the Great Physician to examine the issues of our lives, he may need to hold our hearts in his hands.
What a vulnerable position to allow someone to scrutinize us that closely and find what makes us tick. . . .
~Patsy Clairmont, Under His Wings
To pick up on Patsy Clairmont's analogy of the grieving process being like surgery…
Perhaps an apt correlate is as follows:
What we child-loss grievers are needing for our "surgery" is more like "Intensive Care," while the regular church goer might be okay with "regular hospital rooms" or even "out-patient care"! So while the average church-attenders proceed on their way through their routine activities, possibly they are in what is more like "regular hospital rooms" where doctors and nurses wander in and out at various times to check in on them, while we child-loss grievers feel more in the need of an Intensive-Care type soul-searching under the ever-watchful eye, and heart, of the Great Physician!
We need the continuous healing and comforting of the Great Physician/Comforter who is ever-present with us in our deep grief and our deep soul-searching on, not just a daily basis, or even hourly basis, but more like the most intensive of on-call help, even that of a minute-to-minute basis!
As Patsy says,
If we don't feel, weep, talk, rage, grieve, and question, we will hide and be afraid of the parts of life that deepen us. They make us not only wiser but also gentler, more compassionate, less critical, and more Christlike.
(It is one of the reasons that I get so irritated when I hear child-loss grievers tell me people are judging them for staying away from church like they are going to lose God in their needed time away!)
No one that I know of in the normal circuit of church-going is going to process the ways that we "feel, weep, talk, rage, grieve, and question"; it is just too threatening for most church-goers!
To me, it is like we are facing the spiritual depths through which no soul wants to penetrate, much less plunge head-first. We will not hear the angst, the heartache, the devastations of which we face daily ever addressed in a regular Sunday School class, or a Sunday sermon.
It feels more like the parishioners of today hover safely in the shallows while we have been thrown face first into the darkness of the depths, like-it-or-not.
Why would we turn to those who dog-paddle the shallows when we MUST learn deep-sea diving to survive our devastating loss?
We've been thrown into the deepest grief known to mankind with no how-to-manual, and we're in it to sink or swim.
And to the church-goers who feel so threatened that we are away from church for awhile,
We are trying our hardest to swim. Please try to understand that our desperate needs for God are just much different than yours! Trust me, we are not staying away from church because we "don't need God"! It is quite the opposite. Perhaps we just need Him more desperately than you!
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