Grief. There is a deep sense of it. An energy in the air enveloping each of my closest friends, myself, our country. Lamenting losses on all fronts. A collective groaning.
It rises up and breaks us down. We are face down in the weeds wanting to disappear into them. Our bodies ache. Our eyes are swollen. Our hands are clenched tightly in an eternal fist. And the ground at our feet is wet because we cry so much.
Grief pushes in on all sides. It is a pulsing, intertwined and complicated emotion with no seeming beginning or end. Something that often doesn’t make sense in how it expresses itself to us or in us or how it flows out of us.
I grew up in a system that told me it shouldn’t be that way. I grew up in a system that spewed out one liners about trust and God and will and prayer the instant someone got a phone call about cancer, or signed divorce papers or buried their child. I grew up in a system that threw arms around a heap of a human in the midst of despair and said, ‘Just trust. God has a plan for this’.
I grew up in a system that expected struggle or painful feelings to demonstrate themselves a certain way or it wasn’t acceptable. To continue to function and move forward. To not fall off the deep end or ‘leave the faith’. To acknowledge the blessings God was giving you in the chaos. I grew up in a system that gave a timeline for despair; a week or two filled with casseroles and flowers and cards. Of obligatory “I’m praying for you’s”. Grief was rated in tiers, death of a loved one being the only reason to truly feel terrible.
I grew up in a system that said it is my job as a christian to ‘comfort’ people. And ‘comfort’ meant making people see that God was what mattered, not what was happening to them or their family, and that they should get out of their painful feelings as quickly as possible. And if they couldn’t see the bigger picture outside those dark and painful feelings, than they weren’t really trusting God enough or at all.
I grew up in a system that used one liners about God to absolve ourselves from the responsibility of sitting in pain with people or to placate ourselves or remove ourselves from sitting in our own pain. And at this point, the only words I have are
Stop that. Just stop.