“A Place for Grief”
Isaiah 25:1, 4,6-9
Ephesians 1:15-23
Hebrews 12:1-2
I don’t know what happens when people die—though I’ve accompanied enough people through the process to believe there is something—and, more important, someone—on the other side of the veil. I’ve heard enough deathbed visions to think that while death takes our beloveds from us, it may reunite them with dear ones who’ve gone on before.
My people are buried in a simple, cooperatively-owned cemetery in the piney woods of East Texas. Stately live oaks tower over the graves, Spanish moss hanging from their branches like so many ladders connecting earth to heaven. Once a year the cemetery hosts a homecoming, and the living gather ’round their dead for an afternoon of visiting and pecan pie.
When the time came to lay my grandmother Edra to rest in the red clay soil of that place, the local preacher—her nephew and my dad’s double-first cousin—did the honors. Looking around, he reminded us that she was in good company.
The remains of her husband, Morris, rested on one side of her; her second-born child, Aubrey, whose death at 18 months old broke her heart, was on the other. Over there lay her identical twin, Neva. Over yonder were her sisters Iva, Roda, and Opal, her brothers Travis and Verdon, and her grandson (my brother) Keith.
I don’t know where we go when we die, but I’d like to think there will be a welcoming party to greet us. I like to think it will feel like home.
I don’t know exactly where the souls of our beloveds go when they die, but I want to trust—and I do believe—that in some way they are still with us, that they are part of that great cloud of witnesses our scriptures evoke and that, furthermore, their witnessing and that thinly veiled cloud are more real than most of us acknowledge or can comprehend.
This past June, on the seventh day of my sabbatical road trip, I drove a few miles out of my way to visit that East Texas cemetery. I hadn’t been there for 10 years, since we laid my other grandmother, Elma, to rest on the Fourth of July. I told myself I was going for my family—because I knew it would honor my parents and other relatives—but I also did it for myself.
I needed a concrete sense of connection to my ancestors and my only sibling. I wanted a sense of rootedness and place—not so much the place where their bodies or ashes had been buried, but the somewhat backward corner of the world where they had lived and worked, where they had raised their families and worshipped their God, the out-of-the-way place that for them was the center of the universe.
Never before had I been to that place by myself, never before had it been so deserted that I could hear the dry, sun-scorched grass crunching under my feet, never before had I had such solitary time to contemplate family and place, connection and disconnection, life and death, and grace upon grace in spite of everything.
I would like to tell you that I had a deeply meaningful, even mystical experience, but it was a hundred and one degrees in the shade and there wasn’t much shade to be had.
And yet the reality of that hallowed ground and all the love and life and grief it holds abides with me, even on this All Saints Sunday when I know several of you have suffered major losses recently. Even as we celebrate resurrection, life everlasting, and that great cloud of witnesses, we must also know that there is a place for grief, and that it is holy and healing ground. As if to remind me that we must not deny the reality of death or harden our hearts to the pain of loss, as I was writing this sermon I received the news that my best friend’s mother had just died.
And so my hope for this service and our church, my hope for each and every one of us, is that we will be a safe space and holy ground for grief and hope and for all our feelings.
It seems to me that we are pretty good as a church at making space and time to remember and celebrate the lives of those we have lost. We create beautiful memorial services, and we excel in offering sympathy and support to so-called survivors of all manner of loss.
And still I wonder if we could not yet grow in our capacity to grieve and to honor and allow grief. I wonder if we might recover some of the wisdom of the old ways, when grief was understood to have both urgency and staying power, and funerals were held within days of a death rather than weeks or months later. I wonder if we might still learn that grief and resurrection faith are not mutually exclusive, that even if we trust that nothing can come between us and God’s love, that God’s love has defeated death forever, and that someday, somehow, somewhere we will be reunited with our loved ones, we will never stop missing them. I wonder if we might come to see and acknowledge the loss and grief of those whose loved ones still live but whose memories and personalities have died.
Jesus, after all, wept bitterly over the death of his friend Lazarus and the pain of those who loved him, even as he knew he was about to call Lazarus out of the tomb.
I wonder if we—mostly white, mostly New Englander Protestants—might yet come to respect and learn from not only the lives of the saints but also the All Souls’ traditions of other lands and cultures.
I am aware that this is not exactly an uplifting sermon, and I hope that is okay. Because sometimes what we need is simply to be seen, and even the truest, most hopeful assurances can ring hollow when what we really need is both comfort and the permission to be sad and uncomfortable.
In a few moments we will gather around Christ’s table and call forth the great cloud of witnesses, including our very own dear ones. We will give thanks that the God who is love does not ask us to put on a happy face, and that the sacrament so central to our life together is one that invites us to remember both the love that has died and the love that lives on and is present with us and to us. We will give thanks for Jesus, who lived out the truth that “there is no remedy for love but to love more.”
For now I leave you with a “Blessing for the Brokenhearted,” by Jan Richardson:
Let us agree
for now
that we will not say
the breaking
makes us stronger
or that it is better
to have this pain
than to have done
without this love.Let us promise
we will not
tell ourselves
time will heal
the wound,
when every day
our waking
opens it anew.Perhaps for now
it can be enough
to simply marvel
at the mystery
of how a heart
so broken
can go on beating,
as if it were made
for precisely this—as if it knows
the only cure for love
is more of it,as if it sees
the heart’s sole remedy
for breaking
is to love still,as if it trusts
that its own
persistent pulse
is the rhythm
of a blessing
we cannot
begin to fathom
but will save us
nonetheless.
