Angie Best-Boss is a Favorite Person of mine. (There are lots of you, and many don't even know it.) Now and then, she sends me sermons that she's given (she does a Quaker minister gig when she's not writing up a storm about health and parenting and life.) Nearly a year ago, I received the following from Ang, and being one of my favorite topics ("grief" - yay!), I saved it to my computer's desktop for easy reading/editing/posting later.
I almost always do things when they need to be done, and that's very often not exactly when I want or even intend to do them. Let's just say it's a good thing that I keep an ear to the ground and nose to the wind, otherwise, I'd miss even more than I already do.
As I purged photos from my camera phone this morning, something that needs doing on occasion and that requires a certain amount of Letting Go, my uber-buggy computer and whacked out country internet combined to put me in my place. My browser stalled, stopping my own personal Internet Time in its meaningless tracks, and Ang's "sermon on grief" document inexplicably opened.
So it turns out that today is The Day for finally publishing this sermon, un-edited, from July 2009, by Angie Best-Boss.
While she names individuals and refers to situations that only her congregation would know, these are words that I needed to hear today. And I know of several others in my life, other Favorite People, who need to hear these things even more than I do. After all, we all lose. As Ang says, it's "the price we pay for living."
Service of Remembrance 7/19/09
Opening prayerTo the God of Light who resides in each and every one of us, and who exists in every living thing and in every manifestation of Nature, I thank you with all my heart for the blessings of this day.
I ask you to bless this country and all countries, and all of the people of this nation and of all of the nations on the Earth.
We gather together filled with all the longings of life. We bring our hurt into this place, some of it marked by deep and open wounds. We bring our hope into this place, some of it bursting with joy at the very fact of existence.
Whether we have come here out of habit, conviction, loneliness, or curiosity: we belong here because we are here, and all that we have and all that we are is welcome here.
We bring our thoughts and we bring our silence. Our fears and concerns, our hopes and expectations.
Into the silence we throw our very being.
May we allow the deep wisdom to come that comes when we allow our hearts and minds to be recklessly, wildly, prayerfully, open.
We throw ourselves fully into your presence, O God. Amen
Ecclesiastes 3:1-12A Time for Everything 1 There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under heaven:
2 a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
3 a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
4 a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
5 a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain,
6 a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
7 a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
8 a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.
9 What does the worker gain from his toil?
10 I have seen the burden God has laid on men.
11 He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.
12 I know that there is nothing better for men than to be happy and do good while they live
SermonAbout 15 years ago, I was an emergency room chaplain in an urban teaching hospital in Norfolk, Virginia. It was sorta like the hospital on ER, without the drop-dead gorgeous staff or the exorbitant pay scale. I loved it, but it was a rough place to work. Gun shot wounds and suicides were everyday occurrences. And like most public hospitals, it was short-staffed. As a teaching hospital, doctors in training scrambled to stop the bleeding, sew up knife wounds, and tend to the sick. For the most part, they were good at it.
What they weren’t any good at was dealing with the families – especially after someone had died. I would come to the family room and listen as another new doctor tried to tell the family that their loved one had died without actually saying those words. Instead, they would say:
We did everything we could.
Some physical injuries are simply impossible to repair.
The illness was fatal.
Your loved one has passed.
They would say anything to avoid saying that someone had died. Because that was just too painful to say or watch people respond to. Other people’s grief can make us feel uncomfortable. The problem was that not saying the words didn’t make it any less painful for the families – instead, in their stress and anxiety, it often confused them. They needed –and wanted – to hear the truth – and sometimes that meant their loved one had died. Naming the pain of their loss was an important beginning.
Once they knew, their reality changed. They were not the same people they had been when they walked into the emergency room. Grief would change them, as it does all of us. But they couldn’t begin to cope with that reality until their loss was named and acknowledged.
We don’t live in a world where we like to acknowledge pain – our own or anyone else’s. Our culture values independence, toughness, determination – and we see tears and mourning as a sign of weakness, which is to be avoided at all costs. When someone dies, we have created an expectation in our culture that you get three days to deal with the intense grief and then you aren’t really allowed to talk about it anymore because you’re making the rest of us uncomfortable. The maximum amount of time is a year; after that you’re just bringing us down.
And if we aren’t that great at encouraging honest grief during death, we are even less sympathetic and patient with other losses. There is no good time to speak of hard things. And for that very reason, many of us avoid speaking at all about some of the most important areas of our life together.
This morning, we titled the meeting for worship as a “Service of Remembering” to honor the grief we’ve suffered as a community and as individuals and families in the past year or so. We have lost much. And yet, sometimes we are like the new doctors who are hesitant to name the pain because it makes is real. If I say out loud that someone's leaving was unexpected and uncomfortable and even painful, we have to live with those feelings, even for a few minutes. We had hoped for a different ending.
As a community, we grieve over our friends' leaving. While it is our hope they return as a part of this community, that relationship has changed, and we perceive change as loss. It can feel scary to lose a pastor – especially two in a short time – but it is compounded when we fear we’ve lost friends as well.
We still grieve for lost loved ones – it hasn’t been two years yet but I sense there are times we don’t say their names because we’re afraid of hurting their families. But not saying their name doesn’t mean we don’t feel their absence. It still hurts to have lost them.
I know others who recently lost their grandson, and you have suffered the deaths of loved ones in your own life as well. Some of us have suffered the loss of jobs or financial security. Our sense of identity can feel at stake when our health alters, or relationships end, or our family members disappoint us, or friends let us down.
Because it isn’t just the deaths and losses we grieve.
Judith Viorst wrote the book,
Necessary Losses, where she describes the many varieties of loss that we go through on the “normal” journey of life. “Whenever we think of loss, we tend to think first of the death of people we have loved. But loss,” she says, “is a far more encompassing theme in our life. We lose, not only through death, but by leaving and being left, by changing and letting go and moving on. Our losses include not only our separations and departures from those we love, but our conscious and unconscious losses of romantic dreams, impossible expectations, illusions of freedom and power, illusions of safety - and the loss of our own younger self, the self that thought it would always be unwrinkled and invulnerable and immortal.”
We mourn losing families who move. We grieve leaving the Yearly Meeting, even when we perceive that transition as a positive move. We experience the loss and pain of feeling rejected, of what we wish that relationship had been. For some of us, it brings up feelings of old insecurities and inadequacies – of not being good enough.
In the same way, when friends shared the struggles in their marriage, it was painful for us in different ways. We hurt for them, but for some, it brought back our own pain of betrayal or abandonment, or even guilt and shame. Our issues that never get resolved get brought back up when we grieve. Part of the pain of someone leaving is that we remember every time we felt rejected.
Loss comes as waves that ebb and flow, or that echo long beyond the original pain. Dealing with grief is not a simple process, nor is there a formula that I can guide you through that will make everything ok. But I do believe the first step of healing – whether it’s a person, a family, or a community – is to identify what we’ve lost or fear losing.
We may be tempted to focus only on the future, and shortchange, both ritually and really, the good work grief can do in us. Here’s the problem with grief. It cannot be denied or avoided. It waits for you and eventually demands your attention.
That’s why as a part of this service this morning, we’re taking a few moments to name those losses. Gerry has shared with you some cowry shells, and if you are not familiar with them, they have an incredible legacy. They were used as currency in the 1600s and are found worn as jewelry by Cro-magnon man. In Pompeii, they were used to prevent sterility, even an early emperor of China was buried with a mouth full of these shells to suggest power and abundance and vitality.
But they are also a symbol of life and rebirth. In the Fiji Islands, only religious leaders were allowed to wear them because of their perceived power. Bandomble, a Brazilian and African faith tradition, used cowry shells to tell the future. The round shape of a pregnant belly has also been said to be the dwelling place for the Goddess while the other side is said to be the mouthpiece of God. I particularly appreciate that tradition, as Friends believe God still speaks to us today.
Why are we holding them? Not because they’re a talisman or magical symbol to erase our pain, but because sometimes, when we’ve lost something, we need a tangible reminder of our losses. I am going to light this candle and then we will spend a few minutes holding the shells, remembering, naming the losses to ourselves, to the Light, and if we wish, to each other. In a few moments, I’ll come back up and finish my sermon and we’ll spend more time in open worship.
To acknowledge our losses is the beginning of changing our focus. Grief is a crazy-making, complicated process. It is part of life's critical transitions, its times of loss. Losses include not only endings -- but also beginnings, which start with grief and mourning.
When we’ve lost a person or a relationship, it is frightening to think of “letting-go” of that person. We don’t want to forget what we’ve had. A better way to understand it is to see it as a shift of focus. Just as when we lose a loved one, at some point the life and death of the loved one stops being the primary focus in our lives. The slow shift allows the one who’s gone to move slowly to the side, to accompany the bereaved on the continuing journey of life. The memory remains as long as there is life, but it is no longer the reason for that life. One learns to move forward, taking the memories along as companions.
In facing loss and change, Irvington will have to come to a new normal that both remembers and honors what we’ve experienced and lost.
Wherever and whenever we invest ourselves passionately, we open ourselves to the experience of loss. What hurts cannot always be kissed and made better; we will have to accept (in ourselves and in others) the mingling of love with hate, of good with bad; that we cannot offer ourselves or those we love ultimate protection from danger and pain, from the inroads of time, from the coming of age, from the coming of death. All of these losses are “necessary losses” because we grow by losing and leaving and letting go.
The people we are and the lives that we lead are determined for better or worse by our loss experiences. I’ve learned that in the course of our life we leave and are left and let go of much that we love. Losing is the price we pay for living. It is also the source of much of our growth and gain.
But healing doesn’t happen by accident. When my kids get hurt, and in the summer, it is almost a daily occurrence, some of the little owies don’t warrant my attention. But some of those cuts, some of those injuries need my attention or they’ll get worse. The same is true with our spirits and our life together. For healing to begin, we might new tools or new skills – we surely need support and care, and spending enough time with others who truly care about us.
These sorrow and losses that we’ve named in our hearts are now part of your story. And part of what you now know about living and loving and dying and losing. And it will become part of what you learn about surviving and healing. These experiences are now part of your story, inside of you, in your soul and your memory. Instead of paralyzing us, they will help shape how we move forward as a meeting. We have loved, we have experienced pain, and come together, committing to keep on loving anyway.
I’ve been reading,
Not Fade Away (a short life well-lived) by Peter Barton, a successful, young media mogul, father, husband, musician, passionate lover of life. To all appearances, this man had it all, a large sprawling home, beautiful family, riches galore, and the drive to match his rise to unparalleled success in the media business. Yet, in the middle of his world, terminal cancer suddenly intervened. He writes about letting go of his expectation of longevity, to a brand new world in which he emerged from a cocoon to embrace life much more fully, completely awake and at peace from moment-to-moment, from the inside out, without reservation and of living with grief and loss and then peace.
I’ve been letting go, and this… yes, I’ll call it a surrender… this surrender has been accompanied by something strange and wonderful. I’m not sure I can adequately describe it. But let me look for words that will at least come close.
A kind of singing quiet has been settling over me.
It arrived unbidden. It took me by surprise. I’ve had neither strength nor inclination to fight it off or question it.
Maybe this quiet is nothing more or less than what some people mean by acceptance. Or peace. Or grace. But there’s a richness to it, a texture, that I did not expect.
It isn’t passive; only still. It’s close to death yet full of life. For me, this quiet is another form of music. It’s music without motion, just a harmony frozen in time. I wish I could explain how I’ve finally arrived at this amazing calm. Truthfully, though, I suspect that I did not achieve this quiet, or even find it. It found me when the time was right.
May it be so.
Closing prayer:
We acknowledge our grief and pain and hurt and fear and invite you to be a part of it. Knowing that all of life is holy, help us to see that even in our grief, You are Present.
Lord, we are reminded of the one thing that any of us can do about suffering: each of us can do our small part to make this world a better place for everyone and everything.
We acknowledge it is finally time for us to let go of that crazy notion that we can live separate and aloof from one another. Let our prayers be to remind ourselves of who we are: We belong to each other. We are linked in this life in spite of ourselves.
And so we pray for ourselves: Let every encounter be a homecoming as we step forward now for the healing of our world. The world is not going to be saved by good people or noble people. The world is going to be healed by ordinary people, like you and me, who are not afraid of pain and who are not afraid of loving each other. Amen
