How to Hurt Those Who Grieve
Bad Ways of Helping Those Who Grieve
Answering the “Why’s”
Kelly Kapic in his Embodied Hope book says, “I do not think we must choose between affirming the reality of God and confessing the pain of human suffering. We can work forward from the view that both are true. We can acknowledge the struggle of being a follower of Yahweh, the creator of heaven and earth, and having to deal with suffering as it is: real, tragic, and heartbreaking.”
In grief there will be confusion, doubts, bad theology. We want to correct the doubts and wrong reasoning of people. How can we be gracious that in their times of confusion we can sit in the uncomfortableness of people’s questions without given trite answers. It’s hard for us to feel weak, to not know what God is doing. We want to know that life makes sense, that we are in control, that everything will work out for our good so we give answers to questions we don’t know or fully understand.
“When guided by the need for justifications and answers, growing Christian attempts to ‘explain the ways of God’ tend to foster distortions…Such explanations, by trying to integrate evil as part of the world, often end up justifying or rationalizing evil rather than confessing and naming it. Too often when Christians start to defend God in this way, they end up calling evil or suffering ‘good.’ When people mistake theodicies for pastoral care, the voice of the sufferer is often silenced. Rather than offering the comforting presence of compassionate listening, these abstractions smother the wounded with useless and often inaccurate explanations. This works a form of violence against the hurting one, whether unintentional or not. And finally, these attempts to justify and explain why the evil has occurred can actually become evil in themselves, promoting further suffering rather than providing genuine comfort.”
Why do we try to explain a death by explaining God’s purpose behind it? We give exmpales that God is causing you to be humble, or he is disciplining you, or maybe someone will become saved out of this suffering or you will experience great spiritual renewal. We make all these assumptions but we are never given a clear view as to what exactly God is doing. Take for example Job.
Job 23:3-4, 7
Oh, that I knew where I might find him,
that I might come even to his seat!
4 I would lay my case before him
and fill my mouth with arguments.
7 There an upright man could argue with him,
and I would be acquitted forever by my judge.
Todd Billings says that “if God is truly God and we are not, it is a loving and gracious act of God to tell us that our creaturly wisdom is limited; we can and should lament and respond to evil and suffering in our midst. But only God has a God’s eye perspective that answers why it has been allowed.”
We need to let God be God and acknowledge that we know far less than we want to admit.
We Stay Away
Keller Says that “isolation is also caused by friends who simply stay away. Why do we so often avoid a person in affliction? It may be as simple as the feeling of incompetence-we don’t know what to say or do. It may also be the sheer fear of being drawn into and drowning in the sufferer’s pain. Others stay away because, like Job’s friends, we need to believe that the afflicted person somehow brought this on or wasn’t wise enough to avoid it. That way we can assure ourselves that it could never happen to us. The afflicted person challenges us to admit what we would rather deny-that such severe difficulty can come upon anyone, anytime.”
Shame the Griever
We need to avoid shaming people over their grief. That because we are Christians and we know that heaven exists and all tears and pain will be wiped away then we should not grieve. However, I think that’s not what Paul says in 1 Thess. 4:13-17. The people are grieving without hope, we grieve with hope because we know the eternal hope. But yet we still grieve.
C.S. Lewis desribes this combined grief and hope that Paul talks about. “If a mother is mourning not for what she has lost but for what her dead child has lost, it is a comfort to believe that the child has not lost the end for which it was created. And it is a comfort to believe that she herself, in losing her chief or only natural happiness, has not lost a greater thing, that she may still hope to "glorify God and enjoy Him forever." A comfort to the God-aimed, eternal spirit within her. But not to her motherhood. The specifically maternal happiness must be written off. Never, in any place or time, will she have her son on her knees, or bathe him, or tell him a story, or plan for his future, or see her grandchild.”
We grieve for the things we have lost in this world. I will never see my mother again, she did not see me graduate from seminary, which she had prayed one day that I would attend and enter ministry, she will never see her grandchildren, I cannot call her for advice, or wish her happy mothers day. I grieve those things. I lost parts of my son-hood.
Empty Platitudes
Oxford dictionary defines platitudes as “a remark or statement, especially one with a moral content, that has been used too often to be interesting or thoughtful.” For example - “Everything happens for a reason.” “They're at peace now.” “Be happy, they’re with Jesus.” “Keep a stiff upper lip or keep your chin up.” “I know just how you feel.” “You’ll be fine.” “You can have more children.” “Well, at least …” “Don’t you think it is time to move on?” “I guess God just needed him in heaven more than we needed him here.”
Perhaps it’s better to talk about the loved they lost or cherishing the person instead of trying to get them to move on from the person.
In King Lear, the king carries the corpse of his only daughter Cordelia onto the stage and says this.
“Howl, howl, howl, howl! O! You are men of stones:
Had I your tongues and ears, I’d use them so
That heaven’s vaults should crack. She’s gone for ever.”
There is a deep sorrow that howls in our souls and desires to be freed. But we as civilized Westerns are not comfortable with that howl. We want to hide from it, clean it up, ignore it, reduce the savagery of it to a tame house cat.
Perhaps, we try to comfort them by talking about our own experiences of grief. I think this can be helpful to a small degree and one needs to be wise with this. I think acknowledging that you too have lost a loved one to help this person not feel alone can be kind and generous. But moving from that to “Oh I know just how you feel, I went through the same thing, let me tell you my story.” The focus goes from them to you. The reality is you don’t know how they feel, their suffering is unique to them. They have their own doubts, fears, and worries that are probably different from you. Let’s not cause further isolation by wrongly assuming their grief without allowing them to speak of it themselves.
Simple Questions
Instead, what does it look like to ask simple questions to those who grieve?
Help me understand your experience.
What is your grief like?
What words would you use to describe your grief?
What’s been the hardest thing for you in your grief?
What is it that you would like to say right now?
Perhaps it’s more important to let them say whatever it is that they are feeling, thinking or believing without forcing it out of them. Let me naturally be able to speak. Be a person who is present with them, no matter what. Often, presence can speak more powerfully than words. Think of Jobs' friends, the power it was to sit in silence in grief. When I think of my own suffering, it was people willing or not willing to sit in it with me that mattered the most.
Grieving is a Process
“Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process. It needs not a map but a history…Grief is like a long valley, winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape. As I've already noted, not every bend does. Sometimes the surprise is the opposite one, you are presented with exactly the same sort of country you thought you had left behind miles ago. That is when you wonder whether the valley isn’t a circular trench. But it isn’t. There are partial recurrences, but the sequence doesn’t repeat.”
Grief comes back over time, but I don’t know if it ever fully goes away. It’s that familiar valley but you continue to move forward. Grief can come back anytime, perhaps on a birthday, holidays like Christmas, Thanksgiving. Some special moment in your life. Or just a random day where you grieve the loss of whatever it may be. Perhaps going to a baby shower will awaken the grief of infertility that you struggle with.
But as Lewis says, it’s natural we grieve because we love. We miss the one we love and the response to that is that we grieve.
Kapic, Kelly, Embodied Hope, 17.
Billings, Todd, Rejoicing in Lament, 27.
Keller, Walking With God Through Pain and Suffering, 213-214.
Lewis, C.S., A Grief Observed
