Good grief! Some Christians believe and behave as if talking about grief somehow takes away from God’s glory, God’s goodness, God’s perfect record.
We are asked to participate in a relationship with the God who only wants to see us when we’re happy. Smiling faces in worship, a practice that can act as a buffer, a defense against reality. In the African American religious experience, we are invited to praise God “anyway,” “anyhow” and “in advance” of a good report on a bad situation.
Not wanting to sit with our grief, we present rehearsed statements: “God makes no mistakes.” “God knows best.” “It is well with my soul.” “God is good all the time and—all the time, God is good.”
And while all of this can be true, the underlying message is: Don’t say anything bad about God. Stand up and let us sing, “I won’t complain.”
We act as if God’s ego needs to be padded. We talk as if God needs to be protected from human failure and complaint, like God is too frail and too sensitive to hear such things. Or God is too important and too busy to be informed or concerned about our anguish, agony and affliction.
Yes, if this misery needs company, don’t look to or for God. No, God keeps the divine head in the clouds and we don’t want to bring God down, do we?
So, we attempt to mask our hurt and rush the grief process. We do all of this to get back to how a Christian should be—happy, possessing “the joy of the Lord” (Nehemiah 8:10). It is faith adamant, faith defiant, faith impenetrable, but it is also faith in denial.
We would rather persons not cry—not even at funerals. Chin up; we expect them to be strong as a show of faith.
At the start of the funeral, some clergy encourage mourners not to be sad because their loved one is “already in heaven rejoicing.” They are “in a better place.” Some even speak for the dead who “wouldn’t want you to be sad.”
We don’t even allow the time or space for people to grieve. Also, some of us don’t know how to talk about suffering without celebrating it.
Good grief.
Perhaps we are ill-prepared because we don’t talk enough about forsakenness, of God AWOL, God absent and seemingly absent-minded. Because it seems that God has forgotten about me or doesn’t know where I am.
Doesn’t God know that I am suffering? Doesn’t God already know what is happening? God, fully present everywhere, has somehow missed me.
We don’t speak of God in the distance. We don’t talk enough about the God who doesn’t come right on time or in the nick of time or come close to who you thought God was—when push comes to shove, comes to pink slip, comes to a pandemic, comes to sickness and then comes death knocking at your door.
And this is its own grief.
Jill M. Hudson writes in “Congregational Trauma: Caring, Coping and Learning,” “Trauma can strike anywhere any time and the church is generally ill-prepared to respond.” Most of us were taught that God is omnipresent, that the Divine was always around here somewhere, that God would come from up there if we just cried out. God was always within earshot and is “just a prayer away.”
But what happens when you expect God to be somewhere and God does not show up? When you are at your worst and need to see God at God’s best? When you are left holding the bag, left alone to suffer for a good cause?
God doesn’t come, but the questions do, and they are many. “Did you forget about me? Was this a part of your plan, and if so, why didn’t you tell me?
Or “How could this happen to me or happen to me here?” “Has anyone seen God? I need to have a word with the Manager of human affairs.”
These questions are not evidence of one’s faithlessness. Instead, it is “faith seeking understanding.”
Consequently, you are not a heretic and I am not any less holy for asking questions. More so, we have a savior who knows a thing or two about grief and had his own questions (Matthew 27:46).
Feel free to repeat after him. Because God is good and so is grief.
Director of The Raceless Gospel Initiative, an associate editor, host of the Good Faith Media podcast, “The Raceless Gospel” and author of Take Me to the Water: The Raceless Gospel as Baptismal Pedagogy for a Desegregated Church.