Monthly Archives: March 2016

Last year I published this post. It still speaks to me and I have re-worked it a bit to share with you again. Grief is such an overwhelmingly powerful emotion that affects us at all levels – physically, mentally, spiritually. It can be very difficult to find our way through. The Easter story, from Good Friday to the dawn of Easter Sunday is a story of hope. It is a story that goes from grief to joy. For those of you going through a dark period of grief, I wish you courage for your journey, a sense of hope and ultimate joy. The Jewish people have an ancient tradition called Keriah. Maurice Lamm (from chabad.org) says, “The most striking Jewish expression of grief is the rending of garments by the mourner prior to the funeral service.” It is a ceremonial expression of grief. He goes on to say, “It allows the mourner to give vent to his pent-up anguish by means of a controlled, religiously sanctioned act of destruction.” To me this is a powerful visual to express something that runs so cruelly deep. On Good Friday I hear from the gospel reading that at the time of Jesus’ death “the veil of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom”. The veil of the temple hung in front of the “holy of holies” – it was the place where God dwelt and only the high priest could enter. There are good theological reasons why this is mentioned in three of the four Gospels. If you are interested, I encourage you to read some commentaries. What struck me is how significant an act of grief this is. There are times when grief makes us feel as though we have been torn in two. We can feel that our loved one has been literally ripped from us. And like that torn veil, nothing is ever the same again. This kind of grief places a wide, black line in our life’s timeline. Our life now is before he/she died and after he/she died. We suddenly find ourselves in an unknown territory. As author Elizabeth Harper Neeld says, our assumptive world no longer exists. This means that as well as the layers of grief (and there are often many layers) with which we are trying to cope, we also no longer have a normal. Nothing is the same as we feel our old world being taken from us and our new world not yet created. A lot of things can feel meaningless. We can feel like we are facing a void. The period of grief is dark and, at times, we can feel isolated in this grief – entombed. But as we work to figure out our new life, we can slowly move from a place of being frozen to a place of potential. We gradually find new meanings and are able to let go of old ways of being that are harmful to us or no longer make sense. We adopt and adapt to new ways of being. However devastating that loss is, there is life beyond it, even if our forward movement is slow and, at times, reluctant. What we must learn is that what we really need to let go of, in order to move into that newness, is not the love for the person we have lost, but the life that no longer exists. Our Christian belief is that the death of Christ was devastating, even catastrophic for those who witnessed it. But the story does not end with death. There is resurrection, new life. Death paved the way for new life. Herein lies our hope. Good came out of the bad. Imagine the grief of God tearing the veil. And yet, and yet that tearing opened the way to God for all of us. By that tearing, the holy of holies was accessible.  There was death. There was the tomb and in that dark and nothing time of the tomb, there was transformation. And then there was resurrection – New Life and with it new possibilities. All three times were essential. That time in the tomb, that time of transition, was necessary in order to create the new. The resurrected Christ, who though he bore the marks of his pain and death, was transformed and in that transformation offered to us new life and hope. The hope of my faith is, as Julian of Norwich put it that “All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.” Joy.

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