Making space for grief with love, boundaries, and support
Mindy: We have both taught about grief in the introductory pastoral care course and as a stand-alone elective throughout our teaching careers. Grief and loss may be my favorite class to teach. And students often say it is one of their favorites. Why do you think this is?
Leanna: This course allows students to bring their whole selves – including their vulnerabilities and sense of loss – into the classroom in ways many other courses do not. Because the content of the course is so personal, students connect with it in deep ways, which provides a unique richness and texture to our conversations in class.
Mindy: That’s been my experience, too. Studying grief and loss evokes some predictable tender places but also can surprise students in unexpected ways. This requires grounding and deep love for the work, as well as a healthy process. I love how teaching and learning grief is invitational. Every meeting, students are welcome to bring their aches and curiosities. This also requires boundaries and good support networks. The classroom is not therapy, but it often brings up things that students and I might take to a wise mentor, therapist, pastor, or other caregiver. We all need support around grief. How do you support students in their studies of grief and loss?
Leanna: I start by telling students that this subject will touch them personally, even if they are not actively grieving a major loss. That’s because the expansive way we talk about grief in the class means every participant is bound to have experienced it in some way. I then ask students to be intentional about monitoring themselves throughout the course and noticing when certain topics feel more challenging or painful for them. This helps students see when they need to reach out for additional support (therapy, spiritual direction, conversation with a spiritual caregiver or mentor, etc.), but it is also good practice as students develop self-awareness around grief and loss. This is a skill they will need in ministry so they can be attentive to their own well-being while tending to so many other people’s needs.
Pervasiveness of grief and loss
Mindy: I used to advise students not to study grief if they had experienced a recent loss, but in the past few years, everyone in the class has been grieving in some way. Grief seems more pervasive. I was teaching the grief class in Spring 2020. The fresh grief of COVID-19 was itself part of our class. Every class reading, discussion, and assignment felt more poignant than ever. It was amazing to have this ready-built container that held space for the many uncertainties of the moment. Some might say people are more attuned and sensitive, and others that there is more to grieve today than in the past. What do you think about this?
Leanna: I believe both are true. Since the pandemic began in 2020, I’ve seen more emphasis in the wider culture on explicitly naming losses and speaking more openly about the mental and emotional challenges that come with grief. The pandemic itself was a collective trauma that caused myriad losses, which we are all still trying to figure out how to process. Plus, the last few years have seen increasing political polarization, the outbreak of multiple wars, and constant news coverage of the climate crisis. Taken together, these experiences can make it feel like there is something new to grieve every day.
Mindy: Grief and loss are so pervasive, and there remains so much ungrieved. Grief literature has grown significantly in the last decade across spiritual care, theology, ethics, environmental studies, psychology, sociology, and more. This raises the question of how we teach grief. We know there is much more material than we could address in only one semester of study. How do you approach the class?
Leanna: In a semester-long class, I present loss as expansively as possible. I want students to understand that grief is not only associated with death, but with many other kinds of losses too: job loss, divorce, migration/displacement, infertility, etc. Even experiences that we usually think of as joyful – marriage, becoming a parent, retirement – also include elements of loss. Thinking about loss in this broader way can help students become more aware of the nuanced nature of grief and enhance their pastoral care practice.
Mindy: Students are often relieved and surprised to think about grief and loss so expansively across generations and ages. I take a narrative approach: how do we hear and tell stories that include grief and loss? We read spiritual care books and psychologies of grief, but I begin with artists who show how they live with loss as creative people not despite their loss or trying to move past it, such as cartoonist Roz Chast’s Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant (about the aging and death of her parents), novelist Valeria Luiselli’s nonfiction Tell Me How It Ends (about migration grief around unaccompanied minors fleeing violence), and this semester adding excerpts from jazz singer Nnenna Freelon’s poetic memoir Beneath the Skin of Sorrow: Improvisations on Loss (about relearning to create after three simultaneous significant losses). It’s beautiful and haunting that creativity that acknowledges loss and makes space for grief is possible. Centering stories also acknowledges that whatever we are studying, someone in the room is likely holding their own stories.
Leanna: I also include narratives in my class because I think they help students connect more deeply with the emotional and spiritual aspects of grief. Some of the narratives I’ve included in the grief course include Lament for a Son by Nicholas Wolterstorff (about losing an adult child), The Summer of the Great Grandmother by Madeleine L’Engle (about caring for a parent through dementia and death), and Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I’ve Loved by Kate Bowler (about facing a life-threatening diagnosis as a young woman.)
Grief work as holding space and creating meaning
Mindy: I know one goal in teaching and learning grief is for students to imagine how they’ll hold space for grief in their churches, faith communities, chaplaincies and nonprofit contexts. This is one reason I like to think about the miracle of creativity that acknowledges loss, both in the authors we read and in the way each class session unfolds, and in the assignments.
Leanna: I agree. It’s important to me that students’ learning in the class can be translated into their own ministry settings. One of the assignments I give in this course is to observe a particular ministry context and assess its practices for attending to loss and grief. At the end of the assignment, I ask students to make a recommendation about how the community they studied might strengthen its pastoral practices in relation to various kinds of loss. The assignment itself functions as a way to open conversation in students’ ministry contexts about how they are (or are not) making space for grief and loss in the community’s life together. This encourages students to see naming and making space for grief as key features of ministerial leadership.
Mindy: That’s a great assignment. My assignments also practice opening space for acknowledging and living with grief and loss. Students host their version of a death cafe, basically a dinner or dessert party where a small group discusses death. Then students share what they did — it quickly becomes clear that there are lots of ways to make space for grief and loss. I also invite students to create something unique that could meet a need they see around grief and loss. Students have drafted children’s books or art pieces about loss in relation to identity, place, migration, life-stage grief and intergenerational loss. They’ve designed resources for the unique losses faced by recent college graduates, sermon-writing retreats that bring pastors and mental health grief counselors together, and caregiver respite events. I hope students leave the class confident that they are part of a diverse community that can help hold space for grief and meaning-making around loss.
Leanna: This is one of my teaching goals, too. I encourage students to think about how they can do this kind of space-making in the faith communities where they worship and serve. At their best, congregations are places where people can find hope and connect meaningfully with others. In many cases, though, churches don’t do a good job of creating a safe place for people to express their grief and have it held by the community.
Mindy: It’s strange, isn’t it? Many grieving people find support outside of churches. This is important, but churches are also places where grief work can take place. Scripture, liturgy, sacred music, fellowship, service, and trusting communities are all significant grief resources. Yet often these staples of church life aren’t used in the service of the griefs and losses already in the room. Why do you think this is?
Leanna: There may be many reasons this happens, but one may be a general sense that in church, we should only talk about the positive aspects of our lives and faith: joy, inspiration, hope, transformation, resurrection. Even though this is contrary to the biblical witness (which includes many expressions of grief, lament, and pain — just read the psalms!), many people in congregations still seem reluctant to name their own suffering or feel profoundly uncomfortable hearing and holding the suffering of others.
Mindy: I’ve heard people say they come to church for relief from the weight of the world. Years ago, a congregant shared that they thought communion itself was too heavy and stayed home on those Sundays. Yet church is a place that holds complexities, where the sacred and secular meet. I’ve also seen beautiful counterexamples, but there does seem to be an opportunity for churches to hold more space for and even welcome the range of emotions and realities already present in the pews and Zoom screens. While funerals and memorial services are one place to hold space, I want to think with students about holding space in all seasons for the ways in which we all live with loss and grief.
Leanna: At times, the church struggles to be a place where we can acknowledge the complexity and ambiguity of life. The relentless insistence on “looking on the bright side” and avoiding uncomfortable topics is part of our broader cultural milieu, and it seeps into the church in various ways. Yet, if they wish to become places where people can be deeply known and loved, faith communities must find ways to attend carefully to the realities of grief and loss. To put it in liturgical terms: my hope for my students is that they can become comfortable sitting in the grief of Good Friday and the emptiness of Holy Saturday, rather than rushing to embrace Easter joy.
Mindy: Holy Saturday is a great example of the in between, the heaviness of grief, the confusion of how to remake the world (as you’ve written about), and the bold fragility of hope in the future that endures. Lent is a time to make space for grief and loss.
Leanna: In her 2018 book Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I’ve Loved, seminary professor Kate Bowler tells the story of her Stage IV cancer diagnosis and the ways in which people of faith responded to her experience — both helpfully and unhelpfully. At one point, during the first Lenten season following her diagnosis, Bowler complains to a friend, “Everyone is trying to Easter the crap out of my Lent.” Bowler’s comment highlights the importance of making liturgical space for the expression of grief and other painful feelings as part of communal faith practice. Lent is a season of the church year that uniquely lends itself to sitting with loss and emptiness for a time, as a way of honoring the truth of human experience.
Mindy: Beyond Lent, I know we’ve both been thinking about ways for faith communities to make space for grief in everyday life. In my work on listening that grounds spiritual care in diverse communities, I believe it’s important to honor and include grief as an aspect of this work. It’s important to think about listening well to our own griefs and to the griefs of others, in addition to the griefs we share in community. Our grief also shapes how we listen. In Listening for Liberation, I write about grief as both a challenge and an opportunity for deeper listening. I know you have also been writing about the role of grief for faith communities.
Leanna: I have. I’ve been writing about grief within the specific context of faith communities seeking to heal from a period of conflict or tension. In Embodied Reconciliation, I describe a set of practices that members of congregations can engage in as they work to rebuild relationships with one another. In one chapter of the book, I focus on practices of grieving and lamenting as critical steps on the path toward reconciliation. Making space for faith communities to grieve and lament allows them to tell the truth about how a particular conflict has affected them, and to name the losses they have experienced as a result.
Mindy: Since grief is pervasive, it can be difficult to end a class on grief, like it’s difficult to end this conversation! Once people start to open up and practice creating space for grief, it can feel like we are just getting started. I often turn to ritual. I lead some rituals and invite the whole class to create their own rituals, too. One ritual I love is to invite everyone to bring one material item that symbolizes how they live with loss. Everyone shares a story about their item as they place it on a table (or on-screen if we are on Zoom). Once the items are gathered, we pause and look at the whole sacred collection. What do we notice? What holds these items together? What do we feel? After a few moments, each person retrieves their special item and takes it back home, knowing they are not alone.
Leanna: Maybe that’s the most important thing about making space for grief: it allows people to see that they are not alone. Loss is a universal human experience, but it can feel terribly isolating. Helping individuals and communities learn to share their grief with one another can be a powerful way of fostering healing and hope in the midst of struggle.
