On a recent long drive home after seeing Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” the experience percolated in my mind and heart. In presenting an intimate portrait of ordinary folk living unremarkable lives, this play invites us to appreciate life’s strange mixture of levity and sadness, irony and breathtaking, ephemeral beauty. In the promotions for the play’s Boston run, I had seen the actor who played Emily Webb – the character at the center of the play’s emotional conclusion – reflecting on her appreciation of Wilder’s achievement in showing us how grief and joy abide together — so closely adjacent, even intermixed, in our experience.
I was particularly struck by her calling my attention to grief and joy. Grief has recently become my subject matter as a scholar – a historian and theologian – while I research grieving and its connection to spirituality, religious experience and theological conceptions. So with grief on my mind and (always) in my heart, and a long road to drive, I found what I hoped would be a light distraction in an audiobook mystery by the capable writer Louise Penny.
The desire to be rescued from grief appears normal in most contemporary cultures. Grief is a painful problem for many.
Penny’s 2005 novel Still Life was a good choice, but I had not expected a mystery writer to tackle the subject of grief as well. I certainly had not prepared for a theological take on grieving. But there it was in the audiobook, as one of the central characters, Clara, is undone by overwhelming sadness when her close friend dies. Her husband, Peter, becomes the instrument of Clara’s healing through a theological intervention. He insists that Clara recall what she believes: namely, her belief in the reality of God. She is initially angry with her husband’s apparent impatience with her sadness. When she overcomes that anger and pauses to remember that her conviction is indeed that God exists and that her dead friend is with God, an immediate transformation results. Grief no longer overwhelms her. It is manageable and survivable. God – or at least her belief in God – has rescued Clara. And it rescues her quickly, less than 24 hours after her friend’s death.
Longing for rescue from grief
The desire to be rescued from grief appears normal in most contemporary cultures. Grief is a painful problem for many. Problems tend to point us toward solutions or lead us on a quest for resolution. If the identified problem is a disease, we seek a cure or some alleviation of the most severe symptoms. If we frame the problem as a mental illness, we may look for an appropriate diagnosis and effective therapy. Problems are challenging to simply abide. We might be tempted to see those whose grieving extends beyond a year or two as suffering from a pathological form of grief.
Our therapeutic as well as religious expectations contribute to this sense that grief can and should be overcome.
Our therapeutic as well as religious expectations contribute to this sense that grief can and should be overcome. Surely our faith traditions will not only bring consolation but also a means of coping. In Penny’s scenario, the theological intervention brings Clara an almost instant, even “magical,” psychic rebalancing, enabling her to navigate grief guided by the conviction of God’s reality, with God as her friend’s destination. This scenario may have the ring of a familiar kind of religious piety and a method for getting grief under control.
Clara’s experience conforms to a particular Christian paradigm for interpreting grief. Grief is hard, but it is finite, temporary and manageable — with God. Grief’s tears and its immense burden will soften and, in a way, be cured by the therapy of a religious message, a truth accepted and internalized.
Penny is a mystery writer, and I am not particularly inclined to place her in the same category as theological commentators like St. Augustine of Hippo or John Calvin of Geneva. But in Penny’s novel, I recognize the general outline of their approach to grieving. Their approach grants grief space – but very limited space – for working out, in a reasonable way, the natural effect of significant pain and loss. Grief belongs to the nature of things, to the order of a fallen human experience.
Can grief and wonder coexist?
In the traditional Christian understanding, grace works alongside and ultimately beyond nature. And through grace, we are summoned to believe and trust, as Peter summons his wife Clara to do so. As part of faith in God, such trust imposes a limit on tears. In its familiar forms, it at least implies an expectation that grief will end, yielding to the grace of wholeness.
In the traditional Christian understanding, grace works alongside and ultimately beyond nature.
Penny’s novel depicts a world different from Wilder’s Grover’s Corners, where grief and joyful wonder are entirely coincident — close friends and neighbors, neither cancelling out the other. Wilder’s world allows for emotional ambiguity. We might be satisfied if we could say, “Yes, this complex feeling is my experience of life.” But for others, the mix of sadness and brightness may be unsettling.
When “Our Town” first opened in 1938, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt said the play “moved and depressed” her “beyond words.” Do I want to remain in the ambiguous state of mind sensed in the world of Wilder’s “Our Town”? Or seeking healthy-mindedness, will I gravitate toward Penny’s world, represented by the experience of Clara and Peter: a world of greater clarity and the promise that grief’s chaotic wildness will be domesticated for the sake of emotional stability?
Tolerance of grief vs. refusal of grief
Beneath the question of which worlds to inhabit is the matter of grief itself. How do I interpret the grief we live with? And how do I respond to this grief, these manifestations of our painful experience?
Those who share with me their experience of loss tend to fall into one of two broad groups, which I call the grief-intolerant and the grief-tolerant. The first group acknowledges grief’s reality but seeks and expects not only to alleviate their symptoms but to end their grieving (at least its most painful forms). They expect a positive outcome: the restoration of normal life and the return of hope. The second group experiences grief as a chronic, dynamic and enduring condition. They seek amelioration and welcome various therapies. But to some degree, those who are grief-tolerant make peace with the continuing experience of grieving, woven into the fabric of a life characterized by many emotions and commitments.
I have found it helpful to recognize this diversity of experience and interpretation. This perspective allows me to see our differences and appreciate that we all gravitate toward different descriptive worlds because we orient ourselves differently toward our own personal pain and the painful experiences we share — the assaults on our communities, our society, our world.
But while appreciating this difference, as a theologian and historian of religion, I also contend with the ways our traditions of faith and belief have contributed to how we construct and read the world of our experience. I find it particularly noteworthy that our scriptural and theological traditions are frequently harvested to buttress what I call the grief-intolerant response and to exclude the grief-tolerant.
To the extent that a doctrine of resurrection is essential to Christianity, we may wonder whether Christian traditions create space for the world of the grief-tolerant…
My local independent bookstore now has a growing section labeled Grief and Grieving, nestled among the shelves dedicated to Religion and Philosophy. Many of the titles point to ways in which an ancient tradition or practice of wisdom may help direct us through and help us emerge from the darkest experiences of painful loss. Amid the diversity of such wisdom, Christian teaching presents an especially strong challenge to the sense that the uncertainty of intermixed joy and mourning characterizes a faithful life. Christians quite often present ourselves as people of good news. This good news instills in us a certain confidence that weeping is only momentary and that “joy,” as the psalmist has it, “comes with the morning” (Psalm 30:5). This morning points to a promised new creation when tears will cease and death will be “no more” (Revelation 21:1-4). Christians say, fervently: Christ is risen! That utterance seems to banish all ambiguity.
How can we continue to weep?
To the extent that a doctrine of resurrection is essential to Christianity, we may wonder whether Christian traditions create space for the world of the grief-tolerant — for “Our Town”’s appreciation of emotional ambiguity, for the experience of persons and communities contending with radical and unhealed brokenness.
If I live with chronic illness; serve as intimate caregiver to a loved one with a terminal condition; suffer as a bereaved parent; feel constantly, directly, deeply, personally the indignities of our brutal and unjust systems; bear daily the agony of knowing what ecological collapse means for the lives of creatures I dearly love — if my life is situated in the rubble of disaster, can I with integrity incorporate the happy and unclouded vista of the archetypical Easter sunrise into the canvas of my faith?
As Wilder was conceiving his “Our Town” against the backdrop of the rise of fascism in Europe, at roughly the same time, the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber spoke in 1930 to a group of German Christian pastors about his view of outlooks that fundamentally distinguish the soul or orientation of Jews from that of Christians. In his talk, later published in his essay collection Israel and the World: Essays in a Time of Crisis, Buber paid special attention to how creation, in the eyes of Christians and Jews, stands with respect to redemption.
Knowing the history of Christians’ accusations against unbelieving Jews, Buber portrayed a Jewish consciousness and experience as liminal — that is, belonging to a place in-between. On one hand, in a forsaken and desolate hour, a Jew feels the Divine Presence as “a breath from above, the nearness, the touch, the mysterious intimacy of light out of darkness.” On the other hand, “as part of the world,” the Jew keenly and intensely experiences this world’s lack of redemption, Buber said: “He feels this lack of redemption against his skin, he tastes it on his tongue, the burden of the unredeemed world lies on him.” Redemption of this world is the hope of Jews, just as it is the hope of Christians in many ways. Yet the outlooks are qualitatively different, because the Christian – “incomprehensibly” to the Jew – “affirms in an unredeemed world that its redemption has been accomplished.”
Buber’s aim in 1930 was description and not criticism, toward the goal of mutual understanding. Probably his description of Christianity – that is, as grounded in a conviction that creation’s destiny is not only known but already accomplished – accurately described the common theology of his clerical audience. Not only did Christian messianic interpretations support this more or less closed story, but so did the New Testament theme of resurrection, which had become literalized and made doctrinally crucial in Christian tradition. This tradition tends to make the decidedly liminal and ambiguous Jewish experience an outlier and outsider.
Buber’s striking way to describe a Jewish sense of life’s brokenness seems to open a theological door to the emotionally ambiguous experience of “Our Town” and of those who are grief-tolerant. When I walk through that door,
I experience a spirituality that directly supports reckoning with our embodied life and with that complicated, felt reality of grief and joyful wonder, existing together.
But another aspect of Buber’s task in speaking of the Jewish soul in 1930 has a compelling and relevant connection to the question of how I interpret grief, of how I imagine grief’s territory – as contained or expansive – and of the moral ramifications of my interpretation.
When Buber addressed his audience, he was not simply the objective scholar. He was a passionate defender of Jews and an advocate for the dignity of all human beings. He knew well that he was up against both the anti-Jewish traditions of mainstream European Christianity – imagining and seeking the elimination of Jews as Jews through their conversion – and the rising tide of racial antisemitism that planned the complete exclusion or eradication of Jewish humanity. I suspect Buber saw clearly the danger that often accompanies the rock-solid theological confidence of a fixed story, whose definitive ending is unequivocally spelled out as a universal mandate for our common living. Such a story, when allied with political power, tends to work its way out socially and politically in authoritarian terms.
The totalitarian mindset largely depends on a framing of reality that makes one intolerant of human diversity and unconcerned about the pain of others. Yet the mindset of relationality and compassion (literally “suffering with”) directs one toward the love of and care for others. It protests against closed, absolute and authoritarian programs. Buber’s account of a Jewish mentality resists authoritarianism precisely as it articulates difference and signals a deep and unending openness to the reality of the world’s suffering.
Toward a Christian understanding of grief
In response to my recent encounters with Wilder, Penny, Augustine, Calvin and particularly Buber, as a Christian theologian, I ask: What do I make of how the Christian tradition both constrains and liberates our imagination around the experiences of grieving and living — the ongoing, lived experience of heartache and wonder in contemplation of our broken, dying, mysterious, gorgeous, awe-inspiring world?
As a teacher of Christian traditions, I first understand my calling to offer encouraging words to Christians who seek to attend to the legacy of the Christian faith. Our traditions are life-giving. But we are always responsible for interpreting them in ways that help our world and avoid harm — that is, in ways that convey the authentic, liberating meanings of God’s graciously transforming power for good and not for ill.
My second inclination arises in response to Buber. I am grateful for his insights, but I will say that the Christian inheritance is more varied, flexible and capacious than his 1930 description suggests. Christian tradition can be broad enough to allow us to see and respond to the suffering of the world as a mystery permeated by the grace of God — but a mystery not yet taken up into a conclusive, divine final solution.
Christian tradition can be broad enough to allow us to see and respond to the suffering of the world as a mystery permeated by the grace of God — but a mystery not yet taken up into a conclusive, divine final solution.
Whether sitting (as I do while writing this) on the cusp of the Advent season – which encourages self-examination on our common need for rescue from the oppressions of our sinful systems – or in the penitential moment of Lent, I turn my ear to scriptural encouragements toward a hope that is nearly the antithesis of positive thinking and triumphalism. I attend to the ways biblical writers regularly summoned stressed, harried, deeply anxious, imperfect folk who dwelled on the margins of power, calling them to humbly trust within the limits of partial sight.
But against the grain of this call to faithful courage, I also hear the broken and anguished cry of the abandoned one: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Psalm 22:1; Mark 15:34). I will listen to this cry of suffering without dishonoring it by explaining away the agony of its liminal moment in terms of a broader, fuller, supposedly more complete story. Christians who embrace the incarnation of God amid the deeply uncertain realities of a suffering world have good reasons – doctrinal as well as pastoral – to abide with patience and active love as compassionate companions in the territory of the wounded and grieving.
