Patience with the Process: grieving and dying
As we are in the week leading up to Easter, I am met again with a nagging detail that continues to grip my seeking soul. In the Christian tradition, the story of the divine man, Jesus Christ, can be distilled down to 3 events: his crucifixion, his burial, and his resurrection, 3 days later.
Like an unraised savior, the truths that I have yet to reconcile are:
Why was his death, specifically 3 days long?
In the dying, how do we grieve and what does it mean to grieve?
Lastly, can we trust the eternality of what’s meant to resurrect?
It’s easier to rationally process these concepts instead of vulnerably addressing the deeper principle of what death means and why we must know. Instead of focusing on the factual, linear information, I have dove beneath the solidarity of knowing like a scuba diver who squeezes through a small entry to find an expansive cave.
“Those who know death most painfully can speak to hope most vigorously” - Frank Laubach
Over the years, losing my dad, and both my grandmothers, tears and presence have been the two most healing components of my grieving. I remember sitting in my dad’s old Volvo, a few weeks after he passed away as we were about to attend a local high school baseball game. As the engine stopped and we sat in silence, I cried out, “ I just miss him.” We both said there, our eyes flooded with the painful reality of absence.
I’ve had several other overwhelmingly emotional moments where I’ve sobbed until my face hurt. As if my heart was gently releasing the eminent love I had that could not be physically expressed, yet the soul knows no bounds and still needed that presence.
Tears validate and explain what is too deep and too true to be explained. Physiologically, it’s been well established that the process of lacrimation, tears produced through tiny, almond-shaped glands located above the eye, help clear the eyes of debris and other irritants and keeps eyes moist lubricated (The science behind why we cry, 2019).
We are naturally dispositioned to see grieving as a clearing of the soul from the debris of brokenness and loss. Crying and grieving bring wholeness and an okay-ness to what’s happened. In some ways, it’s the only way to reconcile and integrate our unexplainable experiences in an honorable, approachable, understandable manner.
Learning to sit with the parts of us that need to die shows us that we can trust and have patience in our lives. Death and suffering are the necessary ways of revealing what is true and what is false. There is often a prolonged process that we want to rush. If it was us we’d be raised after a minute much less 3 days (unless you're David Blaine).
Jesus was ok sitting in death because he knew resurrection was on the other side. Some things don’t get raised right away. We must be ok with the unfinished work. This brought up in me an uncomfortable reality of being patient with that which needs to die within me.
Why is it so hard for us to wait within what’s slowly dissolving from our control? To me, it’s not the most commonly used rationale for the speed of the internet, instant satisfaction through Amazon Prime, and iMessages. At least for me, it’s that I don’t want to change. I don’t want to let go and I sure as hell don’t want uncertainty in it all. I want full control.
Here in the West, we ignore death. Mostly because we were obsessed with being forever young but also because we have many privileges that shield us from seeing death regularly. The death of Christ gives us a constant and universal exposure to what it means to die and how we may experience that reality.
As Walter Bruegmann says, “The cross is the assurance that effective prophetic criticism is done not by an outsider but always by one who must embrace the grief, enter into the death, and know the pain of the criticized one.”
When we avoid grieving, we are denying the already existent reality of death. This denial comes from believing delay equals disappearance. We believe that if we ignore or run from this truest reality, it’ll “feel better” and we will experience comfort. This is true if we are desiring to feed our ego and false self, but the more we avoid dealing with it, the further we remove ourselves from the necessary process of loss.
The sooner we walk with death instead of trying to escape it, the deeper and more present life becomes. Life in and of itself and also in the sense of newness and birth. Real comfort comes after being uncomfortable. The false comfort we seek in avoidance is called unnecessary suffering and loss. The loss of presence in the pain and death. The loss of putting a value on things that deserve recognition.
It feels chaotic to let go and not know what’s going to happen. That’s what trauma and sudden change do to you. It's like jumping off a boat or ledge into the water, hoping you land right but knowing you may belly flop or hit something on the way down. Once you sink into the depths of the water and pop back up, there’s a feeling of the newness of freedom or expansion. We must learn to embody and welcome that which is inevitable and appreciate it for what it is.
Grieving acknowledges the appropriate worth of people and experiences. It allows us to treasure people and things for what they are so we can let them be what they were. I have a theory I call the law of vulnerability: what comes up, most come out. We are all guaranteed to lose people and situations close to us. Have we properly grieved? Have we truly acknowledged their worth? Are we still holding on?
We get to choose to grieve and feel pain because that is part of the soul’s nature. We can see this so easily in the natural world. Nature’s constant way of death and resurrection. This death shows us that we all must complete our necessary cycle of loss and death to find wholeness and completeness. Though in the moment it feels empty, it’s infinitely filled with life.
The number Three, shelosh[f.], sheloshah [m.] means harmony, new life, and completeness. The three days that Jesus spent in the grave represent the full cycle, the completed process of death. They represent the waiting, the patience in the process of dying. Yes, dying is not a single act but an eternal process and rhythm.
We must trust that what is resurrected transcends the doubt of its worthiness to die to begin with. Just as no one knew if Christ would rise again, there is an unseen hope to make “what could be” concrete and to let what was, be obsolete.
Who knows what’s waiting for us on the other side. On the other side of fear, loss, pain, suffering and sorrow, and uncertainty. One thing I do know is that, whether it’s pre-death, during death, or after death, we are held and known by a Presence that has been through it and is with us now. In, through, and as our tears, our grieving, our pain, and our death. Whether or not we choose to “die before you die” as Richard Rohr says, we will meet death eventually. Why not become acquainted with the inevitable?
What needs to die within you? What is currently dying? What day are you on? How are you experiencing this process?
