The Companionship of Grief

Reflections on the Lectionary for All Saints' Day

The Raising of Lazarus, Via Latina Catacomb in Rome, circa 4th century CE. The space in the center is a burial loculus. Image in the public domain, taken from Wikipedia.

Note: this week the Revised Common Lectionary offers a choice of two pathways: a set of readings for All Saints’ Day/All Souls’ Day, and a set of readings reflecting an ordinary Sunday. I’m offering reflections on both of these. Below are my reflections on All Saints’ Day, and I will publish reflections on the regular readings later this week.  

As I settle into midlife (I am 46, and turning 47 in about six weeks), I have acquired a new companion: grief. I don’t know what I expected from this time of life, exactly, but I don’t think I anticipated how much grief and loss would be a part of it. This grief takes a lot of different forms: the grief of losing beloved older relatives, the grief of watching earlier phases of my children’s lives pass by, the grief of the pandemic, the grief of seeing familiar institutions stumble, the grief of watching political life unfold in all its tragedy and frustration. I think about a dozen members of my high school class have died, which is a strange and strangely moving kind of grief. And beyond all of that, I have found that grief kind of piles up as the losses accumulate: mentors who succumb to old age and colleagues who pass away too soon, old friends and distant acquaintances whose lives meet an untimely end. I think I anticipated that loss would be a big part of being elderly—if I myself live that long—but I don’t think I thought that I would have become so acquainted with grief so early. As it turns out, I don’t think my experience is at all unusual.

As a consumer of science journalism, I have long followed articles like this one that ask whether the understanding of death is a uniquely human phenomenon or not. The evidence seems reasonably strong that, at the very least, humans are not the only creatures that struggle to make sense of the transition between life and death. The expressions of loss and grief that can show up in nonhuman species are moving. But humans do seem to have especially developed perspectives on death, and therefore on grief. There are as many ways of reckoning with mortality as there are human cultures, and maybe as many ways as there are human beings. We all find our way through grief differently. But one aspect of human culture—religion—seems particularly attuned to the challenges of living with loss. Religions usually offer some structure for thinking about the meaning of death, and they can suggest important rituals for making sense of it. (Whether or not animals have rituals around death and loss is hotly debated, and it has implications for how we think about human religion. So far the answer is a resounding maybe).

For many Christians, reflection on death is concentrated in one special time of the year, which is approaching this week: All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day. Different Christian traditions handle these differently; some celebrate them separately, and some conflate them and celebrate them together (with an emphasis on “saints” as all believers or all persons), and some even focus on a third day, All Hallows’ Eve or Halloween. Some churches don’t mark these days at all, or they include a small ritual within an otherwise-normal service. But some churches spend a whole Sunday service on All Saint’ Day or All Souls’ Day or both, or they even add a special service devoted to those themes. I have found, across the three different denominational traditions I am most familiar with, that All Saints’ Day services and rituals have offered a lot of comfort and structure for reflecting on death and grief. There is something powerful about having a framework to name our losses and make sense of them.

The lectionary readings for All Saints’ Day (and All Souls’ Day) gather reflections on death from across the biblical canon (and, for Protestants, one reading from the Apocrypha, which functions as a kind of para-canonical collection). As we might expect from an archive of human experience, the Bible contains many encounters with death and many reflections on its meaning. The ones curated for this set of lectionary readings are just a sample of the many ways the biblical texts contemplate human impermanence and grief. There are many other texts and stories that might have been added. But even a limited collection like this week’s lectionary texts offers rich resources for our consideration.

The first passage comes from Wisdom of Solomon, which is not canonical in the Protestant tradition, but which nevertheless shows up in lectionary readings from time to time. This passage, 3:1-9, begins with a bold claim: “the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God.” The passage then goes on to narrate some of the debate that human beings often have about death and how to make sense of it. The passage claims that death is not a bad thing, but that it can be thought of as almost a blessing, and that the dead (at least the righteous dead) reside with God. Perhaps you’ve heard something like this at a funeral before: “well, she’s with God now,” or “he’s met his savior.” This was a lively debate in the early church—whether people who died went immediately to be with God in heaven, or whether they stayed in their graves to await the resurrection. Passages like Revelation 6:9-11 seemed to suggest that at least martyrs were in heaven with God (in their case, under the altar of heaven), and this passage from Wisdom of Solomon also presumes that. But the more popularly held idea was that the dead waited in their graves, and that all people would be resurrected at once. Perhaps as time passed that position became harder to defend, and it was more comforting to imagine people who had passed away as moving directly to God’s presence. Today, I think that’s what most Christians who believe in an afterlife assume: that eternal life, whatever that means to them, begins upon death, and not after a long delay waiting for Jesus’ return.

Likewise, the passage from Isaiah also asks about the relationship between the present and the future. These few verses are less about death and more about eschatology, but they still point to a beatific vision of plenty and harmony. Isaiah envisions a feast that gathers all people in, and it envisions that God “will wipe away the tears from all faces.” The people, Isaiah imagines, will rejoice that the God they have waited for has arrived, and that God has brought salvation. This is a passage that was written not about death exactly, but it was written in the presence of death. It’s a vision of salvation that is rooted in experiences of imperial violence and national destruction, and the kinds of loss that accompany those traumas. God “will swallow up death forever,” Isaiah claims, and you can imagine how that might have sounded to people still buried in various kinds of deep grief and loss. Isaiah was written out of and into the traumas of war, when the basics of territorial sovereignty and individual liberties were in question and prophets like Isaiah spoke into questions of whether life could possibly go on.

I wonder, on a Sunday before the United States votes in a consequential election, how a passage like this might be heard. While apocalyptic rhetoric is common on both sides of presidential politics (with both claiming that democracy or the very soul of the nation are at stake), the United States is not quite in the same position as ancient Judah was. But there are some similarities. This part of Isaiah was written (scholars think) as foreign threats menaced Judah and Jerusalem; the latter parts of Isaiah were written in the aftermath of the destruction of Jerusalem by Babylon and the return from exile. So, the sense of foreboding that comes through in this passage from Isaiah 25 is not altogether different from the charged rhetoric around the election. Isaiah is predicting a crisis, as are both Democrats and Republicans. Isaiah turned out to be correct. It remains to be seen whether Republicans, Democrats, or both will turn out to be correct about their claims about the threats to the United States. But it’s a safe bet that no matter what kind of faith community you’re a part of, folks will be showing up this Sunday with a lot of anxiety about the future, and Isaiah’s words might sound comforting to them, or menacing, or both.

The passage from Revelation in this week’s lectionary meanwhile—21:1-6a—offers another vision of future peace and plenty. But this is a conflicted vision, easy to welcome but difficult to accept. This past summer I taught two classes on the Book of Revelation, and students in both were struck by how incongruous and disjointed the latter chapters of Revelation felt after all that had come before. The first twenty chapters of Revelation are filled with divine violence and wrath, visiting slaughter and suffering upon people and the natural world alike. It’s true that the world appears remade in chapter 21, but what are we to make of that? There is a new heaven and a new earth, a new Jerusalem, but does that erase the violence that has come before? My students were skeptical of this remade world, and suspicious of the God who shows up as a benevolent force in the latter chapters. Revelation 21:3-4 is echoing Isaiah 25; Revelation claims that God “will wipe every tear from their eyes” in the same way that Isaiah claims that “God will wipe away the tears from all faces.” But, as my students pointed out, the situations are not quite the same. In Isaiah God shows up as a comforter in the wake of human violence—in the aftermath of an imperial conquest. In Revelation, God is the aggressor who has just undone the world in a fit of fury. How can the God who perpetrated those acts also be the one who remakes the world and comforts the survivors?

I think this is a nice way to capture some of the dynamics of grief. In times of loss, it’s natural to have questions about the nature of God. On the one hand we might want to claim, alongside the Wisdom of Solomon, that the dead are in the hands of God, and we want to believe that they have reached a deserved rest. But on the other hand, when someone dies we often feel angry or betrayed by God. In a theological system where God is all-powerful, after all, it’s difficult to escape the conclusion that God is responsible for both life and death alike. Those who believe that God controls the whole world often use language about God “taking” people, or we say that God “needed an angel,” or we use other language that implies that God is somehow responsible for each individual death. That kind of justifying language might hide anger or bitterness underneath. Even if we don’t believe that God works in those specific all-powerful ways, we might still feel conflicted feelings about loss, and we might lash out at any deity who is supposed to be in charge of a world where something so unfair as death can happen. The conflictedness of Revelation 21 is a good model for this conflicted way of feeling grief: the one who offers us comfort might also be the one about whom we are suspicious, or the one toward whom we are angry. To my knowledge, no one has ever worked out a satisfactory solution for the way the emotions of grief point in so many different directions at once. It’s just an inextricable and irreducible part of being human.

That last part—the depths and contradictions of human grief—hang all over the gospel text this week, which is John 11:32-44. “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died,” Mary says accusingly to Jesus. Mary is feeling the way many of us might feel in a time of loss. Her brother Lazarus is in his grave, and Mary feels that Jesus had not done all that he could have done to save Lazarus. When I imagine this conversation, I hear more hurt in Mary’s voice than anger; I envision this exchange as a chance for Mary to register her disappointment and her woundedness. I think many people have felt that way about God—angry, perhaps, but also confused and hurt by the death of someone they love. In a time of grief, we might be angry, but very often we are simply looking for an explanation, a reason, or a way to make meaning out of something that feels meaningless. Mary’s hurt comes through in this passage; she seems confused about why Jesus, as God’s representative, could not prevent Lazarus from dying. I often wonder whether, even after Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, Mary regarded Jesus with suspicion from that point onward.

That, I think, is why rituals like All Saints’ Day are important. They are opportunities for us to speak our grief out loud, and to act on it, in all of our conflicted feelings. Rituals (like lighting a candle or saying a prayer or simply gathering in community) help give structure to our pain and anger and hurt, and they give direction to our questions. A day like All Saints’ Day can give context to our grief, and we can find space for anger and gratitude and suspicion and joy and memory and hope, all together at once. The sting of grief is never quite erased. The story of Mary’s hurt and disappointed comments to Jesus are still there in John’s gospel, after all, preserved forever for us to remember on her behalf. And our hurt and disappointment are durable too. But there is power in a moment, arriving once a year and reminding us to feel everything that we feel, that gives us permission to grieve and to give voice to our hurt, and most of all, to remember.