Tending the Wounded Heart
(What follows is the sermon from Sunday, August 7, 2011):
Sermon Series: Tending the Heart
August 7, 2011
Rev. Dr. Craig Strobel
Psalm 130
Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.
Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive
to the voice of my supplications!
If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities,
Lord, who could stand?
But there is forgiveness with you,
so that you may be revered.
I wait for the Lord, my soul waits,
and in his word I hope; my soul waits for the Lord
more than those who watch for the morning,
more than those who watch for the morning.
O Israel, hope in the Lord!
For with the Lord there is steadfast love,
and with him is great power to redeem.
It is he who will redeem Israel
from all its iniquities.
Earlier this year in late spring, I began a journey that all of us take at one point in time. It was a journey whose path I had trod before, but this time the journey was closer to home, and to my heart – my father died suddenly and unexpectedly on Easter. You all are aware of this, and your expressions of support and sympathy have made this journey bearable. This is not the first grief I have experienced, nor will it be the last. But as grief, it is an experience that wounds my heart. As a result of this experience, I realized the need to share with you all some of what I have learned about going through the valley of grief.
This morning’s reading from Psalm 130 begins with a cry that could easily be from someone deep in the middle of the pain of grief. “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications!” Have you ever been there, deep in the midst of an aching emptiness, feeling like someone has kicked you in the stomach, feeling totally lost, bewildered, unable to make the smallest decision, not knowing what will set off a torrent of tears? If you have had this experience, then you know well the valley of grief.
There are many forms of loss that can result in grief: death of friends and loved ones, divorce, job loss, demotion of job, rejection of book or grant proposals, a sudden inability to do something that you have planned on doing, betrayal or abandonment, etc. Many griefs make up our lives. How we deal with our grief in part determines the emotional readiness and openness we have to engage our families and friends, as well as our jobs or other commitments in life. How we deal with our various griefs may make all the difference in how open we are in listening to our hearts, and listening to others from our hearts. Therefore, and important part of tending to our hearts is to know how to grieve well, so that our hearts will be well.
One of the pioneers of understanding the process of grieving is Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross who described five basic stages to the grief process:
• Denial,
• Anger,
• Bargaining,
• Depression and
• Acceptance.
Often our first reaction to the news we hear of a death or receive notice of a suit for divorce or get that job termination notice is one of denial or disbelief. “This cannot be right,” we think. “I just saw mother yesterday and she looked great.” “But things have just started to get better between us.” “Just yesterday I received a good job performance rating. This notice must be for someone else.”
As the reality of the situation sinks in, we may feel angry. “Where was the hospital staff when his heart stopped?” “How dare she split up the family!” “That corporate office is full of empty-headed idiots!” Anger is a normal reaction in the face of something that has injured or wronged us. We may get angry with God, we may get angry with people in authority, we may get angry at the cat.
We may then try to bargain with God or with the other person. “Maybe I heard wrong God, you’ve brought back other people from the dead, couldn’t we just have another miracle right now?”
When we come face to face with our own utter powerlessness to change our situation, anger and desperation may turn into depression. We may not only realize our helplessness, may then feel helpless, even unable to do anything. Depression is a common response, and does not represent an aberration.
Finally, we grow to accept the reality before us. We don’t like, we desperately wish we could change it, but what has happened has happened. Our task is now to move into this new situation and find ways to continue our lives, make new connections, new friends, explore a new vocation, fall in love again.
Drs. Kübler-Ross and David Kessler on their website, Grief.com, offer the following comments about these five steps:
The most helpful way to move through grief is to allow ourselves to grieve in the manner that most befits our individual emotional and psychological constitution. It is inappropriate and unhelpful if not damaging to dictate to anyone how they should grieve. No two people will grieve the same way.
Grieving is a natural process of the body to respond to the extreme emotional stress of loss of any kind. When I say “body” I mean just that. Our brains are an integral part of our body, and they have evolved over the millennia to form deep emotionally-laden attachments to persons, landscapes and situations in life. By virtue of how our brains process sensory inputs, everything we experience has an emotional tag applied to it in our memories. When an experience comes along that represents a rupture in the fabric of our experiences will likewise rupture our emotional fabric. Grief is the process our bodies and brains go through to assess the damage of that rupture and to slowly reweave the emotional fabric of our consciousness.
Because our brains and bodies are one unit, we experience grief in our bodies. We may not be hungry for a while, or we may be ravenous. We may burst out impulsively in sobs, and feel totally empty, like we are walking in a daze. We need to listen closely to all these expressions of grief and acknowledge how they are affecting us. As Drs. Kübler-Ross and Kessler remind us, we can never replace our losses, but we can make new connections with people, new friendships, new vocations, even explore new directions in our life.
Grief is never easy. I know this personally. I have been laid off from several jobs, received many rejections for articles I have submitted to scholarly journals, been rejected in job applications, I have been divorced twice and have had several significant relationships dissolve. I have been unemployed and underemployed, and even was homeless for several months. I have had all four grandparents die, an aunt and uncle and most recently my father. Many of my hopes and plans in life have never been realized, and disappointments have seemed to dog my door. All of these carve out a place of emptiness within me that is the terrain of grief. How I explore and navigate that terrain directly determines how supportive I can be to others who are going through grief. It determines how open I am to exploring the remaining landscape of my inner life. And it is precisely this inner life that I offer to God each day for healing, for guidance and for filling.
Another Psalm has provided untold hope and healing for people who go through grief: Psalm 23. There in the middle of this Psalm are the words, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil…” What I point out to parishioners and friends, and what I pointed out to my mother as well as to myself repeatedly this spring, is the fact that this valley is something we pass through. We do not dwell there. We are not setting up permanent residency. It is god who walks the journey of grief with us, who is there by our side, allowing us to feel each tear as it courses down our cheeks, who holds us as we shake with anger, who lifts us as we slump with depression. We will never be spared grief. But if we tend to our grief, slowly, our hearts, though wounded, will carry us on down and through and finally out of that valley.
Sermon Series: Tending the Heart
August 7, 2011
Rev. Dr. Craig Strobel
Psalm 130
Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.
Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive
to the voice of my supplications!
If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities,
Lord, who could stand?
But there is forgiveness with you,
so that you may be revered.
I wait for the Lord, my soul waits,
and in his word I hope; my soul waits for the Lord
more than those who watch for the morning,
more than those who watch for the morning.
O Israel, hope in the Lord!
For with the Lord there is steadfast love,
and with him is great power to redeem.
It is he who will redeem Israel
from all its iniquities.
Earlier this year in late spring, I began a journey that all of us take at one point in time. It was a journey whose path I had trod before, but this time the journey was closer to home, and to my heart – my father died suddenly and unexpectedly on Easter. You all are aware of this, and your expressions of support and sympathy have made this journey bearable. This is not the first grief I have experienced, nor will it be the last. But as grief, it is an experience that wounds my heart. As a result of this experience, I realized the need to share with you all some of what I have learned about going through the valley of grief.
This morning’s reading from Psalm 130 begins with a cry that could easily be from someone deep in the middle of the pain of grief. “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications!” Have you ever been there, deep in the midst of an aching emptiness, feeling like someone has kicked you in the stomach, feeling totally lost, bewildered, unable to make the smallest decision, not knowing what will set off a torrent of tears? If you have had this experience, then you know well the valley of grief.
There are many forms of loss that can result in grief: death of friends and loved ones, divorce, job loss, demotion of job, rejection of book or grant proposals, a sudden inability to do something that you have planned on doing, betrayal or abandonment, etc. Many griefs make up our lives. How we deal with our grief in part determines the emotional readiness and openness we have to engage our families and friends, as well as our jobs or other commitments in life. How we deal with our various griefs may make all the difference in how open we are in listening to our hearts, and listening to others from our hearts. Therefore, and important part of tending to our hearts is to know how to grieve well, so that our hearts will be well.
One of the pioneers of understanding the process of grieving is Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross who described five basic stages to the grief process:
• Denial,
• Anger,
• Bargaining,
• Depression and
• Acceptance.
Often our first reaction to the news we hear of a death or receive notice of a suit for divorce or get that job termination notice is one of denial or disbelief. “This cannot be right,” we think. “I just saw mother yesterday and she looked great.” “But things have just started to get better between us.” “Just yesterday I received a good job performance rating. This notice must be for someone else.”
As the reality of the situation sinks in, we may feel angry. “Where was the hospital staff when his heart stopped?” “How dare she split up the family!” “That corporate office is full of empty-headed idiots!” Anger is a normal reaction in the face of something that has injured or wronged us. We may get angry with God, we may get angry with people in authority, we may get angry at the cat.
We may then try to bargain with God or with the other person. “Maybe I heard wrong God, you’ve brought back other people from the dead, couldn’t we just have another miracle right now?”
When we come face to face with our own utter powerlessness to change our situation, anger and desperation may turn into depression. We may not only realize our helplessness, may then feel helpless, even unable to do anything. Depression is a common response, and does not represent an aberration.
Finally, we grow to accept the reality before us. We don’t like, we desperately wish we could change it, but what has happened has happened. Our task is now to move into this new situation and find ways to continue our lives, make new connections, new friends, explore a new vocation, fall in love again.
Drs. Kübler-Ross and David Kessler on their website, Grief.com, offer the following comments about these five steps:
They are tools to help us frame and identify what we may be feeling. But they are not stops on some linear timeline in grief. Not everyone goes through all of them or in a prescribed order… the stages are responses to feelings that can last for minutes or hours as we flip in and out of one and then another. We do not enter and leave each individual stage in a linear fashion. We may feel one, then another and back again to the first one…. Instead of denying our feelings, we listen to our needs; we move, we change, we grow, we evolve. We may start to reach out to others and become involved in their lives. We invest in our friendships and in our relationship with ourselves. We begin to live again, but we cannot do so until we have given grief its time.
The most helpful way to move through grief is to allow ourselves to grieve in the manner that most befits our individual emotional and psychological constitution. It is inappropriate and unhelpful if not damaging to dictate to anyone how they should grieve. No two people will grieve the same way.
Grieving is a natural process of the body to respond to the extreme emotional stress of loss of any kind. When I say “body” I mean just that. Our brains are an integral part of our body, and they have evolved over the millennia to form deep emotionally-laden attachments to persons, landscapes and situations in life. By virtue of how our brains process sensory inputs, everything we experience has an emotional tag applied to it in our memories. When an experience comes along that represents a rupture in the fabric of our experiences will likewise rupture our emotional fabric. Grief is the process our bodies and brains go through to assess the damage of that rupture and to slowly reweave the emotional fabric of our consciousness.
Because our brains and bodies are one unit, we experience grief in our bodies. We may not be hungry for a while, or we may be ravenous. We may burst out impulsively in sobs, and feel totally empty, like we are walking in a daze. We need to listen closely to all these expressions of grief and acknowledge how they are affecting us. As Drs. Kübler-Ross and Kessler remind us, we can never replace our losses, but we can make new connections with people, new friendships, new vocations, even explore new directions in our life.
Grief is never easy. I know this personally. I have been laid off from several jobs, received many rejections for articles I have submitted to scholarly journals, been rejected in job applications, I have been divorced twice and have had several significant relationships dissolve. I have been unemployed and underemployed, and even was homeless for several months. I have had all four grandparents die, an aunt and uncle and most recently my father. Many of my hopes and plans in life have never been realized, and disappointments have seemed to dog my door. All of these carve out a place of emptiness within me that is the terrain of grief. How I explore and navigate that terrain directly determines how supportive I can be to others who are going through grief. It determines how open I am to exploring the remaining landscape of my inner life. And it is precisely this inner life that I offer to God each day for healing, for guidance and for filling.
Another Psalm has provided untold hope and healing for people who go through grief: Psalm 23. There in the middle of this Psalm are the words, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil…” What I point out to parishioners and friends, and what I pointed out to my mother as well as to myself repeatedly this spring, is the fact that this valley is something we pass through. We do not dwell there. We are not setting up permanent residency. It is god who walks the journey of grief with us, who is there by our side, allowing us to feel each tear as it courses down our cheeks, who holds us as we shake with anger, who lifts us as we slump with depression. We will never be spared grief. But if we tend to our grief, slowly, our hearts, though wounded, will carry us on down and through and finally out of that valley.
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