A complicated bereavement

A troubled lady asked the same question, yesterday, for about the thousandth time. I buried her middle-aged husband 2 years ago. His body was worn down from a series of painful illnesses and medical setbacks. God called his soul away, and my friend's body exhaled into dust and mourning.

I did not understand the timing of providence then, nor do I now, what with the surviving urgencies of a fatherless child and a guideless widow. The widow does not understand, either.

So she asks, and keeps asking, the usual: Why. When did he know. When did you know. Was it my fault. Was it his fault. What could we have done better. Should we have married at all since we married so late and he left so early. Why. How. As in, How do I do this. How do I carry on since he carried me (he did, and she knows it now).

From my old job in the behavioral health industry, I remembered that repeated questions like hers usually represent deeper psychic needs.

This lady has needs in spades. But she really wants an answer. She recognizes what I am doing, quickly, when I try my therapeutic reframing and I avoid providing the data she demands. She does not accept the facile dogma, "God did not explain to Job why: He gave Job what he needed, not what he wanted. Love is sometimes speechless, always beyond comprehension. God loves and saves, but does not explain."

It sounded elegant (because it's true). But like so many real things in today's gnostic morass, truth doesn't work.

At least, not in a positivistic epistemology. But I digress.

So now she wants to head off to a monastery and spend the day plying the monastics with questions until they reveal to her a sufficient revelation. An answer that works.

I will make the arrangements. The abbess and the sisters will listen and do a much better job than I in listening, because their quiet is bigger than mine (I count on this from all monasteries). I hope they will have her work in the garden and be quiet and talk just once in a while. If she does this, then things may work out.

But then again, things may not. She wants a magic knowledge that will settle in her mind like a golden brightness and set her anxieties to rest. She wants a conversion from weakness to strength, from morning terrors to peace at the hearth. She wants, I fear, an escape from history and a shortcut into the pleroma, because life now without her ailing spouse is simply life the way it always was, a low gray swath punctuated by some entertainments.

Thank God, there is the weekly witness of heaven and grace. Orthodoxy is a strange thing in a land gone gray, but life has that property of oddness when the alternative is practiced.

Death does that: it makes life strange. In the months after the event, it takes the gray that was always there and makes it clear, unignorable. Indubitable.

The poor widow feels this and doesn't understand. She lived in a gray land and spoke an idolatrous language, full of symbols and words that were deprived of meaning, signs that pointed to fantasy and little reality. She watched and lived in TV, quite the gnostic liturgy.

She found that TV doesn't prepare you for death.

I am full of answers, but she doesn't want them. Jesus wants us to repent and prepare, for the end draweth nigh. Marana tha. The tower of Siloam falls and Pilate's soldiers do some counter-insurgency work and inflict collateral damage. Repent. Two men work in a field, one is taken, the other is left behind. Repent. Watch and pray. Taste and see that the Lord is good.

I am full of answers simply because the Church chooses, like Mary, the better part, and sits (in her reality) at the feet of the Word Who has Logos in sumptuous largesse, much more solid fare than the weary gnosis of the psycho-political gospels (left and right). The Church has answers to all the "why" questions, and they are not so hard to figure out. My mother-in-law died of Alzheimers in a broken world, and my friend expired from cancer, because cancer is writ large in a life that has shattered into splinters of autonomy. And I have buried other friends whose hearts failed and lungs collapsed and who were shut tight in automobiles that ran off vector into mortal peril, and hurtled into a calculus of chaos, and a storm of pneumo-pathological evil made manifest in burning towers and homicidal tides.

I am full of answers and tears, ever. The Body of Christ is always standing at the tombs of friends, who have been stuck inside for four days, and this Body, albeit knowing better, still weeps. The widow knows not what she does or wants. I know what she needs. She needs the rejection of the gnostic gospel, for one thing, and the acceptance of the Orthodox gospel for another. She needs the turning away from salvation schemes in this world, from the you-are-special-messages that give you goose bumps for only a few moments, then land you in a post-rush drag.

She needs to escape the gray passions of resentment and 8-track memories set on endless loop. She needs to jump the track by embracing of Christ and dogma, and the ingesting His Body and Blood. She already has her answers: her husband will be saved through his death and her prayers, and so shall she. But she needs, more than answers, the entry into Beauty and the adoption of Goodness, and the speaking of Truth.

She needs what she already has. She looks elsewhere and will not find. The Gnostics will always disappoint.

And this is our problem here in this gray world of Chinese toys, saran wrap individualism and koolaid gnosis: we Orthodox ask catechumen questions, repeatedly, looking for answers, all the while when we are it. Already.

Comments

[Fr. Gregory]

Nicely said, Fr. A very powerful and important message.

[Sheila Joyce Gibbs]

Praise our Lord...
Grief is truly one of the most difficult journey's in this life...I only just found that out 30 mos ago with the loss of my dear hubby...& yet, God never fails us, no matter what.

Thankyou for sharing your words of wisdom.
May God richly bless your much needed Ministry.

[s-p]

Beautifully said. We seek answers when we need presence...which we already have.

[JCW]

This post reminds me of all the days I was an interning chaplain at our local hospitals. More than anything, as you wrote, it was presence over words. There was nothing to be said.