Being thankful for being touched in our grief

If anything in this life touches you, you are blessed.

Just so you know where this is coming from, I write this in tears, but my tears are NOT tears borne of pain.  My tears are of remembrance of my mother, and they’re not tears of pain, they’re tears of being touched.  I’m playing the song that she and Dad would occasionally weep to when they remembered their daughter, my sister, Debra Leanne, who they lost to stillbirth in 1973, an era that did not allow couples to adequately grieve their pregnancy losses.

I don’t think I’m alone in noticing that there is something cherishable in being touched.

We are touched when we fall in love, when we receive that awesome job offer, when something wonderful happens to us.  But just as much we’re touched so very deeply in our losses, and this is because love conflates the situation with pain because the situation cannot be resolved.  When love and pain coexist, there’s the basis for being touched.

If we’re not afraid of the effect of being touched, and we’re not ashamed of those tears that will run down our cheeks, and those messy nostrils, if we’re able to find a safe way of expressing what the heart certainly feels, we will be blessed.  If we can go there and even allow for the occasion when we’ll be lost in our loss, we will be blessed in it.

As we allow ourselves the space to grieve our loss, the Good Lord meets us in that attitude of heart and gives us a depth of a touch of his presence even as we wrestle with the paradox of love’s voluminousness with love’s inability to be met.  Somehow, in the truth of allowing that truth of our loss to melt us we’re broken in the most redemptive of ways.

I would go so far as to say that a part of the intent of James 1:2-4 is to inspire us to dig deeply into the truth of those first four words, “Consider it pure joy...”

“Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance.  Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.”

Twenty-first Century Christians tend to be transfixed in a bemused way by James 1:2-4, but those who suffer find themselves transfixed in an entirely intrigued way, for when we suffer and we have faith, we cannot help but search.  James wrote to an audience that had an intimate understanding of suffering—for the culture of the time, for one’s faith, to mention just two.

We really have nothing to be afraid of with our cognitions and emotions that are connected to loss.  Indeed, these “uncontrollable” nuances of attitude that come out in the unavoidable behaviour of brokenness are a great blessing because they help us to be more authentic—more human, not less.

There is another fact of loss that makes grief something we can be very thankful for.

Because the grief cannot be resolved, because it cannot be avoided, and because the loss cannot be overturned, and because it will remain a loss for the rest of our lives or for an indeterminate period, we are held in that state of vulnerability that will compel us toward the growth of change.  We cannot remain as we are, and whenever we’re touched by the grief, especially as we connect with that unrequited love that cannot be reconciled the way it wishes to be.

The truth is, that grief insists on being heard, and if only we won’t deny it, it will touch us and it will heal us.  We just need to be actively passive and let the grief do its work.  We need to step out of grief’s way as it will heal us if we’ll let it.

Being so very thankful for our grief is a cherished state to experience especially as we consider we so often feel we’re trapped in the pain of grief.  This grief can touch us as much as it can pain us.  It’s time to sit with it and allow it to touch us and heal us.  It will if we let it.