“The heart that breaks open can contain the whole universe.”

Joanna Macy

Several years ago, I presided at the funeral of an older man. He had lived a long life, and the family gathered for the memorial service. They asked if the man's teenage granddaughter could read a lesson during worship. She approached the lectern with a kind of grace unusual for early teens. She opened a Bible and, before reading, said, "I chose this passage because it reflects the qualities of my grandfather.” She then began to read First Corinthians 13.

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

I must have heard that scripture hundreds of times at weddings. It always sounds so naive when two 20 somethings enter into marriage. But, now hearing this grandchild read the passage as a description of her deceased grandfather. I was slain, as was the congregation. Nothing more needed to be said.

The columnist David Brooks describes two different kinds of virtues for life. In the first half of life, we work on our resume virtues. These qualities help us earn a living, establish a family, and plan a career. We desire to impress people with the capabilities of our competence, education, and keenness for success. However, different questions begin to arise in the second half of life. This is primarily brought on by increasing awareness of the limits of life. We realize we will not live forever. Therefore, our focus shifts from resume virtues to eulogy virtues. What do we hope people will say at our funeral? Were we kind, compassionate, and thoughtful? Were we a good listener, a generous person, or an encourager? Or were we a complainer, a know-it-all, and a braggart? The second half of life brings an opportunity to ask questions of ultimate significance.

Death is a tremendous gift to us. It forces us to face our limits and thereby helps us choose how we wish to spend our time and energy.

This week is Holy Week, and in many ways, it's a week of death. The historic liturgies of the Christian church turn our attention to the brutal death using the ancient form of capital punishment engaged by the Romans, namely crucifixion. We should not trivialize this form of execution. The Romans invented it to inflict maximum suffering on the victims and used it to dissuade other would-be rebels. This event culminates in the Good Friday liturgy.

Holy Week marinates in death. The week's origin centered on the Passover celebration, which marked the events in ancient Israel as enslaved people prepared for their freedom march out of bondage in Egypt. Passover is named from the marking on doorposts so the messenger of death would pass over their homes. The Passover meal recalling the departure across the Red Sea became the center of Christian worship in early precursors to Holy Week. This shape of the week of death we call holy slowly developed over time and formed in the 4th century. Jesus and Paul link the Passover meal with the Last Supper, thus bringing yet another death marker into the week.

All this talk of death may get you a little down. Primarily that's because US Americans are “death phobic and grief illiterate,” as the Canadian palliative care counselor Stephen Jenkinson has noted. Years ago, on departing the house to attend a Good Friday liturgy, my wife asked if anyone wanted to join us. One gentleman declined by saying, "Nah, it's too depressing. I'll wait for Easter. That's more of an upper." His language reflects an almost pharmaceutical quality. As if religion and life are chemically inducing activities for our ever-expanding consumption habits and feel better consciousness.

I believe the crusty Canadian is onto something. “Death Phobic and Grief Illiterate." We seem acutely afraid of death and struggle mightily with sorrow and loss. Our "always up and to the right" pragmatic culture has little time for grief, evidenced by the minuscule days off the average grieving worker receives.

Death intrigued me at an early age. In 1976 the film Annie Hall caught my attention. It spoke to my young adult angst of romances gone awry, confusion regarding vocation, and the ever-present quest for meaning. In the film, there is a scene in which Alvy Singer is trying to convince Annie to read some books on death. So I leaned into death and purchased Ernst Becker's The Denial of Death and read it over a weekend. My college roommate called the campus ministry center out of concern. Three months later, the telephone in our dorm room rang. I picked it up and listened while a friend described how one of our high school friends took his own life with a shotgun. He was 16. I remember the funeral to this day—a line of grieving high school and college kids formed around the block. I can still see all those people, all those tears and all that hurt.

My vocational calling grew out of these early experiences, though I didn’t realize it till years later. Being a pastor roots you in death and its accompanying co-pilot grief. We learn to navigate hospital corridors, confused families, and awkward moments in funeral homes. Working in a hospital cancer ward for a summer remains one of the most exhausting yet life-giving experiences. Death and grief have been my teachers through the years. Their yearning to be expressed, articulated, and shared with others is among the lessons they impart.

To speak of sorrow
Works upon it
Moves it from its
Crouched place barring
The way to and from the soul’s hall.
- Denise Levertov

Our unexpressed sorrows, the congested stories of loss, that, when left unattended, block our access to the soul. I would go so far as to suggest that it is in death and grief that we most profoundly connect with God. I won’t say exclusively, but there is something in the human experience of loss that unites us with one another and the sacred.

Who has not experienced loss, heartache, shattered dreams, grave disappointments, all the little deaths of life, not to mention the significant deaths of loved ones who have passed away? In the past two years, a million US Americans have died from Covid19, and globally the number sores to six million. Add to that the grief we bear of all the world’s suffering from the Climate crisis, racism, economic insecurity, and now war. I remain convinced a significant part of our current engagement with lousy behavior on airplanes, school board meetings, and yes, even the Academy Awards is deeply connected to unexpressed grief. Yes, I contend that the growth of mean behavior is a manifestation of unprocessed sorrow.

We need more than a splendid funeral, though that always helps. What we need is a cultural recalibration, maybe even an intervention. This reorientation would center around sorrow, loss, and grief. Every person reading this article could take one step forward to encourage their local church, synagogue, temple, community center, school, or even place of employment to form a grief group. There are free guide books available - One from the United Kingdom, another from the States, and a third from Canada.

Holy Week serves as more than a reminder of the presence of death in life. It suggests a particular way in which death is life and life is death. Like the mystics, theologians, and depth psychologists have all noted, the concept of God embracing death is a most meaningful embrace of life. We do well to see in death the gift of life. The fact that Christ, the fully incarnated human presence of the eternal, dies on a cross brings it all together. Death and life are one.

So death is not something to run from, hide from, or pretend does not exist. Instead, death and grief are to be engaged. Every culture throughout human history has done this work in varying degrees of intensity. In some ways, those cultures were not as advanced as ours in technical achievements. But in other ways, they were far more mature in their use of ritual, community, and spirituality, especially around grief. An example of how those ancient cultures can teach us today can be seen in the work of Ronald Grimes. Watch this short film of his, and follow him on YouTube for some profound insights into the use of ritual.

Holy Week is a perfect name for this week because a week of death is holy. So let's grieve together, not just in the events of 2,000 years ago, but in the ways, Christ dies in, with and under all the current losses and deaths in Ukraine, Brooklyn, Boston, Wakefield, Middletown, Manchester. If we grieve those losses in healthy and kind ways, we can find death as a friend. Death is a unifier of what makes us human. Perhaps that’s why they call it “Good” Friday.

Until next time, be well and be kind to yourself and those you meet.

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