Good Friday Grief

Our observance of Good Friday brings us into the reality of grief. Through the Good Friday liturgy, we deepen our sense of Jesus’s suffering and of the profound grief of his mother and his followers. Jesus’s trial and crucifixion happened long ago and far away, but because Jesus is for us a very real presence whom we name as both Lord and friend, the story touches us deeply.

Often as we allow ourselves to enter into the story and share in the grief of his followers who witnessed this event firsthand, we find ourselves connecting this deep, cosmic grief — our sorrow at the brutality that nailed God Incarnate to a cross — to our own personal experiences of loss and grief. Sometimes we experience a connection with a familiar grief around the death of a loved one, while other times we are surprised by what surfaces. Sometimes we find ourselves consciously grieving a loss we had kept at arm’s length, something we weren’t even conscious that we were grieving. 

Some of us are conscious of our grief around the losses of life and place connected to climate change. Psychologists are aware of a growing number of people experiencing grief connected to climate change. The combination of species extinction with the loss of human lives to climate-related floods, storms, and fires is layered in with all the other global concerns that are connected with grief: the pandemic, the loss of life and the lack of humanity in Russia’s gruesome attack on Ukraine, gun violence here in the United States. 

I know that few people I’ve talked to since the most recent UN IPCC working group report came out have heard anything about it, and I’ve noticed that the floods in South Africa — the result of the “deadliest storm on record” in South Africa — haven’t received much coverage in the United States. However, since the same global changes that contribute to the large-scale catastrophes being experienced now and forecast to occur in the future to some degree — depending on how well we respond to the warnings in the IPCC reports — also contribute to changes close to home, I expect there is some degree of awareness even if we ignore the bigger picture when the seasons seem “off” or the weather seems “really strange”. 

Good Friday focuses on Jesus’s death on the cross. The full meaning of the Easter message of hope, of love having the final word, depends on Jesus death being real. If we try to deny his death on the cross, the Easter message is diminished. Good Friday invites us to experience our grief so that we might fully live into the salvation story we proclaim at Easter.

Acceptance of the realities that bring grief near is a necessary part of healing. Certainly we will not begin to heal our biosphere until enough people feel the grief of what we are losing. For me, and I suspect for others who pay attention to climate change, the death of Jesus on the cross is connected with the unnecessary deaths resulting from catastrophic events related to floods, storms, drought, and melting ice, with the loss of entire species, and the loss of places and nuances of seasons that will never again be the same in our lifetimes. Good Friday teaches us that we can somehow bear the grief, that it’s okay to open our eyes and see the reality all around us.

Good Friday: The Goodness of Grief

Reflecting on the Solemn Collects of our Good Friday liturgy last year in the post Good Friday: Grief, Compassion and Hope, I talked about the weight of grief as we hear again the story of Jesus’ trial and crucifixion and the way that resonates with the weight of grief felt by people paying to attention to climate change and its effects on all forms of life on this planet.

The weight of that grief is heavier this year than it was last year. Since last Good Friday, 2014 has been declared the warmest year on record. As 2015 is underway, we continue to break records for the hottest continuous twelve months on record.  Arctic sea ice has hit its lowest winter maximum on record. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is now commonly at or above 400 ppm. A new study shows that the rate of sea level rise is greater than previously thought.

California is under a Drought State of Emergency while the northeastern United States is emerging from big winter snow totals that broke records in places like Boston. Both situations produce negative economic impacts for people. Some parts of the world suffer from flooding and damaging storm winds while others see worsening drought. Along with producing immediate harm from floods, winds, and burning forests and prairies, these extreme conditions increase food insecurity. 

But Good Friday reminds us that we do not grieve alone. It can feel that way, because we live in a society that often turns away from facing challenges like climate change because we don’t know what to do with grief. Good Friday gives us a day when grief is acknowledged, felt, and even expected. It’s a day for people paying attention throughout the year to feel less alone in our grief and to be part of a worshiping community that can gather to grieve

The weight of grief for our biosphere has grown heavier in a year, but the promise of Good Friday that compassion for those who suffer can lift us all into a place of some sort of hope still rings true. Hope is not uninformed optimism; hope is not an irrational belief that we will magically return to a time before climate destabilization. Hope is faith that love has power we cannot fathom and even the worst of human experience can be redeemed.

And, more than ever, I still believe this part of last year’s reflection to be true:

Gathering our strength and doing whatever we can to prevent and relieve the human misery that results from environmental degradation is the only choice we have as followers of Christ. Choosing to acknowledge the problems we face and working to address them with so little evidence that we can succeed is where we draw on our faith and our hope.

We are an Easter people, even on Good Friday and because of Good Friday. Opening ourselves to grief, lamenting and being present to the reality of so much loss, also allows us to experience genuine compassion, the entry point to genuine hope.

Grief

Lent 5A

When Jesus saw [Mary] weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. He said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” Jesus began to weep. (John 11:33-35)

Thinking about the Sunday Gospel in the light of recent news about climate change suggests that one big gift the church could provide at this time is to lead us and support us in grieving.

The Gospel in this week’s lectionary is the story about Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. Even though Jesus delayed his travel to Bethany two days after receiving the news of his friend’s illness so that “the Son of God may be glorified through it”, and even though he knows when he arrives in Bethany that Lazarus is dead and he will bring him back to life, he weeps at his friend’s death and at the shared grief of Lazarus’s family and friends. The way John includes this detail of Jesus’ grief indicates that it is an essential part of the story. Can we appreciate the joy of resurrection without fully experiencing grief over a death? Jesus’ delay in arriving allows everyone, including himself, to truly acknowledge the death of someone they loved and to experience grief.

On Monday of this week, the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) released their most recent report on the impacts of climate change. Because their work involves a consensus process, the IPCC reports are fairly conservative; the most dire predictions of climate scientists do not make it into these reports. But the report was disturbing enough to be spotlighted by news organizations that have up to now given little emphasis to the impacts of climate change.

Given a continuation of our failure to make necessary changes and adaptations, the world as we have known it will be ending. There is a lot of anticipated loss to grieve in this, including the loss of arts and institutions that began and thrived in the civilizations that sprang up from successful agricultural societies and the loss of plants and animals with which we have shared our world.

Along with that big report this week, we had disturbing news from the daily reports of atmospheric carbon dioxide measurements from the Mauna Loa observatory. Daily averages the past week have been above 400 ppm, a level we first reached last May. (Carbon dioxide is one of the greenhouse gases; CO2 levels need to be at or below 350 ppm to continue to sustain life as we have known it.)

While there did seem to be some fresh concern about climate change after release of the IPCC report this week, it doesn’t seem to be a major concern for most people and certainly isn’t a cause of grief for most. Even among people who accept the scientific evidence and express some degree of concern, there is a sort of existential denial of the situation. We continue to plan and live as if nothing will happen in our lifetimes or even in our children’s lifetimes. We continue to give priority to the same personal and political issues we would give priority if we could plan on climate stability. And we certainly aren’t grieving the great losses we know (or that we at least know on some level) we face.

In his new book Reality, Grief, Hope: Three Urgent Prophetic Tasks, Walter Brueggemann writes (p. 79): The prophetic task, amid a culture of denial, is to embrace, model, and practice grief, in order that the real losses in our lives can be acknowledged.

Was Lazarus really dead? Jesus’ grief cuts through any denial of the death; it was real. The resurrection of Lazarus is meaningful – and possible -- because he was really dead. Brueggemann says (p. 83) that grief “turns loss to energy for newness”.

Might grief for the losses we face and the losses people in other places are already experiencing allow us to see something new that our denial keeps us from seeing? If the only hope we have is hope that nothing will change, our hope is empty. We can’t see whatever new and unfamiliar sort of hope we might find until we do the work of grieving. In a time and place where denial of death and loss is widespread, the church can lead us in grieving what we are losing so we can see our new reality more clearly.

No Bird Sang

Grief

At the end of our Maundy Thursday service at St. Stephen’s last night, the choir sang And No Bird Sang      to help us make the transition from our Maundy Thursday remembrance of the Last Supper to the events of Good Friday. Douglas Wagner’s words begin with this: “Calm was the wind and dark was the sky, when our Lord came to die; Lone on the cross for our sins he did hang, and no bird sang.”

These words resonated strongly for me last night. The Gospels describe the darkness at noon, the way all of creation responded to Jesus' death; the spiritual and the physical are not separated. 

One of my joys this time of year is hearing the birds sing when I wake up in the morning or when I’m outside gardening or sitting on my porch. When I read and think and pray about habitat destruction, pollution, and the effects of global warming on existing ecosystems, I often think about the birds and the joy and comfort their songs and company bring to people. What would our world be like if no bird sang? Even if we grieved nothing else we stand to lose as a result of environmental degradation, the thought of a world with few or no birds brings considerable grief.

Last year Good Friday fell on Earth Day. Last year’s Good Friday post  suggested that grief – our Good Friday grief as Christians and our grief for the ways we have harmed the earth – connected the two, and that the Solemn Collects of our Good Friday liturgy can help us through this grief. When we pray the Solemn Collects, rather than staying stuck under the dead weight of grief, we open our hearts to the concerns of the Church and the world.

This past year has seen more extreme weather events, more floods, droughts, storms, and fires, a continuing rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide and thinning of the Arctic Ice. The environmental pressures on human beings and the other things that live on the earth are great. Through it all, we find our ability to cope with our grief and find hope as we did last year:

It can be difficult to know where to begin doing something with our grief for the earth. With no significant national or international effort to address climate change or prevent future oil spills or stop covering the planet with plastic, we know our efforts are valiant but probably not enough. Yet just as our hearts are touched by Good Friday, our hearts are broken open by this grief, too. Prayers for the earth and her people are a good place to begin. We might pray for the Church and all people, praying that we continue to find meaning and hope in our lives even as the chances of sustaining life as we have known it on our planet get increasingly smaller. We might pray for open eyes, ears, minds, and hearts, for the ability to understand what we are facing and the will to do something about it.
 The third of the Solemn Collects asks for the cry of those in misery and need to come to God; it also prays for God to “give us…the strength to serve them for the sake of him who suffered for us.” Gathering our strength and doing whatever we can to prevent and alleviate the human misery that results from environmental degradation is the only choice we have as followers of Christ…Making the choice to acknowledge the problems we face and work to address them with so little evidence that we can succeed is where we draw on our faith and our hope; making the choice is where we get out from under our grief and, drawing on our faith for strength, gather energy for the work ahead.

Grief

Good Friday / Earth Day

For Christians walking through Holy Week, Good Friday is a day that stirs deep emotions. There is an emptiness in churches where the altars have been stripped. Our Good Friday liturgy begins in silence. We read John’s account of Jesus’ last hours (John 18:1 – 19:37), from the betrayal and arrest of Jesus through his death on the cross and the piercing of his side. The remembrance of Jesus’ pain – physical, emotional, and spiritual -- calls up deep sorrow and grief from us.

This year, Good Friday falls on the same date as Earth Day. Grief for the ways we have harmed the earth provides a common element between the two observances. Just as we go through our Good Friday grief and come out on the other side with Easter joy, the grief we experience when we witness environmental degradation and contemplate the future can show us some direction to find our way out to a place of meaning and Christian hope.

The average amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for March 2011 measured at the Mauna Loa observatory was 392.40 ppm; 350 ppm is generally considered to be the upper limit of the amount of CO2 that is safe for human beings and the other living things that sustain human life. (The last March reading below 350 ppm was in 1987. I recommend a look at the graph on the CO2 Now website) Rising CO2 levels result in ocean warming and acidification which are damaging shellfish and corals, and of course in rising world temperatures which melt ice, make oceans rise, and do much more. As the atmosphere warms, severe weather events become more frequent. Yesterday morning, The Weather Channel posted an update of severe weather in the United States in April. With the month not yet over, TWC says we have set a “tentative” record for the number of tornadoes in April. They also report this:

There have been over 5200 severe weather reports (tornadoes, hail, and high winds/wind damage) so far in April. On average, only about 3300 severe weather reports are tallied in an entire April nationwide.

There is grief in many communities where people have lost loved ones, homes, and businesses to tornadoes and other severe weather this spring.

The environmental damage linked to carbon emissions is only part of the damage that causes us grief this Earth Day. Japan has an ongoing nuclear crisis. Species extinction continues at an accelerated rate. Plastic pollution is everywhere. In a Huffington Post piece called Crucified Creation and the Hope of Eco-nomics Doug Demeo, a friend and GreenFaith Fellow, says that when he looks around the earth today “the weight of creation crucified seems too much to bear”. Doug talks about mountain top removal and hydro-fracking among other “environmental woes”.

Our Good Friday liturgy does something in the midst of our grief. After the story of Jesus’ final hours has been read, and perhaps a homily preached or a hymn sung that provides more reflection on the reading, we pray the Solemn Collects. Rather than staying stuck under the dead weight of grief, we open our hearts to the concerns of the Church and the world. With our hearts already broken open, these tend to be profound prayers.

It can be difficult to know where to begin doing something with our grief for the earth. With no significant national or international effort to address climate change or prevent future oil spills or stop covering the planet with plastic, we know our efforts are valiant but probably not enough. Yet just as our hearts are touched by Good Friday, our hearts are broken open by this grief, too. Prayers for the earth and her people are a good place to begin. We might pray for the Church and all people, praying that we continue to find meaning and hope in our lives even as the chances of sustaining life as we have known it on our planet get increasingly smaller. We might pray for open eyes, ears, minds, and hearts, for the ability to understand what we are facing and the will to do something about it.

The third of the Solemn Collects asks for the cry of those in misery and need to come to God; it also prays for God to “give us…the strength to serve them for the sake of him who suffered for us.” Gathering our strength and doing whatever we can to prevent and alleviate the human misery that results from environmental degradation is the only choice we have as followers of Christ. Environmentalist Bill McKibben said it in a different way in his speech at the Power Shift gathering in Washington, D.C. last weekend: “The only thing that a morally awake person can do when the worst thing that’s ever happened is happening is try to change those odds.”

When we choose to acknowledge the problems we face and to work to address them with so little evidence that we can succeed is when we draw on our faith and our hope; when we make that choice, we get out from under our grief and, drawing on our faith for strength, gather energy for the work ahead.