Friday, March 30, 2018

Another Good Friday Reflection

This week I attended the Popular Culture Association Conference, held this year in Indianapolis. After reading a short story on the first day of the conference, a story I finished writing and submitted to the conference just days before my son Michael took his life last October, I was able to relax and attend several poetry panels.

 One of them was put together around the theme of grief and consisted of poets reading their own work on the grief and loss they'd experienced in their own lives. Humor and sadness were both fully represented in the very creative poems read by poets of different ages. Certainly, the panel reminded me that this season of my life is one where I still hear and laugh at jokes, and even tell them, even as I still feel sadness I've never known before. In this way, the panel felt real.

I also heard many poems that reflected strong poetic technique. Yet it was most interesting that the poems most affecting to me on this theme were poems that had both effective technique and a rich understanding of experience. I'm not sure what I was looking for in attending this panel. Since our loss, some people have given me poetry to read, some of it Hallmarky and some of it so severe in language that it didn't represent anything but a cold, distant cathedral not built for me.

The poems on this panel did not go to either of these extremes. Each poet's approach was different. I was most affected by one of the poets, Sally McGeevey Hannay, who wrote about the loss of her son five years ago in poems that explored the experience honestly in a number of different ways, but often drawing on the form of the sestina. I found empathy, identification, in someone writing from where I am living now, and I also found some hope.

Grief is that experience that is perhaps most universal. We all will die, and before we do we all lose people we love. I am writing this late on the night of Good Friday, and I am aware that this day marks the time of great fear and uncertainty when the followers of Jesus watched him being crucified, and then they ran shocked and horribly confused into hiding. I am aware that Christianity is first a religion of grief before it can be a religion of resurrection. I am conscious of the fact that those first followers would have been in the dark at this point after sunset on Good Friday. And we need to face this for the moment; at this point in their journey, they were in grief, and they had no understanding, no hope, and no expectation that anything would ever change.

That it did is what is celebrated in churches on Sunday, of course, and if it is believed, it should be celebrated. But before we rush to Sunday, I would like to note that many don't like to stay in the condition that the first disciples found themselves in as the sun set on the death of their rabbi. Many of us don't want to dwell in that place where everything looks futile and final.

I'm not suggesting that we should want to stay there. I understand the desire for light and victory. But if we don't understand the deep sadness and shock that was the disciples' experience, as it is honored by our remembrance of Good Friday, then I'm not sure that we are getting all that the Christian experience is really about.

The poets on that panel I attended yesterday didn't all read poems that connected with me in that way. But it was clear that they knew something about loss and how it shapes us. And all of the poets had learned to laugh again. But it came with time.

As Christians, we should understand this about our own grief and the grief of others. Constant happiness is not a sign of a blessed life. Grief comes to everyone. There is nothing we can do to help, and we shouldn't expect to do that, and we also shouldn't ignore people because we feel we cannot help them.

The normal run of grief was interrupted by the triumph of Sunday in the story of the resurrection. That is not the story for most people who grieve. Before Sunday comes, we should attempt to understand something of the grief that tore at the disciples in those hours on Saturday. It may help us to stay with each other and understand our burdens a little more, because in a very real sense, death shows us our futility, and we are still looking forward to the resurrection that is to come.