Читать книгу Grief’s Liturgy - Gerald J. Postema - Страница 6

Introit I

Email Message: Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Dear Friends,

Linda, the love, joy, and very center of my life, died last night.

When we learned Monday that no further chemotherapy options were likely to prove beneficial and that Linda probably did not have the physical resources to cope with their expected side-effects, we engaged hospice services to help ease her pain and difficult breathing. Hospice nurses arrived at our home and began their ministrations late afternoon Tuesday. A few hours later, she died.

At the time of her death, we were surrounded by friends.

Jerry

For nearly two and a half years Linda worked with formidable determination to deny lung cancer control of her life; when the time came, she denied it control of her death. In her final hours, her pain was overwhelming; her struggle with the evil inside her was terrible. But when the pain released its grip, she chose to let go. Linda—not the cancer—said, “It is finished.” I was there. I held her hand. I whispered my love. Gradually she became very quiet. I sat with her. I leaned close to kiss her. No breath!

God take her! Wrap her in your arms!

May the eternal light of your steadfast love surround her.

Lux aeterna luceat eis, Domine.

Sleep, O sleep in the calm of each calm.

Sleep, O sleep in the guidance of all guidance.

Sleep, O sleep in the love of all loves.

Sleep, O beloved, in the Lord of life.

Sleep, O beloved, in the God of life.

—The Ebba Compline

Introit II

I heard a voice say, “Cry!”

I said: “What shall I cry?”

—Isaiah 40:6 (NIV)

“We are summoned to a silent place,” John Bell wrote, “struggling to find some words to fill the space.” But why must we look for words to fill the space? Isn’t silence better? Is anything but silence possible?

In his “Requiem for a Friend,” Rilke looked for words to “set it all in order.” But I wonder what is one to set in order? Death? There is nothing orderly about death; and to make death into something orderly, to domesticate the demonic, is to deny its awful negation of all that is good. Grief, then? Grief is chaos; to set it in order is to try to capture fog with a sieve.

Still, could we not hope, perhaps, to wrest some meaning from death and grief, some why or wherefore—to grasp somehow the terrible mystery of death? But often I can only believe, with Wolterstorff, that “such shattering of love [is] beyond meaning for us, [for death is] the breaking of meaning.” So, the question persists: why? Why words? Why not just allow silence to bind up the pain?

Very often, surely, silence—the aching, silent cry—is all one can manage. Even so, sometimes I found myself seeking out words, or music, or images . . . something to give shape to the grief, even if anything I sought was likely to be inadequate. Might there be some reason to seek out words?

Perhaps, to name. So much of grief is beyond, or beneath, words; ineffable sighs and cries, and pain too deep for words. But, still, we can strive to bring the ineffable, the fleeting, and the chaotic into the human melody of living and loving. Not to deny the demonic awfulness of death, but to deny its claim to dominion.

Perhaps, to honor. Although the why of suffering and death may always elude our grasp, we can try to capture, preserve, and honor the dying, honor a life lived in the face of death, and honor the love that lives on in the grip of grief.

Especially, to remember. We can seek to gather the fragments of love left scattered by the demands of living with illness, to reassemble them and breathe renewed life into them. This remembering is a sacred, sacramental work of love.

Perhaps, through the work of naming, honoring, and remembering, we may be permitted to touch that which is beyond touch, to enter the garden of what T. S. Eliot called “this intersection time.”

Introit III

Does this grieving have a name?

I cannot think of it merely as a process, something to undergo, something that happens to one. I find it even harder to think of it as a process of healing, because grieving is not pathological, although it often brings pathology in its wake. Its cause, rooted in the lifeblood of love, is the most profound treasure of the soul. In the midst of grief, to think of grief’s pain as pathology is impossible. Neither can I think of grieving as a journey. The problem is not merely that we are inclined to call nearly every life process a “journey,” trivializing the term. The problem is that grief is not an adventure. It is not orderly. There are no maps to guide; it has no known destination, no promise of relief or joy upon arrival. So, again, I am left wondering what is grieving’s name?

In Luther’s text, the familiar phrase “blessed are those who mourn” (Matthew 5:4) is rendered, “Selig sind, die da Leid tragen”—“blessed are those who bear grief.” “Bear grief”—that seems right.

Grief is a leaden burden borne on the backs of the living,

bending the bearer unbearably.

Grief is liturgy—

extreme, exhausting, endless labor;

sacred labor: labor set apart, singular, and profound,

soul-engaged, soul-challenging,

assigned and prescribed, like the divine office,

yet unlike it because it is without a script;

To grieve the death of one’s beloved is to live a lament-psalm;

to live, weeping, a contradiction-filled, pain-racked,

musical prayer.

Like a lament-psalm, grieving mixes guilt and grace;

anguish and anger give way suddenly to alleluia;

and alleluia, in a moment, sinks back into sickness of heart.

Occasionally, disorientation modulates to a key of reorientation—

the wounds remain, the pain still stabs, but sometimes

renewed life, scarred and broken joy, seem possible.

Yet the reorientation is momentary—never once and for all:

no feeling is final, no insight stable,

no steps forward without stumbles back,

no relief without relapse;

Grief’s liturgy moves irregularly, in zig-zag patterns.