by Cecilia Kingman Miller, Summer Minister

A sermon given August 3, 2003

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

Last month, I was sitting in a restaurant with a friend.  He and I were talking about the kind of relationships we hope to eventually find.  I described one couple we both know, married for thirty years, whose love is still radiant and passionate.  But my friend shook his head and said slowly, “I don’t want to love my wife that much.” 

I looked at him in shock and said, “Why on earth not?”  And he said, “If you love someone that deeply, it will hurt that much more once they’re gone.” 

I countered his argument by saying, “But that’s the nature of love.  This is what we do—we’re human.  We love one another, in spite of risk, in spite of loss.” 

And this good man said solemnly, “I’m just not sure it’s worth the risk.”

Now, you might think my friend was a cynic, but I know he’s not.  Passionate and kind, with an irrepressible enthusiasm, this is not someone who believes life is meaningless.  But he does know what it means, as we just heard the song say, to be left “halfway through the woods.”

Who among us has not felt that way at some time?  My own journeys through sorrow have led me straight into that thicket of despair.

Grief is a universal human experience.  Deaths, betrayals, endings—they leave their mark on us.  And if we let it, sorrow can trap us into a defensive posture towards life.  We then move through the world with caution, expecting hurt to overtake us at every corner. 

Haven’t we all felt as my friend did, at one time or another?  Who has not wondered why we give our hearts away only to have them so terribly wounded?  I’m embarrassed to tell you this, but I once said to a man who was attempting to ask me out on a first date, “Look, if it all ends with me crying on the floor, what’s the point of even starting?”  (I did subsequently apologize to the poor guy.)

But how do we find our way through sorrow, without becoming bitter?  Well, the first step is to actually grieve.  The very thing we want to avoid must be entered; the ocean of tears must be shed. 

Ours is not a culture that welcomes grief.  We’ve lost the methods and symbols: the mourning clothes, the wreath on the door, which offered the bereaved time and room to grieve.  Nowadays, in a culture fixated upon feeling good, people suffering the blows of death or illness can feel they are out of step with the world, or rushed to be “fine” once again. 

Some sorrows have historically not been allowed public expression.  The losses of abortion, or relationships which had to be kept secret due to societal disapproval, or the terrors of abuse—even today some of these remain hidden from view, buried in solitary hearts. 

And there are subtler losses too, more difficult to express: the loss of our youth, the loss of faith in a person, a religion, a government, the loss of a cherished ideal. 

These sorrows are all around us, every day.  But we don’t know how to speak together of our anguish.  As we avoid our collective grief, its capacity to bear us harm grows.  Robert Bly wrote that modern men’s trouble in life is due to the harboring of residual grief.  Others have written about the scars that war leaves—on families and society, when veterans must bear their suffering in stoic silence.  And when we avoid sorrow, cynicism and malaise grow; and we become people who live only by half, afraid of life’s depths.

What might the world look like if each of us fully traveled grief’s path?  What gifts could anguish offer us?  I’ll tell you what heartbreak has given me.

Nearly twenty years ago, I found myself immersed in a grief so profound, I could not imagine it carried any gifts.  In fact, if someone had suggested that there was anything good about my sorrow, as I have just done here with you, I might have wanted to slap them. 

It was the summer between my freshman and sophomore years in college, when life dealt several blows at once.  My parents had finally ended their bitter marriage, and their anger at one another spread like poison around my siblings and me.  Then my first serious relationship ended, and the arguments and tears exhausted me. 

But the most difficult blow came when my beloved maternal grandmother, whom we called Gogo, fell sick with pancreatic cancer and was given a prognosis of only a few months.  I had leaned on Grandma Gogo throughout the terrible, toxic years of my parents’ marriage.  She was stout of heart and sometimes stern, but her constant presence and love had sustained me, and the knowledge that she would soon die was unbearable. 

Gogo declined rapidly, and just as classes began that fall, she finally succumbed to the cancer.  I was not with her when she died; I was asleep in my dorm room.  And when my mother called at 5 a.m. to give me the news, I thought my heart would come clean out of my chest.  How could she be dead?  How could I live without her?

I was certain that the world had been wrenched on its axis.  Surely everyone else had felt this shift of gravity!  How could people drive their cars, mow their lawns, eat their dinners? 

I wept and wept, and as the poem said, I wondered how the ocean still held water.  I lay on the floor and thought I would die.  In fact, I sometimes wished to die, not in the suicidal sense, but in that weariness of sorrow.  Each time I woke my first thought would be: Ugh, not another day. 

But the days kept coming, as they do.  And signs of my loss were everywhere: her handwriting on the back of an old photo.  Gifts she had given me.  The most painful reminder of my loss was a doll she had made, which lay on my narrow bunk.  A Raggedy Ann, with an embroidered heart that said: “Ceci, I love you.” 

Gogo had made it for me while I was still in high school, and at the time I’d been a bit ungrateful about the value of such a gift.  But I’d carried it to college with me, and held it at night after she was gone. 

There were other reminders, too. You know how it is: you see the loved one’s favorite food on a menu, or catch a glimpse of someone who looks like them, only to be bitterly disappointed when you realize it’s a stranger.

With each reminder, the urge to crawl deep inside and pull a blanket over our own souls grows greater.  Daily life just doesn’t seem possible again.  We are stunned to find that grains still ripen, still the moon increases.  It’s an affront to our grief to see life continue.  How can things ever again be normal? 

I began to grow angry in my sorrow.  I railed against God, asking over and over why my beloved grandmother was taken from me just when I needed her most.  I fell into spiritual darkness.  Surely God was a trickster, who gives with one hand and takes with the other.  Having trusted the Holy my entire life, now I was without trust, and without comfort. 

I never felt so alone as in those bleak hours.  My childhood faith failed me now, my conception of God too finite to allow room for the depths of grief.  Yet my sorrow became a catalyst for spiritual growth. 

First, I learned it was not a sin to be angry with the Divine.  As a friend once said to me, it’s okay to be mad at God—God can take it.

It’s true.  No matter your vision of the Sacred, the Holy is big enough to hold your anger when loss comes.  We do not have to be like Job, suffering silently.  If we do not express grief’s anger, it will poison us.  But if we give our anger a voice, our hearts will eventually be free of its burden. 

And I also learned that the religious journey is not simple, and that darkness is not to be feared, but embraced.  I began, ever so slowly, to recognize the fruits of the spirit that come in times of trial.

Each time sorrow comes, it offers new lessons.  Just a few years ago, I was grieving the painful loss of a cherished relationship.  This time, I was trying to hold my grief inside of me, to hide it from the world.

During those terrible days, it was difficult for me to attend church.  It wasn’t just because I was once again angry with God.  I was also afraid that the soaring music and tender words would shatter my well-put-together facade.  Yet, church called to me each Sunday morning.  Finally, I made a test run. My closest friend was singing in an evening concert of her church’s choir, and I decided to attend. 

I arrived late and sat alone in the dark balcony, as the music filled the church.  I was doing great, right up to the last number.  And then the choir began their finale, a tender tribute to love. 

The lines sang: “We’ll build a house, a hearth, a home.  We’ll make our garden grow.”  To me, it represented everything I’d lost.  I sat in that balcony and wept.

But as I cried, I watched my friend sing with the choir, her face shining with joy.  I knew she had suffered her own sorrows—I had been her comfort in times past.  Then, as the concert ended, I watched the minister, another friend of mine, move among the pews embracing those folks, like myself, who’d clearly been weeping. 

And something began to shift inside me.  I remembered the universality of loss.

I wasn’t suddenly cured of my sorrow—grief doesn’t work that way.  But it was a beginning.  I started to feel life’s flow around me.  And I began to recognize the pattern of care I had received over the months.  The check-in calls from friends and family.  And the sweet embraces from people who did not know one whit of my story, but must have seen the mark of sorrow on my face. 

It’s been said the only way God is made manifest in the world is through our own hands.  All the time that I had been trying to hide my grief, the Divine had been comforting me, holding me in the hands of my community.

Grief makes us need one another, and it is in those moments of vulnerability that we come to know the gentle face of the Divine.  We are not alone.  No one is alone.  We have others around us, here this morning, who also know grief’s path.  We can see its mark on each other’s faces.

In church, sorrow can be expressed and comforted.  This room is called a sanctuary—a safe place to bring our hurting hearts.  Here, the gift of community can sustain us.

Grief can also offer a keener religious vision.  Sorrow and death are signs of life’s brevity and finitude.  They can aid our discernment—clarify our purpose.  Grief presents the ultimate question of religion: Knowing we are going to die, what is the meaning of our lives? How are we to live each day? These are questions we might prefer to leave unexamined, but suffering compels us to ask them. 

And perhaps these questions are grief’s greatest gift.  Sorrow hones our capacity for joy.  Loss strengthens our ability to savor life: to relish things like marionberry pie, or a well-played baseball game; to be dazzled by sunlight on a lake’s surface; to fall madly in love once again, with a partner, or a grandchild, or a friend.   

It’s true; there is more room in a broken heart.  It’s not just a corny line in a song. Grief reminds us that we are meant to love the earth, and all her creatures: not just our lovers, or babies, but also oak trees, dragonflies, dirt.  One day, we wake to see the ocean full, and we are not betrayed, but glad. 

I believe our purpose in life is to love, and our task is to keep our hearts open.  The revered Unitarian minister A. Powell Davies once wrote, “An open heart never grows bitter.  Or if it does, it cannot remain so. […] Anguish, like ecstasy, is not forever. […It] is a door to life.” 

Let us open this door to life, together, companions on this journey.

May it be so, my friends.  Amen.

PRAYER

Holy One, who is both known and unknown, we gather each week in this sacred place, marked by joy and grief.  Help us to trust the dark, help us to enter life fully, that we might serve the good and love all creation.  Grant us courage and comfort, as we go forward through the days of our lives.  We ask this in the name of all that is sacred.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  Copyrights 2003, Cecilia Kingman Miller, Summer Minister.  All rights reserved.