Thirty years ago a movie called Corrina, Corrina came out starring Whoopi Goldberg, heartthrob Ray Liotta, and a very young Tina Majorino. Set in the 1950s, it’s a story about a lot of things. But the plot centers on a little girl named Molly who stopped speaking after her mother died. Molly’s father is devastated by his wife’s death. Eventually, he has to go back to work, so he hires a nanny named Corrina. And one day, while helping to make her father’s bed, Molly finally speaks to Corrina for the first time.
“Corrina?” Molly says softly with her hand on the bed “this is where my mommy sleeps.”
“You’re right. Your mommy used to sleep here.”
“When is she coming back?” Molly asks.
Corrina takes a moment, then a deep breath, and gently tells Molly this. “You know Molly, she’s not coming home. Because when you die, the angels take you up to heaven.”
And a couple of heartbeats later, Molly says “Well, then I wanna die, too” and lies down in her mother’s spot on the bed.
Have you ever felt like that? I know I have. Some grief is so big it can make you want to just lay down and die, too.
It’s often said that grief is the price of love, that it’s proof that we’ve loved. I think that’s true. But even if that’s true, it can still become unbearable. The pain, the finality, of such huge loss can sometimes be too much to face, not just for children like Molly, but for people of any age.
Someone once asked author and pastor, Nadia Bolz Weber, how to grieve without losing your mind. She dedicated a whole blog post utterly rejecting the idea. Nadia used the metaphor of a computer system update to describe what it’s like to try to function while grieving. Why would we expect ourselves to function normally while acclimating to a new reality without the person we loved, without the long term relationship that has ended, without our recently destroyed home? Grief can make us shut down just like computers and phones have to shut down while updating. And even when we start back up again, we will probably function more slowly and some tasks will be more difficult.
People talk about grief as a weight, describe grief as a burden, as heavy, as suffering. And it is. And in our postmodern world, we have become accustomed to immediate relief from suffering. There is a pill to relieve or lessen just about every kind of pain you can think of. And while sedatives are sometimes prescribed immediately after trauma, using substances (or even work or chores) to distract ourselves from grief rarely helps lessen our pain in the long run.
Neither do the ways we’ve found to obscure the truth of death. We speak of people having “passed away” or “gone on to glory” instead of saying they died. I don’t hear often anymore, but some seek to comfort the grieving by telling us our beloved is now “in a better place.” For many, these sayings are a comfort, they are expressions of deeply-held faith. But even those of us who believe in an afterlife can feel like death has stolen our loved ones from us. And no matter how gently someone transitions from life to death, the finality of death is anything but gentle.
Religious liberals love to pat ourselves on the back for our different approach to death. We love that our memorial services focus not on a deity, not on the afterlife, but on the value and preciousness of the deceased’s life. Some of what’s become the norm in our congregations is deeply healing and meaningful. But we have our own ways of avoiding the truth of death, too.
Chief among them is our reluctance to include the body in our grieving. Muslims prepare the bodies of their loved ones and mourners attend the burial. It’s considered an act of extreme kindness to participate in preparing a body for Jewish burial and a burial service follows the funeral. Catholics bury the body and both the funeral mass and burial service include rituals that help the congregation say goodbye to their loved one’s body.
But religious liberals focus almost exclusively on the memorial service in our mourning rituals. Occasionally families will ask me to lead burial or ash scattering services, but they are usually very small gatherings. We have no congregation-wide practices to help people say goodbye to the bodies of our loved ones and friends. I have to say, this has bothered me for a long time. After all, we are not just disembodied minds; we are our bodies, too. And it is spiritually important for us to have the opportunity to say goodbye to the physical as well as the emotional, the mental, and the intellect. And I wonder if we’ve done away with body-centered rituals because when faced with a corpse, when faced with ashes, it’s nearly impossible to soften or distract ourselves from the raw truth of death.
At its heart, grief is the pain we feel when facing the truth of loss, of death, of betrayal. Often the loss is of a single person, and even that can render us speechless. But sometimes, the loss is much bigger. I’m thinking especially of all those who have lost homes and businesses, neighbors and communities, loved ones and friends in Hurricanes Helene and Milton. And I’m thinking of all those around the world whose lives have been shattered by terrorist attacks and war.
I have been pronouncing her name incorrectly, so I’ll take this opportunity to correct myself. Valerie Kaur [core] begins the second chapter of her book, See No Stranger, by recounting her experiences in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The violence of the attacks on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, combined with religious ignorance and centuries-old racism and xenophobia, unleashed a deadly wave of hate crimes against Muslim and Sikh Americans. When she learned her friends, family, and members of her Sikh faith were being assaulted and killed, she hopped in her car with her camera and sound equipment to document these events, to document the truth of history as it unfolded right after 9/11.
She traveled around the country interviewing victims and survivors of these hate crimes, and eventually came to realize that the simple act of being present, of listening to people’s stories of pain, violence, and loss was working a change inside them and inside herself. She describes coming to understand the power of grieving as a community practice. Soon, even the separation of being on opposite sides of the camera dissolved and Kaur came to understand herself not just as the recorder of the story, but as part of the story. This wasn’t violence happening to other people, it was violence happening to her community. She writes:
In our shared tears, I remembered something I had forgotten: Separateness is an illusion. The bowl breaks. We are part of one another. I became aware of a sensation inside me, an ache that exceeded language. After so many months on the road, listening to so many stories, grieving with so many people, I turned my attention to the place in me where the pain made a hole. This is what it feels like to live with an open wound, I thought.
Death, especially when it is violent, is like having a person ripped out of the fabric of our lives, and then having to learn to live with the open wound. When our bodies have an open wound, we go to others for help, for support while we’re healing. We need others when our hearts and spirits are wounded, too. Grief was never meant to be borne alone. Humanity has evolved to bear loss and trauma together, in community.
Grieving together can be a practice for revolutionary love when we find the courage to face loss and pain without trying to avoid or soften or distract ourselves from the raw truth of it. Grieving together can be a practice for revolutionary love when we stop trying to get over it, and when we rely on others to help us get through it. Or, when we lean in when we can be present to others in their grief.
After Valerie Kaur’s uncle was killed outside his convenience store because he wore a turban, her aunt traveled from her home in India to the US to attend his funeral. Hundreds of people from the wider community came, many who had been his customers over the years. Kaur interviewed her aunt about this loss, about the impact of this violence on their family. Toward the end asked if there was anything her aunt wanted the people of America to know. Kaur was ready for her aunt to be bitter, angry, upset. But this was her response:
“I had no friends or community there. But everyone gathered together. Hindu, Muslim, Christian. Everyone was crying. Sikhs weren’t the only ones who were crying. Everyone was crying.”
She wanted me to thank America for loving her. “They didn’t even know me” she said “but they cried with me.”
They loved me. They cried with me. In other words, they grieved with me, helping me bear the unbearable. And by doing this, they brought me into the healing process. People who were once strangers are now part of “us” and those people now understand the need for justice, so that no one else’s uncle is murdered out of ignorant xenophobic fear. Job’s friends had the right idea for the first seven days, just sitting in silence with him, bearing witness to his pain. It’s when they started trying to soften the raw truth of death by trying to find a logical explanation that their harm began.
I think this is the very heart of grieving for revolutionary love. Learning to face the raw truth of death, of violence, of unimaginable loss, and leaning in, not away. Learning to listen to the truth of loss that others have to tell and not trying to rationalize it. Learning to let the truth of another’s loss, another’s pain and injustice and oppression convict us. Learning to trust that our presence, our love, is enough.
I’ll end today with Kaur’s invitation to her readers:
The heart is a muscle: The more you use it, the stronger it becomes. Then the next time a black boy in your city is killed by a police officer, or a turbaned Sikh father is beaten, or a Jewish “person is stabbed, or a trans woman is murdered, or an indigenous woman goes missing, or a Muslim child is attacked, show up. Show up at the public vigils and memorials to grieve, in person. You don’t need to know people in order to grieve with them. You grieve with them in order to know them.
By grieving with people, we come to know them. And we build real solidarity, solidarity that reveals the world we want to live in – and that shows us each our own role in fighting for that world.
May it be so, and may we make it so. Amen.