This week my big sister Sandra died. She had been struggling with various illnesses for the last several years. She had a fall just before Thanksgiving and, her body unable to recover, she succumbed quickly to the underlying illnesses. I began grieving on hearing, just before Christmas, that she was unlikely to recover. Initial shock is an unpleasant experience: inability to breathe normally, pain, tears, not being able to speak, wanting to run with nowhere to run to. Thankfully, the initial shock passes. It does return, with each shockwave less than the first. I have also felt numbness and inability to settle. I have observed my own grief and Like Lewis, I have wondered where G*d and faith are in all of this.
Grief is unpleasant. My grief this week is not so much about Sandra but about myself. San was a person of faith. She believed her life would continue in heaven, that she would be with mum and dad. Whether her belief was well-founded or misplaced, she is now beyond death, certainly beyond the pain of her last illnesses; returned to the ancestors, individual consciousness melded with universal consciousness, the spirit returned to G*d who gave it. All those who die have overcome death. Death can do no more to them. Such understandings comfort and help us make sense of the literally senseless. So, my grief is not for Sandra. It seems to be for myself, my own loss, for the loss suffered by Sandra's closest people. I do not think we ever "get over" the loss of a loved one; but we do in time move to acceptance. Life carries on. The intensity passes. The human spirit is extraordinarily resilient.
The question of G*d remains. Personally, I no longer find useful the notion of God as an all-powerful person in control of the universe; able to do anything but often refusing to do so for inscrutable reasons. The problem of theodicy arises from anthropomorphism—making G*d like a human, speaking of G*d in human terms; "the big guy in the sky." When we do so, such a G*d easily becomes tyrannical. If G*d is not not the cause of suffering and pain, then God is at least indifferent to it. Lewis describes such a G*d as a "vivisectionist" and a "torturer." The Theologians have tried to rescue this view of G*d in numerous creative ways. I have read many of them. Like C.S. Lewis in A Grief Observed I am unconvinced by their arguments.
Life on planet earth is a lottery. Some are big winners. Many seem to break even. Too many are losers. We live in an indifferent universe. In a world where pain and suffering are common experiences, randomly dished out without rhyme or reason, notions of G*d all powerful and G*d all loving are incompatible.
Personally, I have rejected the notion of G*d all-powerful and rest instead in G*d all-loving. Where we find love, there we find G*d. As grief is closely related to love, in grief there we find G*d; not as the cause of pain, not as the solution to pain but in loving relationships: the lover, the beloved and the love between them.
In the ancient Chinese story, the sage Zhuangzi's wife dies. His friend Huizu visits and finds the sage sitting on the floor, pounding a drum and singing. Huizu is astonished and asks why Zhuangzi is not grieving. Zhuangzi replies that when his wife first died of course he grieved like everyone else. But as he reflected on her life he realized that grieving had only a limited place. He saw that anyone's life is like the seasons, spring, summer, fall and winter. We all pass through those seasons and death will come to us all. Grieve the loss but celebrate the life. The story suggests that celebration is more important than grieving.
My big sister Sandra hated funerals. She said they were too morbid, too sad, too down. She wanted to celebrate life. The celebration of life is the celebration of love. And in celebrating love we celebrate G*d for G*d is love. The mystery of love is the mystery of G*D.
Be kind to yourself and to those you love today,
+Ab. Andy