There’s Joy in this Grief

‘Bereavement’ is the hideous term used to describe death or the state of mind of those who suffer because of the death of someone they love. I use it because I cannot think of any other exact word to describe death and grief in one breath. Nevertheless it smells of false consolations and the hollow smoothness of the rubber-tyred hearse.

A priest told me recently that he had found it very hard to console a young woman in her bereavement. Her husband had just died. He probably went the right way about it by sympathising without consoling. Who would have dared to try to console Our Lady when she sat below the Cross with her dead Son’s head resting on her knees? Her consolation would be the Resurrection, and that had not yet come. We may develop the bad habit of regarding deep grief as a sickness, when it is in fact the proper response to death.

Our Lord grieved for Lazarus, though He knew better than we that death would take His friend to the Father’s arms. And He brought Lazarus back to life, not only as a proof beforehand of His power over death, but also simply because He loved Lazarus and shared the grief of the sisters of the dead man.

There is, however, a pagan grief and a Christian grief. The first is hopeless and the second hopeful. I remember standing in the bedroom of a house beside the dead body of an old woman whom I loved. I had just helped to page 70 lay the body out. And the presence of the holy and terrible Messenger filled my soul with coldness. There was no evil present; I knew that. But this did not make it easier to bear that absence of all natural consolation, when every article that belonged to the dead person seemed charged with sorrow. It was as if I had only to raise my eyes to see the faces of the innumerable dead shining like crystalline flowers in the snowfields of Heaven.

Death always seems cold to the living. It teaches us that our God is no mere kitchen idol but the true and terrible Lord of the living and the dead, whose love is a consuming fire. In a sense the one who does not dread death at all is either already wholly sanctified or else an ignorant child.

While I stood in that bedroom I heard a native bird singing in a tree near the house. And its song symbolised perfectly the voice of the receiving angels and the voice of the liberated soul of the old woman whom I loved. I could not reach her. My own time would come to enter the darkness of separation from all created things.

But she could reach me, because love is transformed but not obliterated by death. Her death was her gift to me. And when I carried her body on a stretcher down the track to the undertaker’s van, I knew in spite of the freezing presence of the Messenger that I was carrying the dead Body of Our Lord. The old woman whom I loved was not a Catholic. That made no difference.

Death is not the only separation. Mercifully we are asked to accept a number of small deaths before the Messenger arrives. I say mercifully, because these minor separations – a woman going into hospital to bear a child, a friend leaving for another country, somebody eighteen years old getting a long sentence in jail, even the desertion of a man by a woman or a woman by a man – these things, different for each of us, are the means by which God mercifully plucks out the roots of our attachments so that when death comes we will fall asleep without spiritual clinging to what cannot by its nature be permanent. The torment of death is to be separated from what one desires to keep. If the desire is absent there is no torment, even if the physical pains are vehement.

We Catholics speak often of the avoidance of evil but little of the care we should take to avoid inordinate attachment which is itself the root of sin. Why cannot we live happily in a world designed for our happiness? Most of all, I think, because we hate poverty; because we are not prepared to ‘die’ before the Messenger arrives – yet if we were willing thus to ‘die’, we would find our lives loaded with the fruits of the Resurrection.

No; we want money; we want approval; we want cigarettes and coffee; we want sex; we want good reviews of our books, if we are writers. And none of this is sinful. But it means that unconsciously we regard Christ the Deliverer as Christ the Robber, who will take our comfort away from us.

This is not the case. He takes away our toys in order to give us the whole universe. He takes away our idols to give us Himself. In Him death is the page 71 door to life, not only when the Messenger arrives, loaded with invisible gifts, but here and now, while we still inhabit our earthly tabernacles.

One hears again and again in the Gospels that note of Divine frustration – ‘My children, I want to offer you the whole world, and you cannot see it. I want to embrace you, and you think I am your enemy.’

Truly there is a dread deep in our souls as we take that first faltering step in His footprints. But the first flicker of a new flame begins to mount in our hearts. We, who thought we could never be free, are being freed. We, who feared we would have to be sad for ever, have begun to be joyful. We, who loved comfort, now dread comfort more than death because it might stand between us and our Beloved. Another grove of deathless cedars has been planted in Lebanon.

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