My father died ten days ago on February 8th. It was his 63rd birthday. His name was Tim Mayfield.
If I’m honest, I didn’t feel much like writing this week, but sometimes deadlines are good for us. Though I apologize in advance if there is no neat bow to be tied. This is a reflection in process.
Grief is an intensely personal thing. It lives in us, that hollow space where someone belongs. It is a void, and that void has stolen most of my good words. When the feeling of that hollowness hits me, all I can seem to do is dumbly look around and say, “Oh man…” What do you say to the void?
But I know grief is not just personal. My family and friends grieve with me. Even virtual strangers who knew my father have shared in my loss. Grief binds us together. The absence weaves connection, and those connections are something each of us experiences. Grief is a universal human phenomenon attested to since the beginning of recorded history by sages, poets, and, more recently, at the Anxious Bench, by Verónica A. Gutiérrez (thank you again for that article, Verónica).
Yet, despite this universality, grief is seldom a major theme within the academic articles and historical tomes I spend my professional time reading. Does grief matter for Christian history?
Griefs Observed
It must because our stories of grief abound.
The Psalms are filled with grief. Jesus weeps for Lazarus at the tomb. Mary and other women wept at the foot of the cross. Our faith was born in grief.
Augustine devotes an entire chapter of this Confessions to describing the loss of his mother. While he held back his tears during her burial, he secreted away and brought his grief to God:
And then little by little did I bring back my former thoughts of Your handmaid, her devout conversation towards You, her holy tenderness and attentiveness towards us, which was suddenly taken away from me; and it was pleasant to me to weep in Your sight, for her and for me, concerning her and concerning myself. And I set free the tears which before I repressed, that they might flow at their will, spreading them beneath my heart; and it rested in them, for Your ears were near me — not those of man, who would have put a scornful interpretation on my weeping. But now in writing I confess it unto You, O Lord! Read it who will, and interpret how he will; and if he finds me to have sinned in weeping for my mother during so small a part of an hour — that mother who was for a while dead to my eyes, who had for many years wept for me, that I might live in Your eyes — let him not laugh at me, but rather, if he be a man of a noble charity, let him weep for my sins against You, the Father of all the brethren of Your Christ (Confessions IX.12.33).
Augustine grieved for his mother, for her love for him, for the holy tears she shed in prayer for his soul. He wept and took rest in that grief.
Grief fills the mystical tradition when women like Catherine of Sienna, Julian of Norwich, and Teresa of Ávila mourn over the sins of the world, the Church, and their own lives. Julian affirms that grief and mourning are inescapable in the Christian life, because of our sins, we shall “never stint of moaning nor of weeping nor of longing till when we see Him clearly in His Blissful Countenance” (Revelations of Divine Love LXXII). Catherine mourned and grieved over the brokenness of the church, and she lobbied popes and cardinals to do something about it. For them, grief was normative for the Christian life, the product of our brokenness, and a pointer toward hope in Christ.
I spend most of my time studying missionaries, and their stories of grief abound. This is especially true when you consider Protestant missionary women. By 1870, at least 27 memoirs of missionary women were posthumously written to commemorate the lives of women who died in the field. That is a rate of over two a year since the first Protestant female missionary was sent in 1812. As Ashley E. Moreshead, amongst others, has pointed out, these memoirs provided evangelical women with “models of female subjectivity,” prescribed patterns for women to put their revivalist and activist energies to work. Martyrs must die. Grief begets hagiography.
Within the 20th century, perhaps no story of missionary grief was better known than that of Elisabeth Elliot. With her husband Jim, she was called to Ecuador in 1952. Four years later, Jim and four companions were killed by the Huaorani people they were seeking to evangelize. Elizabeth went on to continue evangelization work with the Huaorani and cemented her husband’s legacy through her 1957 book, Through Gates of Splendor. Elizabeth went on to become an icon of evangelical femininity and the queen of purity culture, arguing that marriage was the penultimate experience of evangelical womanhood. Pregnancy, of course, was its essence.
The examples could go on. I could talk about the angelic specter of Robert Semple in the ministry of his well-known widow, Aimee Semple McPherson. I could talk about Bonhoeffer’s grief for his family and his country, about C.S. Lewis’ public excavation of loss in A Grief Observed, or about the countless losses felt by Christians around the world today. Grief abounds in Christian history.
Grief and the Meaning of History
Mourning the untimely death of his son, the philosopher and theologian Nicolas Wolterstorff reasoned that “suffering is down at the center of things, deep down where the meaning is. Suffering is the meaning of our world. For Love is the meaning. And Love suffers. The tears of God are the meaning of history.”
I think he is right about history, about its ultimate meaning… though I’m not sure I can fathom it.
I know that history, by its very nature, is the realm of the dead, that the present can only become history when it leaps over the unbreachable ditch to the past. We tell the story of what was because it will never be again. History begins in loss.
For Christians, that loss is both more and less acute. We know that those we lose in Christ are bound to us in Christ, alive with the great cloud of witnesses. But, we also know—with Wolterstorff—that “Death is demonic. We cannot live at peace with death.” Grief is unending restlessness. It is a yearning for what should not be. Julian of Norwich was right.
“The tears of God are the meaning of history.” It feels like a Zen kōan now. It is a truth inexpressible in words.
I asked a very academic-sounding question at the front of this blog post: Does grief matter for Christian history? It’s a silly question. Of course, it does.
Grief pushes and pulls us. It can propel us to greatness or to ruin. Grief has turned sinners into saints and saints into sinners. It is a primal human experience. How could it not matter to our collective stories?
It does matter; all that grief matters. But, right now, it doesn’t matter much to me. Right now, I just miss my dad. I don’t want a history of Tim Mayfield. I just want Tim Mayfield back.
And that’s the truth of it. History begins in loss, and today I am a historian outright.
“The tears of God are the meaning of history.”
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