Our Pain’s Meeting

Over the past three years I have been in a process of learning, unlearning, and trying again. Emergence has given me a language for this wrestling match, a divine lexicon for the struggle. In light of my journey, I want to explore what faith can look like when we find ourselves caught between belief and skepticism; hope and despair; human questions and divine humor. 

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Just over a year ago I lost someone very close to me. The loss was sudden, and devastating, and I regularly doubt whether my life will ever be as good as it was when they were in it. I’m told this persistent ache is called “grief,” and like every traumatic experience that resists comprehension or satisfaction, grief is a lengthy process one must move through to eventually heal.

Writing about this process has proved difficult because grief reveals the poverty of words — even poetry falls short. If grief were a color, it might be dark grey, or shit brown, or one of those other colors the style gurus on TV caution me against. Maybe grief is aquamayucky – a term a friend came up with to describe the unique shade of mud that coagulates on the bottom of a painter’s mixing tray. You would think the blend of red, blue, pink, yellow, and purple would produce an equally vibrant color. But no. It sucks.

Death sucks. Grief sucks. Aquamayucky sucks.

Without concrete words for grief, it’s easier to avoid writing about this season of lament altogether. But mostly, I avoid writing about it because it’s painful to remember. Remembering hurts, hurts like death itself. Still, I remember all the time — especially in church.

Last Sunday, I found myself sitting in a chapel service remembering — remembering and hurting and feeling shit brown—when the communion liturgy began.

“The Lord be with you!”
We respond in kind:
“And also with you!”

From its simple beginning, the Great Thanksgiving launches into a grandiloquent mélange of Trinitarian theology and church doctrine. And then suddenly it switches to a scandalously earthy account of Jesus’ life:

“On the night in which he gave himself up for us, our Lord Jesus took bread, gave thanks to you, broke the bread, gave it to his disciples, and said: ‘Take, eat; this is my body which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’”

Jesus asks the disciples to remember his death whenever they come together for a shared meal. And in case they were fuzzy on the details, he connects his suffering to the physical elements of broken bread and bitter wine. Surely the disciples did not need or want a reminder of their friend’s death. In light of my own experience of loss, Jesus’ words seem callous and unnecessary.

As the weight of this morbid request began to sink in, it occurred to me that maybe Jesus knew what he was doing. Given the choice, most of us would rather numb or deny our pain than actually sit with it. But denying and repressing are the instruments of captivity, captivity to fear, depression, victimization, and every kind of injustice. Jesus saves his friends from the bondage of numbing isolation by instituting a tradition of communal remembrance. At its heart, the communion ritual is more than just an element of our worship – it’s a wake.

For centuries, communities have held wakes to grieve the death of a loved one. At a wake mourners share stories, sing songs, make toasts, and offer words of hope. Wakes help us remember life as it is, with its celebration and mourning, its laughter and tears. The stories and the jokes and the drinks dig up the hurt and reveal the possibility of healing. When we raise our glasses to toast the one we’ve lost, we honor their life and the suffering they endured. And somehow, something about our remembering makes them truly present to us.

As the church gathers to tell stories about the life and death of Jesus, sing familiar songs, break bread, and raise a chalice to toast his memory, my pain and your pain meet. At our pain’s meeting Christ becomes  present among us, and in this I find great hope.