(update) I originally wanted to avoid head-on polemics with M.Z.’s post On Not Grieving, however, given the development of the thread, I feel that I need to be more direct. In this post, I argue that M.Z.’s proposal for not grieving the death of Tiller ignores and obscures the meaning of grief we find in the agony of Christ. According to that standard (Christ’s) we ought to grieve for Tiller and rejoice in mystery of salvation. This odd concoction of grief and joy is rendered meaningful in the greatest commandment of love—in this case love of enemy—and its corollary: forgiveness. As Catholics, the love command is not an option to our senses nor is it a matter of retribution; we are all called to love. As St. Therese puts it, it is our vocation.
Grief is not the same thing as remorse or guilt. By this I do not mean the words generated in that sentence, or their semantic connotation (even though that is all our senses can deal with at the moment), but, instead, I refer to the very thing we try to describe using the word “grief.” What is this thing?
Grief is that intense experience of pain and suffering brought on by the effects of a tragic situation. Sometimes it can be felt as nauseating melancholy; that confused sense that something is wrong with the world. Other times it can be felt as acute, excruciating pain, even physical pain. Grief is an appropriate response to the world, we even find it in scripture: Agony.
The mystery of grief is especially present in the agony of Christ’s death. To torture or murder anyone is evil, to torture and murder God is incomprehensible.
Yet, still, Christ grieved his own death, in advance, that fateful night at the Garden of Olives. Grief is not simply what we feel and do after something tragic happens, it is not contained by the consequential limits of space-time linearity. Grief is the agony we must succumb to if we are truly alive in the world.
Surely He had to know that the sting of death would only last but a second in the timeless existence of God. Surely He had to know that the punishment was unjust. Nonetheless, He wept, begged, and even bled.
On the Cross, his agony was on grand display as a mockery of who He said He was and as an eternal sign of His love for us. For a moment, we get a glimpse at the worst possible kind of agony imaginable when the Son calls out to the Father as a bastard child. Amidst this excessive moment of rejected agony—the abandonment of God—we find something strange: we find forgiveness.
“Forgive them Father…”
From the Garden to the Cross, the agony of Christ shows us the raw meaning of grief. And this meaning is an impenetrable mystery. Yet, in the midst of this ultimate grief—the grief of God—we find that, unlike our own complex feelings of grief that so often some with heavy doses of retribution or sadness, Christ’s grief is cloaked in passionate love, pregnant with the joy of Resurrection.
The mad eros of Christ crucified ought to remind us that agony through the mysterious experience of grief is not only a proper response to sin in the economy of salvation, but more: its fruit is not hate, but forgiveness in love.
Let us forgive, love, and grieve together always. Let us rejoice.
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