All Souls': Grief like fear

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Lamentations 3:17-26, 31-33; 1Peter 1:3-9; John 6:37-40

C.S. Lewis likened grief to fear. Not that we’re afraid – But that grief hangs over us, like suspense; It’s a cloud; a pre-occupation; It drains the world of colour; It’s the dementor standing behind you.

The thing he says that’s most striking in his famous little book on grief, though, is that: ‘You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you’ (20-21).

Grief, then, both hides and reveals the truth. On the one hand, from the start, we’ve lost any sense of objectivity. Death unlocks all manner of hidden forces within us,  and the loss of love is like the foundations of a tower being stolen in the night. The bricks come loose. The turret wobbles.

But like the sea washing over a beach, what remains, through and after grief, has greater substance than the pretty ideas and lifestyle choices we accumulate in the good times. It is truth proven through fire, (to thoroughly mix metaphors).

So he dismisses the claim that faith is consolation.Faith doesn’t make us miss someone less; Feel less of an injustice; Feel less loss; Faith may well become the focus of our anger, our bargaining, our tears; But it won’t make the loss less. Rather, grief sifts our theology, our ethics, all our ideas: If our idea of God cannot cope with death, it’s not real. It is washed away, burnt off with other impurities.

Equally, our own suffering, highlights our lack of compassion for others: ‘If I had really cared, as I thought I did, about the sorrows of the world, I should not have been so overwhelmed when my own sorrows came’ (33). We’re never as empathetic as we’d like to believe.

But the test involved in grief is not about God, it’s not exactly about our faith; It’s about our idea of God and how robust that is. ‘God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality.  He knew it already.  It was I who didn’t’ (45).

Once, in a previous church, a child got confused, pointing at me and saying “it’s God!” This God confused with priests and parents, is formed in Sunday School. The foundations of faith laid in simple stories and songs and prayers –  a sense of a father, an authority. This god is usually destroyed by adolescent angst and disappointment. But even as adults there are idols, false gods, that must be smashed along the way. Grief is the heaviest, but most effective tool in the theology shed.

All Souls’ is one of the most important moments in the Christian calendar. Not because it makes us think about heaven. Christianity is vague on heaven. There is little to help us. Some pictures. An assurance that there is more and it will be different.

But no answer to the frequently asked question: “Where is John?” As Lewis puts it with acid humour: ‘kind people have said to me ‘she is with God.’ In one sense that is most certain. She is, like God, incomprehensible and unimaginable (22).

But as he also reminds us, if our beloved is no more, then they never were. If what seemed a person was just a collection of atoms, then loosely held together, now apart; then they were actually just the appearance of a person; and our love hormones and enzymes. And I do not believe that. I believe in a thing called love.

The faith we bring here tonight, in the vulnerability of loss that is undiminished, in the memory of our most difficult days, in suffering, in thanksgiving, in reverence, in memory, is our actual faith. Buttressed, as it is, by fear and anger and pain and sorrow.

Grief is the voice of lamentation: My soul is bereft of peace; I have forgotten what happiness is; Gone is my glory, and all that I had hoped for from the Lord.’  My soul continually thinks of it and is bowed down within me.

AND YET.
AND YET.

This I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning;  great is your faithfulness.

This is not consolation. It doesn’t bring my beloved back. If anything, it seems to say: take your eyes off your beloved and return them to God, the author and creator of all.

And yet: The line CS Lewis finishes his little book with is in Italian:

Poi si tornò all’ eterna fontana.
Then she turned to the eternal source.

It’s a line from Dante’s Paradiso –  Where Dante’s dearly departed Beatrice, who has been his guide through heaven,  Finally turns away from him to God, as he finishes his ascent to divinity. This act for Dante’s lost love and CS Lewis’ lost wife, reminds us that our love after death is more than a love between two. Our love points us now to God.

St John’s epistle has told us that God is love and those who live in love live in God and God lives in them. Unfortunately, we’re usually so fixed on our idea of God as a big white guy (cishet) that we miss the central point of faith that God is revealed as love itself.  When we’re most consciously and presently in the act of love, in all its vulnerability and suffering, we’re closest to God. So grief, which is intransitive love; Love in separation – Is the anguish of Good Friday that God promises to heal.

There’s even a moment in this service, which anticipates this. It’s not Faure’s ‘in Paradisum’, which with its church-bell-like tinkling conveys a sense of distance of the souls in paradise. But the grand opening of Faure’s Sanctus, is, I think, his attempt to bring the saints and angels; the living and departed, together before the throne of God – in communion. Communion is what we long for. With the living, with the dead, with God. Musically and liturgically, it’s the effort of this service to bring us together in the eucharist, the thanksgiving, the remembrance of his broken body, which is also ours.

Grief is at the heart of our faith. Grief is love in separation. Grief is our separation from God and one another. The narrative of Christianity is one which passes from grief to joy From Good Friday to Easter Sunday. If we can keep that love alive with hope.

We are not there yet. We are still lighting candles in hope and remembrance. We are sharing bread and wine in faith and remembrance. And we are gathered together on this side and on a further shore, in love and remembrance, fulfilling the last wish of one who embodied the love and grief of God: Do this in remembrance of me.