Rev Ingrid Brown ‘Making Space for Grief’ Sunday Feb 5th

gilakas’la / čɛčɛ haθɛč,

I respectfully acknowledge that I live, work, play, and pray within the traditional territory of the K’ómoks Nation

“Making Space for Grief”

A Selection of Psalms

From Psalm 13
“How long, O Lord? Will you forget me for ever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
How long must I bear pain in my soul,
and have sorrow in my heart all day long?
How long will my enemies
keep beating me down?
Please listen, Oh God,
and answer my prayers.
Make my eyes sparkle again,
or else I will fall
into the sleep of death.”

From Psalm 55
“Oh that I had wings like a dove; then I would fly away and rest!  I would fly far away to the quiet of the wilderness.  How quickly I would escape – far from this wild storm of hatred.” Psalm 55:6

From Psalm 6:
“Have pity on me and heal
my feeble body.
My bones tremble with fear,
and I am sick at heart
How long will it be?…
…I am worn out from sobbing.  All night I flood my bed with weeping, drenching it with my tears.  My vision is blurred by grief; my eyes are worn out.”

“You keep track of all my sorrows.  You have collected all my tears in your bottle.  You have recorded each one in your book.” Psalm 56:8

(We had a short sermon followed by a longer community conversation time.)

Today is about grief, yes – though I want to explore more about where we can actually bring the messiness that is grief.  And how we move through it.

Where is it ok to just not be ok? To feel grief, sorrow, lament? Work is typically not that place, and there isn’t much room in school for it.  On the bar stool, tears falling into our lager might be ok but is likely not the best choice.

At its best, the church can be that place of community where all the feelings that make us human can exist and be expressed, and held in a compassionate space of generous love.

I shared with you earlier some selections from the Psalms – These ancient words that exist for Jews and Christians and Muslims are foundational to our collective relationship to God as well as our self understand.  They give us guidance and yes, permission for how to engage with the Divine and how to process our human experience.

When we read words that are 3000 years old, that have been read and shared and sung and spoken across the globe in who knows how many languages, words that say “I am sick at heart…I am worn out from sobbing.  All night I flood my bed with weeping, drenching it with my tears.  My vision is blurred by grief; my eyes are worn out.” we can know that it is not only safe but also part of how we lean into tradition and wisdom well when we express ourselves with God in community this way.

Remember, back in the day, folks couldn’t read or write, these were psalms that were sung as songs when people were gathered together just like this.  It wasn’t until much later that we had Torahs and Bibles and Qurans in our homes and the ability to pour over them as individuals.

Grief was never meant as a private affair.  It has always been a community event.  Not that all of us are grieving at the same time – sometimes we are.  But that temple, church, synagogue, is the place where we can holler, and cry and be held in our lament at the way things are, in our suffering over what should be but is not.

But somewhere along the line – likely as a nation, as we found our way into single family homes with a fence and a yard in the suburbs with cars, as we more clearly defined mine and yours over ours, as we worked hard to make the outsides look as shiny as we thought they should be – thanks June Cleaver and Annie Camden and Shirley Partridge. Things, regular human things like anguish and grief became something you did in private not public.  An individual venture not a commons experience.

So we have this historical example of spiritual community as the place where our grief and lament and sorrow can be freely expressed.  Where together we are invited to hold space for one anothers real-ness. So how do we do that?

How do we make this place that place of community where all the feelings that make us human can exist and be expressed, and held in a compassionate space of generous love?  Where we, like the psalmist, can get up here and say, “My bones tremble, and I am sick at heart” without fear.

What are the key ingredients to that kind of community?  Let’s talk about it, let’s open up the conversation and wonder and dream about how we might make this place a place where grief is welcomed and honoured.

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