The Mechanics of Grief

'I don't think I've ever grieved anyone', Cylene told me. She discovered a few days ago that her friend Harry has been dead a month and she knew nothing about it. Harry was 31, a young man buffeted by the world and conflicted against his family. Cylene doesn't know whether it was suicide, a drug overdose, an accident of another kind, or whatever. Notwithstanding her own problems, which have seen her hospitalised twice in the last few months, Cylene 'dreamed I could do good things with him, show him something good in life. You know how it is with abused people, sometimes they can never accept anything good for themselves, they attract more abuse'. She could be talking about herself. Now she has only her self-devised magical rituals to try and hold on to Harry's memory, to offer him to - what?

We talked through how a Christian might view the loss of Harry. If you are a conservative evangelical, there is nothing much to say: Harry didn't give himself to Jesus in life, and so must face the penalty of his sins. You might come up with the bogus line I have heard from Christians of that stamp, that in the last moments of life an unbeliever might have accepted the Lord and thus be welcomed into his everlasting mansions. It's hardly likely, is it. Poor Harry never gave the Lord a second thought through his short and unhappy life so what on earth would propel him in that direction as it drew to a close? Was he ever in a place where that would have been likely? Where is the justice in substitutionary atonement for him?

At funeral services I tell people that what is good about us is not lost: how can it be, when God has made it? But how does that relate to our individual identity, salted with purgatorial fire and cleansed of everything unholy, if that process leaves little enough of us behind? I'm not confident what the answer is. Souls like Harry test all our doctrines. 

So I am reading again. The Matthean Beatitudes are as far as I've got; they help a little. I'd never been struck before how little they have to do with faith. Until the last clause, where Jesus tells the crowd that they are blessed if they are reviled for the sake of his name, the statements all proclaim that those who suffer in this earthly life will be rewarded: and that's it. There's no sense in the text that they have to have any kind of faith before that happens: rather that poverty, mourning, and hungering and thirsting after righteousness predisposes a soul in God's direction, that they generate faith. This is God's 'option for the poor': even for those as poor in spirit as Harry, maybe.