Dispatch Faith: The Grace of Grief, by Hannah Anderson (Author, Life Under the Sun: The Unexpectedly Good News of Ecclesiastes (2023)):
Three weeks ago, I took a spiritual retreat to Texas Hill Country. It was my first time in the area, and I was captivated by the natural environment: I’d wash the dusty heat of the day away with a swim in a river of turquoise. At night, the sky filled with stars and the moon had never looked quite so spherical. After a season of upheaval in my personal life, I felt a sense of safety, as if I were somehow being held by earth and sky.
Five days after I left, torrents fell from that same sky and swept away sleeping children. …
It’s natural to seek answers when tragedy strikes. We want to make sense of things and ensure that it never happens again. But even if natural, moving too quickly to debate and analysis can inflict further pain on those already suffering. Even more counterintuitively, it can also stunt our own moral development: Doing so makes it easier to bypass the harder work of grieving and the wisdom it holds for us. …
[W]hen it comes to grief, Americans are at a particular disadvantage. Our unique cultural story (by no means absent of suffering) has also been shaped by an overarching forward momentum, a positivity that says the future is bright and just within our grasp. The United States is, after all, the land of promise: the land where folks can hope to build a quiet, stable life, where hard work is rewarded, where children are nourished and can grow up in safety so that their children never know want. That’s the dream anyway, and it’s created a distinct kind of spirituality.
Duke Divinity School professor Kate Bowler has studied the phenomenon of this unique spirituality (sometimes named “prosperity gospel”) and how it emerges from and reinforces American culture. Her popular-level work, Everything Happens for a Reason, explores how our expectation of blessing leads us to respond to, or in many cases, gloss over grief. Lacking the epistemological or existential resources to sit with suffering, we end up offering each other platitudes (like “thoughts and prayers”). Or we talk about everything around a tragedy except the grief we feel. We debate, report, castigate and blame—anything to avoid the one thing we need to do above all else: grieve. …
A particular theory of grief suggests it doesn’t actually fade over time, but that we have the capacity to grow so that our particular losses take up less space in our lives and are easier to bear. As already alluded to, research shows that grieving is deeply connected to learning and change; it is the process of imagining a new way of being in the world, not despite our loss, but because of it. In this way, grieving itself can become the catalyst that expands the register of our imaginative possibility, and learning to grieve may be the path to a new kind of American Dream—one forged not in stoic overcoming or scapegoating, but through the common human experience of suffering. …
This was the approach of the late Nikki Giovanni, a poet whose own futuristic vision rested on the necessity of grieving. Unlike the transhuman vision of folks like Peter Thiel or Elon Musk, who attempt to bypass suffering, Giovanni believed that the path to the future demanded we learn to grieve as a means of preserving our humanity. In “Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea (We’re Going to Mars),” Giovanni takes up the question of space exploration, likening it to similarly historic ventures. But then she makes a surprising move: She suggests that those best suited to lead us in the future are those who have suffered in the past—not because it’s their turn to lead, but because they have learned something through grieving that the rest of us haven’t yet. …
I myself can’t help but wonder how developing our collective capacity to grieve—our ability to hear that song of lament sung in the belly of the ship and be changed by it—might alter our current political fragmentation, preserve our humanity, and offer us a path forward. Singing that song will not take away our grief, but it might allow us to take the next natural step in grieving toward hope and a new way of being Americans together. Hope will not come from avoiding hard things or blaming others; it will come in naming our grief and walking toward it. It will come from acknowledging our own weakness and limitations, being honest about the fact that none of us can withstand the rushing waters that remake our lives. And we will need leaders who, instead of taking advantage of our unresolved grief, can guide us by their steady, stable presence—leaders who have faced the darkness and developed the moral imagination to guide us to the other side. So that when we take that next step in, with, and through grief, we will discover that the canyon must also have an ascent—and that what goes down must come up.
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