Christianity & Grief
Hi Friends!
Brit Enriquez
Brit Enriquez is passionate about serving God locally at her home in Banff Alberta, and around the world . She has been involved in various ministries over the last 10 years in Canada, Italy, and Turkey. Currently, she is the Children’s Director at St. George-in-the-Pines Anglican Church. She is the wife of Rev. Seth Enriquez, and mother of a beautiful daughter.
Five years ago, I was driving to a prayer meeting one morning when the unthinkable happened. My first husband was driving, our two-month-old daughter was in the backseat, and I was on my phone, on Facebook, when we drove over a small incline and suddenly there was a deer in the middle of the road. My husband swerved the car to avoid the deer but on a gravel road this caused the car to fishtail, go off the road, and flip over. When the car stopped spinning and rolling my husband was dead. I was a 23-year-old widow, and single mother. My whole life changed in an instant, and I came to the intimate awareness that so many other Christians have, that life with God does not mean that you will not suffer.
Suffering has been a fascinating topic for me for a long time. A few years before the accident, I had been in a church that was influenced by the Prosperity Gospel movement, a type of Christianity that says that God grants health and wealth to those with the right kind of faith, a Christian movement lead by pastors like Joel Osteen on one end and Steven Furtick on the other (“name it and claim it” and other phrases). I am not sure that I was ever directly taught that God wouldn’t let bad things happen to me if I was following Him, but that was definitely an undercurrent in the Christian circles I spent time in in my early adult years. I started to wonder about this aspect of my faith when I saw Christian friends of mine suffering from depression, and when I went through a period of depression in my early twenties. Were we bad Christians? Was our depression caused by our lack of faith? Was suffering always the fault of the sufferer? I couldn’t accept that. And so, I started looking for answers.
As Christians we live in a liminal space. Christ has been victorious on the cross; he has defeated death and sin. And yet we also live in the same broken world that Christ came to save. We live in the moment between the Cross and Christ’s coming again. Living in this in-between space has been something that I wrestling with. Did God allow bad things to happen to those who love Him? How was that possible? The answer came to me in the form of Jesus. Jesus who is the Son of God, IS God, Jesus who perfectly loved the Father and his neighbor, suffered. He was betrayed, misunderstood, abandoned, beaten, and murdered. In Christ’s suffering I found a savior who could relate to my suffering, and who would never abandon me in the darkness.
After my first husband died, Christians who I had believed were my closest friends did not reach out again after the funeral. Why did that happen? This question has plagued me for a long time. At first, I thought that it was situational, and made excuses for my friends. But as the weeks turned into years, I had to confront the truth. Most of my Christian friends were not coming to support me.
It was only later that I began to connect the influence of the Prosperity Gospel in the evangelical church to my friend’s inability to sit with my suffering. With the idea that if you have faith in God, he will bless you, comes the inevitable conclusion that if you are not blessed, you are not faithful. Now I want to be clear. I do not think that my friends blamed me for my grief and suffering. Not at all. What I think is that this idea has left the church woefully unprepared to teach their members how to support people who are suffering. My friends weren’t absent because they thought I was unfaithful; they were absent because they had never been taught how to care for the widow and orphan in their midst. In other words, they were unequipped to deal with suffering, to sit with those who grieve, to mourn with those to mourn, to love like Jesus.
But I was not abandoned. God was with me in my grieving, and I felt his love through family, and through a core group of my non-Christian friends. Through them I learned how to support someone who is going through a time of suffering. My non-Christian friends showed up, again and again, in the texts they sent, in the care packages they organized, and in sitting with me in my pain. They were such a gift to me, and I am so thankful that they loved me well.
A painful realization that came to me, and that we must all confront, is that it’s the church that has largely dropped the ball. I no longer blame the friends from my church communities that didn’t show up for me in my suffering. I think that if the role had been reversed, I wouldn’t have shown up either. How can you support someone when you haven’t been taught how? The western church has failed my generation in preparing us for death and suffering, and as a result we are completely unable to respond to, uncomfortable with and unprepared for death. It is so sad that our faith, our belief in God’s goodness, has gotten in the way of us being able to relate to people who are suffering. God is good, don’t get me wrong. He is good AND, as so many of us know, suffering is a reality in our broken world.
So, what do we do? A start would be to honestly reflect as a Christian community the realities of death. We can’t buy into cultural norms of pretending that death can be ignored by simply living into consumerism and lifestyles of celebrity and comfort. We must have conversations in our church communities about the reality of suffering and how God’s love is found in the midst of hurt and grief. And an essential part is to get our hands dirty. As Christians we are called to be with the poor, the suffering, the grieving, and the outcast. When we are with them, then, what do we do? Well the main reason that I am writing this post is to offer a bit of a guideline for what to do when you find yourself in the position to support someone who is suffering. It is probably going to be uncomfortable, so hopefully the following list of Don’ts and Dos will help you to feel a bit less powerless. I encourage you to save this list and come back to it when you need it.
Here we go.
DON’T DOs
Do not offer “consolations of religion”. For example, don’t say “at least they are in heaven” or “God has a plan”. These things might be helpful for the grieving person to say to themselves, or to you, but do not say them to the grieving person. They are not comforting. I know you want to look on the bright side, but sometimes we need to sit in the sadness and discomfort. As Ecclesiastes says, “there is a time to mourn”, so let them be sad without needing to make it better. Sit in the sadness with them.
Do not say “let me know if…”. This is one of the least helpful things you could say. It makes you feel better but puts the responsibility on the grieving person to let you know how they can be supported, and this can be paralyzing and overwhelming.
Do not expect them to reach out. Thinking that you are giving them space and that they will reach out when they are ready, again, puts the responsibility of the grieving person. They are carrying so much emotional weight that having to reach out for friends can be too overwhelming.
DOs
Be practical. Bring food over. Instead of asking IF you can, ask if they have food restrictions and which day would be best to drop it off. Tell them that you are going to the grocery store and ask what they need. If they have kids ask which day would be best for you to babysit for a few hours. Don’t just offer your help, offer it in ways that allow them to make less decisions and be specific about how you are going to help.
Let go of expectations. If they haven’t responded to a text you sent, send another. Do not feel hurt if they don’t respond. Sometimes seeing that someone has thought of you can be immensely helpful, and just because they don’t have the energy to respond doesn’t mean it isn’t appreciated. Keep inviting them to things, and initiating conversations without expectation that they will respond positively. One day they will be more stable and will start taking you up on your offers.
Be present. The only thing worse than being surrounded by people unaffected by your tragedy is being alone. Though it might be uncomfortable for you to know what to say to your suffering friend, just making an effort and being present with them can be such a help. In A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis writes this shortly after his wife died, “I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.”.
The biggest encouragement I can give any Christian who is struggling to support someone through suffering is, you are not alone. God is with you. You might feel awkward and uncomfortable and I totally understand that. You are being the hands and feet of Christ, and God has allowed you to participate in an essential ministry. Through your sacrifice of your comfort and time, God will bless you and the person you are ministering to. Please don’t let the fear of saying the wrong thing keep you silent. Saying anything is better than saying nothing. God will be with you and Jesus says that, “whatever you do to the least of these brothers and sisters, you did to me.” Matthew 25:40 (NIV). God bless you, now and always.