Unitarian Society of New Haven
Rev. Megan Lloyd Joiner
February 21, 2018
Reading: “The Cure” by Albert Huffstickler
We think we get over things….
We don’t get over things.
Or say, we get over the measles
But not a broken heart.
We need to make that distinction.
The things that become a part of our experience
Never become less a part of our experience.
How can I say it?
The way to get over a life is to die.
Short of that, you move with it.
Let the pain be the pain
not in the hope that it will vanish
But in the faith that it will fit in.
And be then not any less pain but true to form.
Because anything natural has an
inherent shape and will flow towards it.
And a life is as natural as a leaf.
That’s what we’re looking for:
not the end of a thing but the shape of it.
Sermon: “Resilient Hearts,” by Rev. Megan Lloyd Joiner
Seventeen.
Seventeen, I thought, and Pulse and Las Vegas and Sutherland Springs and Sandy Hook flashed before my eyes, and what came next shocked me and embarrassed me and fascinated me: “Seventeen,” I thought, “That’s not so many.”
Good Lord. To what have we become accustomed?
Seventeen lives: children and educators. Cut short. Violently ended. Gone. Families devastated. Children without parents, parents without children.
Over the past few years, we have become accustomed to mass shooting after mass shooting, the death toll rising such that my empathetic heart’s first response
could possibly be: “that’s not so many.”
Gregory Gibbson, whose son was killed in a school shooting, wrote yesterday in the New York Times:
“When gun violence becomes commodified as content by the media, we consume it rather than experience it. As a nation, we’re dead to it now. Despite our momentary hysteria, we’ve pretty much compartmentalized gun death, random mass shootings in particular. Consequently, we live in a country that seems to agree that 33,000 gun deaths a year is an acceptable price to pay for our unique, constitutionally guaranteed access to firearms.”[i]
The truth is, one is too many.
I’m not going to stand here and preach to you, the proverbial (and literal) choir,
about the need for common sense gun legislation. You have called your elected officials. You have signed petitions. You have attended rallies and organized forums and sought to educate yourselves and others. You live 30 miles from Newtown, for God’s sake.
And you will work; we will work to keep ourselves alive to the reality of gun violence, and we will continue our efforts to wake others up as well and make the changes this nation so desperately needs.
This morning I want to talk about what was the original topic for today’s service and which is all too apropos after the events of this past week: grief.
I want to talk about how we live in a perpetual state of grief over the loss of so many lives. Over the state of our nation and our world. How we live with grief in our own lives due to our own losses: lost loved ones, lost dreams, lost opportunities and possibilities. How do we make grief a part of the shape of our lives without having it overtake us, have us shut down completely or shut it out, an unwanted guest?
The poet Rumi encourages us to look at being human as a “guest house”
with every morning, a new arrival. “Welcome and entertain them all,” he says.
“Even if they are a crowd of sorrows…”[ii]
This is easier said than done. But what else is life about than opening our hearts to what comes?
~
Unitarian Universalism draws, we say, from six sources of wisdom and insight. The first being: “Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit
and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life.”[iii]
Direct experience of mystery and wonder.
Direct experience of pain and loss holds as much mystery and wonder, I think,
as that of joy and love. In fact, the two, as so many of us know, are inextricably linked.
This morning, we will explore grief from the vantage point of direct experience;
we’ll look at this link between pain and loss and joy and love; what it means to feel two feelings at the same time; we’ll seek to understand the shape of grief and how it shapes our lives.
~
Soon after Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer at age 36, he turned to his wife Lucy and said, “It’s going to be okay.” After his death, just 22 months later, Lucy reflected: “When [he] said [that], [it] didn’t mean that we could cure his illness. Instead, we learned to accept both joy and sadness at the same time, to uncover beauty and purpose both despite, and because, we are all born and we all die.”[iv]
As he was dying, Paul and Lucy decided to have a child. And when she thinks about what she will say to their daughter, Caty, as she grows, Lucy says she will tell her this: “Engaging in the full range of experience, living and dying, love and loss, is what we get to do. Being human doesn’t happen despite suffering. It happens within it.”[v]
Engaging in the full range of experience, living and dying, love and loss,
is what we get to do.
~
Friends, I tried creating this sermon without telling you the following story. But try as I might, I couldn’t do it. And so I offer you this:
It was May 2013 when I stood in a sunny kitchen in California with my husband Anthony by my side as our friends, Sam and Julie, asked us if we would be willing to be listed as next of kin for their daughter Sylvia, who was turning one. All four of us cried as we said: “Yes, we would be honored.” If anything were to happen to them, Sylvia would come to live with us. We would raise her in the Jewish faith, as was their wish. “Now,” we said, “let us never speak of this again.”
I was just a little bit pregnant then, and six months later gave birth to Arden. Six days after that, on our way home from the pediatrician, we received a call from Julie. Sam had been hit by a car while riding his bicycle to work. He had been wearing his helmet, of course, but the impact was so strong; he was in surgery.
They were operating on his brain, and the outcome was uncertain.
Later that night, we received another call, this time from a friend, someone we didn’t know. Sam was out of surgery, in a coma. Folks were flying out to say goodbye. Could we come? I looked down at the six-day old baby in my arms. I called the pediatrician to ask if we could get on a plane. She said no.
Sam lived. Anthony flew out a month later to stay with Julie and care for Sylvia
for a week. I flew out four months later to see Julie and Sylvia and Sam, still in a coma, but somewhat responsive. I was able to introduce our dear friend to baby Arden. His eyes opened wide when he saw her.
Sam died just two weeks after my visit. He was 33 years old.
At his funeral, I held a bouncing baby girl on my lap and then, afterwards, danced circles with Sylvia, who was almost two. She looks so much like her father.
People have been dying in my life since I was a little girl. But no loss has affected me the way Sam’s has over the past four years.
I have wished and hoped and prayed for things to be different, for it not to be true.
I have had to remember that it was not my husband who died, and come to terms with the guilt I feel for still having a husband.
I have had to face my fears in an unpredictable world.
It took three years, but I finally let Anthony put Arden in a bike seat. This past summer was the first time I had been on a bike since Sam’s accident. As I felt the wind on my face, and I heard Arden laughing with pure delight from her seat on her father’s bike, my heart ached and soared at the same time. Sam loved to bike with his own child. I felt so close to him and missed him all the more.
Sam’s loss has changed the shape of my life – of all of our lives.
~
Before Sam died, I had served for over a year as a chaplain resident at New York Presbyterian Hospital. Our training there focused on the duration of grief. We were told that folks who were still actively grieving six months after a loss were experiencing what is known as “complicated grief.” In the new DSM-5 psychiatric manual, this will be known as “persistent complex bereavement disorder.”[vi]
It is to be considered “when an individual’s ability to resume normal activities and responsibilities is continually disrupted beyond six months of bereavement.”[vii]
Now, I am not a psychiatrist or a mental health professional. And I know how important it can be for people to resume their normal activities after a loss. But I think, too often, we get stuck in this perspective of grief as something we move through or get over on a prescribed timeline. Six months seems to me an awfully strict criterion.
We don’t get over grief the way we get over the measles or the flu.
“We don’t get over things,” the poet says.
“Let the pain be the pain.
Not in the hope that it will vanish.
But in the faith that it will fit in.”[viii]
We do not get over things.
The shape of our lives, the shape of ourselves changes. And things fit in.
This, I know from experience, is true.
~
The Rev. Ruth MacKensie, one of the ministers at First Universalist Church in Minneapolis writes:
“We live in a grief adverse culture. A culture that cannot seem to tolerate the real dynamics of what it is to be alive and human. If we’ve experienced a death, we aren’t supposed to be sad too long. If we are mourning the loss of an opportunity or a dream, we are told to get over it and move on. If we feel horror and agony at one more death caused by gun violence or the murder of a black or brown person at a traffic stop, we are told we are overreacting. If we fall to our knees as another great ice shelf falls into the sea, we are handed some new technology to anesthetize us against the Earth’s lament and our own.”[ix]
Our consumer culture, MacKensie says, tells us that we can either “get out of feeling loss,” or “at least compress it into something nice and neat and manageable.”[x]
In her memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking Joan Didion chronicles the year after the sudden death of her husband. “Grief,” she writes, “turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death…. We expect if the death is sudden to feel shock.
We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind.
We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, [someone] who believe[s] that their husband is about to return and need his shoes.”[xi]
Our world is full of loss. We could exist in a state, as I said before, of perpetual grief. We could live inconsolable, slip into depression, lose ourselves in mourning all that has been lost. But that is no way to live.
In her book, What Abi Taught Us, New Zealander, Lucy Hone, offers us a different perspective on grief. After losing her 12-year-old daughter, her daughter’s best friend and her own friend all in a tragic car accident, Hone turned to her academic research in resilience psychology for tools to help in her and her family’s grief process.
Resilience is defined [by the American Psychological Association] as “the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy [and] threats.” “It seems to me,” Hone says, “there’s sufficient trauma and tragedy in grief to make this body of research relevant.”[xii]
Hone’s book is a guide for resilient grief. She offers coping strategies and tactics for nearly every aspect of grief, above all sharing the mantra she has used in the weeks, months and years following her daughter’s death: “Choose life, not death. Don’t lose what you have to what you have lost.”[xiii]
“Life will never be the same, now;” she says, “it will always be different, with your loss part of your new world and personal identity. But that doesn’t mean you won’t function effectively and meaningfully again, or fully embrace a life full of love and laughter, alongside plentiful memories of those who once stood beside you.” The key for Hone is taking control of the grieving process, navigating grief as best one can “without hiding from [one’s] feelings or denying the reality, or significance, of [one’s] loss.”[xiv]
As a pediatric hospital chaplain, how many times did I hear, in the face of horrific loss: “God never gives you more than you can handle…” or “Everything happens for a reason…” or “She’s in a better place…”? These phrases came out of parents’ mouths by rote. It was what they knew to say. It was what they felt was expected of them.
My job was not to take away any strategy they had for coping, but also to make space to say: “This is a lot to handle” and “Right now, it’s okay to feel whatever you are feeling” and “It’s okay to miss your baby.”
When we acknowledge the pain and the significance of a loss, we open ourselves to the full experience life has to offer, allowing us to feel it all at once – love and loss. Sorrow and joy.
Life will never be the same. For seventeen Florida families, life will never be the same. For all of us, we, too, have to let this new loss in amidst all the others, to feel the pain as much as we can bear, and let it change the shape of our lives once again.
Grief is not something we get over. Greif requires perseverance. It’s something we fold into the very fabric of our being. It makes us who we are.
In conclusion, I offer you these words by the poet David Whyte:
“Grief is a great gift.
I love the way it keeps my heart soft.
I love the way I see it in your eyes, in the eyes of all ‘I’s walking this Earth.
It is a hallmark of the unclouded Light of human-being-ness.
Please don’t tell me to get over it.”[xv]
I pray that we will never get over the loss of seventeen souls in Parkland, Florida or any of the other myriad losses we face. Let us allow our grief not to desensitize us, to make us dead. Let us instead let it change the shape of our nation as well as our individual lives. Let us follow the example of the students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school who are, in the midst of their grief, calling for action.[xvi]
May our hearts be soft, but may our voices be loud, and our determination unwavering.
[i] Gregory Gibbson, “A Message from the Club No One Wants to Join,” The New York Times, February 17, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/17/opinion/sunday/gun-laws-school-shootings.html
[ii] Rumi, The Guest House, https://mrsmindfulness.com/guest-house-poem/
[iii] https://www.uua.org/beliefs/what-we-believe/sources
[iv] Lucy Kalanithi, What Makes Life Worth Living in the Face of Death, TED Talk, November 2016, TEDMED. https://www.ted.com/talks/lucy_kalanithi_what_makes_life_worth_living_in_the_face_of_death
[v] Ibid.
[vi] M. Katherine Shear et al, Complicated Grief and Related Bereavement Issues for DSM-5. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3075805/
[vii] “Complicated Grief Disorder” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complicated_grief_disorder
[viii] Albert Huffstickler, “The Cure” (see above)
[ix] Ruth MacKensie, “Remembrance Sunday: Why is Grief Important Now” First Universalist Church, Minneapolis, MN, January 7, 2018. http://firstuniversalistchurch.org/sermon/remembrance-sunday-why-is-grief-important-now/#description-tab
[x] Ibid
[xi] Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking. New York: Vintage Books, 2005.
[xii] Lucy Hone, What Abi Taught Us. Auckland: Allen & Unwin, 2016.
[xiii] Ibid.
[xiv] Ibid.
[xv] David Whyte, Grief is a Shower of Grace, April 3, 2016. https://thisunlitlight.com/tag/david-whyte/
[xvi] https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/17/us/florida-student-emma-gonzalez-speech/index.html