Opinion: My Growing Theology of Grief…

I have a relative who sends inspiration and prayers to a group of folks every day. I’m humbled and honored to be included in these as many times they have helped me get out of bed or have something positive and loving in my spirit before I attempt rest.

Today, the image sent said “Holy Saturday…In silence we await.” I paused a bit longer than usual.

Much of my church experience, the resurrection season has focused on Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday. In my protestant Christian upbringing, these have been the days we gather, preach, discuss, and celebrate the most. The journey to and through crucifixion and the celebration of a risen Savior. But what about Holy Saturday? Or as I have tended to refer to it, Somber Saturday.

I say it often in many spaces and have preached about it, even recently. I often do not think we give enough time to sit and acknowledge lament and grief.

There are three days between the crucifixion and the resurrection of our Savior. The silence and grief during those days had to be palpable. Yet, we do not often make space and gather to acknowledge those three days the same way we do Good Friday and resurrection Sunday.

As I sit here counting the days and hours until my cousin’s funeral, the silent moments have been palpable. I do not quite know what to do or how to do it, and I’m stuck in the in-between tension of his untimely and tragic death and his burial. The difference is, my cousin will not be resurrected. Not in body and not in the way my family and I truly desire for his presence to be felt. There are no three days to wait for a miracle. There has not been a three-day waiting period after any other loss in my life. And over the last year, as my family and I have experienced loss after loss after loss, this silence after each death, the tension between death and burial, and the silence again thereafter have all been palpable.

It is not easy to grieve. To sit in silence. And definitely not when you have grown up repeatedly hearing phrases to rush you from weeping at night to joy in the morning.

What would it look like to give space to our grief? To ourselves and to others. What would it look like to acknowledge not just the three days between crucifixion and resurrection, but our own natural sentiments regarding the losses in our lives? The tension that lives between faith and suffering is a tension I have not experienced frequent enough teachings and guidance through. While we can’t resurrect our loved ones gone before us, eventually we must resurrect ourselves from the continuous grief felt in the absence of their physical self. Not because grief is containable, but because life and our faith often require us to move through it while a society tells us to get over it.

Let me pause here and reiterate my sentiments.

Grief is not a seven-step process that you go through, and then it is done. Sometimes it looks like laughing through the pain. Sometimes it looks like praying on tear-stained pillows. Sometimes it looks like yelling and screaming and wailing until you cannot wail anymore. Sometimes it looks like all of the things and more, and sometimes in the span of an hour or a day. Because anger, sadness, bitterness, doubt, interrogation, and so many things can all cohabitate the space and sentiments of what grief is. And that is okay. We have to make it more normal for this to be okay.

The grief we feel does not vanish, and I truly do not believe it is something to be extinguished or something to just “get over” after an unnamed period of time. After my maternal grandmother passed in 2017, I really began to interrogate my theology of grief. I thought it was a passing phase, that as I came to grips with the loss of her and my uncle in the span of a few months, I would “get over it.” Nine years later, I still have moments of anger and bitterness and sadness with these losses and so much more. I now know I am just finding my own way to turn these sentiments into something productive and fill my spirit rather than pushing them down. Because after all, “The Body Keeps The Score,” right?

We do not discuss our risen savior only during resurrection season. The remembrance of crucifixion, burial, and sacrifice is a constant reminder of the sacrifices our savior has made and continues to make for us. In Christian discipleship, when we give and take communion, our liturgy often contains words like “do this in remembrance of me.” I have seen these words etched into wooden communion tables for most of my life. It is intended to be a transformative remembrance. One that honors and remembers the sacrifice of our Savior’s crucifixion, burial, and the miracle of resurrection. Shall we not allow this same transformative power to apply to the losses of our lives?

Grief is difficult, and there’s no one way to feel and move through it. I have been holding fast to something my therapist said last year when I was in the midst of grieving multiple losses.

“Give the day what you have and no more. If you wake up and you have 70%, then give the day that and be done. If you have 0% or 5%, then it sounds like that day gets none of you. And that’s okay.”

I did not really have a goal of sharing this when I first started writing. I just needed to get it out with friends and then decided to share with others. Not to impose my ever-growing theology of trauma and grief, but rather as an invitation. I want to encourage us all to acknowledge and sit with Holy or Somber Saturday a bit differently. This is an invitation to, as I preached in a sermon four years ago, “Sit With Me.” Sit with me as I imagine a different kind of grieving process where we truly acknowledge that it is okay to not be okay. Not just about loss of loved ones and friends, but about anything. I do not want false “joy in the morning” if I cannot accept the “weeping at night.” What does our Creator have for us in that tension? What transformation can be gleaned from sitting there with our Savior? I really do not know. But I am grateful for a Creator who is big enough and gracious enough to sit with me in the tension of my faith and my suffering.

May your Holy Saturday and every day beyond be blessed as we continue to seek transformation by the Spirit.

Asé and Amen.