Grief is a strange phenomenon. It turns everything on its head, dismantles our semblance of control, threatens the way we have come to understand the world, and exposes us to our own fragility. It also reveals within the human condition a profound misunderstanding.
This summer, I watched my mother die. It was not sudden. I saw cancer take her bit by bit. Death consumed her. In that moment, I figured I would be far happier dying right beside her than facing the empty desert of a life where she was not. Since I was seemingly incapable of being with her and experiencing our relationship in life, then maybe I could find her in death.
When Moses finishes laying out God’s law to the Israelites in Deuteronomy chapter 30, he sets before them the choice of life and death. “Therefore, choose life that you and your offspring may live.” The answer seems simple enough, but we as humans are far more eager to choose death. In fact, the whole story of the Scriptures could be framed as God urging His people to choose life, displaying His love for them. But, again and again, they choose death.
From the very beginning, man was meant to live in communion with God, who is Himself the source of life. And ultimately the purpose of man was and still is participation in the divine life, to “become partakers in the divine nature.” But what is this nature? Firstly, it is imperative to remember that it is an impenetrable mystery, that we “see through a glass darkly.” The inner life of God is inexpressible and incomprehensible and can only truly be spoken of apophatically, that is, by negation. He is the One who dwells in “light unapproachable”.
Thus, there exists a paradox. We approach with humility the One who cannot be approached and seek to know the One of whom nothing can be known, because He is, in the words of one of the last great Byzantine theologians, Gregory Palamas, “not only beyond knowledge, but also beyond unknowing.” We are like Moses at Sinai, who “drew near to the great darkness where God was,” and like the righteous Job, whose only consolation in His own grief was when God answered Him. It was G.K. Chesterton who said, while writing on the Book of Job, that, “it is the lesson of the whole work that man is most comforted by paradoxes.” And one of the greatest paradoxes is this: if man looks upon the face of God, he shall surely die, yet it is the dead man who looks upon the face of God and lives.
God has revealed Himself, and in that revelation, He has accommodated these impenetrable and mysterious divine truths to our human understanding. He has revealed Himself as a person, Jesus Christ, and Christ has shown us the Father and sent us the Spirit. “God is love” and that love is a unity of persons, a triadic life. The modern Greek philosopher, Christos Yannaras, in his book “Elements of Faith”, posits as follows:
“[God] exists, since he freely wills to exist, and this willing is actualized as love, as a triadic communion. Therefore, God is love.”
In other words, God’s existence is completely free, not bound even by his essence or nature. God is first and foremost not an essence subsisting of three persons, but a person who realizes His existence as love by communicating His existence to another: His only-begotten Son, and through His Son, to His Spirit. And it is that relationship of love between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, that love that constitutes a shared existence, that love that reveals true life as communion, that we as humans are invited into. Christ never acts alone. Every action is an action of all three persons of the Trinity. The Spirit brings the presence of Christ and Christ reveals His Father. “He who has seen me has seen the Father.”
Man, made in the image of God, is made for communion. Adam needs Eve, and when the two “become one flesh,” they reflect and, in the deepest sense (with Christ in their midst) even participate in the life of God. Man was made to see the source of life outside of Himself, to exist, as Yannaras puts it, “only by loving and being loved” which has as its source a rightly oriented relationship with God.
If man’s purpose is communion with God, who is Life itself, original sin then, is man’s rejection of life as communion, as the gift of a free relationship with God, in exchange for life drawn from and sustained by one’s own existence, one’s own nature. When the serpent tempted Eve, he told her that if she ate of the fruit, she would be like God, that is, she would realize within herself the source of her own existence. Eve accepted this, and then Adam as well, and so follows the whole of human history wherein we seek to perpetuate our own existences and ultimately, because we have been cut off from the source of life, God Himself, we die.
Now the lie of grief is this: because death has taken our loved one from us, has supposedly severed that relationship, then the only way for communion to be restored, the only way for me to be with my mother whom I love, is for me also to die. This lie has within it a kernel of truth. Death represents the dissolution of life within ourselves, of the ability to perpetuate our own existence. This is in fact the way of the cross. To deny ourselves and follow Christ, to carry our own cross, is to deny the dead life of self-subsistence. We must die, then, if we are to be resurrected, to share in the life of the Risen Lord who causes our human nature to share in the life of God, a life drawn not inward from ourselves, but outward from God Himself. Of that life – that life completely free from every limitation – there can be no end.. It indeed allows us to see our loved ones again, face to face, as true persons. “He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will find it.”
The lie of grief remains a lie because it gives death the victory. It says that this life must come to an end. It holds on to the belief that our loved ones are dead, and therefore located in some other place (but not here) and that we must die in order to “cross over,” so to say.
In my own Christian tradition – Orthodox Christianity – we exclaim during the early morning hours of Pascha, when the world waits in darkness before the dawn, that “Christ is risen and not one dead remains in the tomb! Christ is risen and life reigns!” If this is true, then death cannot have the victory in anything. Death has been defeated. Christ has destroyed death “by death and upon those in the tombs He has granted life.” Because of Christ, the answer to being with our loved ones cannot possibly be found in death. Rather, it is found in life. “Choose life.” That is, choose life as loving communion. That love, flowing from God Himself, is far stronger than death, and indeed in Christ has torn down the dividing wall, transforming death itself into an opportunity to realize life as communion. Our deceased loved ones do not live in and of themselves. They live ultimately in Christ, and through Christ and by His resurrection, with each of us who love them.
Of what their life looks like, its details and expressions, whether embodied or not, I do not pretend to know. I do know that when I call upon the name of Jesus, when I gaze upon His radiant face, that in some way all those people whom I love, including my dear mother, are there, dead to the dead world yet alive in the living God. And if I abide in Christ, in the life that He offers me now, then, in the words of Fr. Alexander Schmemann, “my very death will be an act of communion with Life.”
In the waiting, we who still tread this “vale of sorrow” have a glorious opportunity to bring our deceased loved ones into our lives, to carry their presence with us. We can invite them to act with us, to share in even the littlest things of our life, not in a merely sentimental way, but in a true acknowledgment that their presence as unique and unrepeatable persons remains. And we can look forward in hope to the final resurrection where we can experience not some other life, but this life, radically transformed into what it was always meant to be – a communion of persons wholly united in love, free from all demand, necessity, and separation.
