The Vocation of Grief

THE following pages owe their title to a conversation engaged in almost five years ago with one of the professors of the Union Theological Seminary. They owe their being to a feeling that much of the literature concerned with the fact of grief is largely meaningless, just as the verbal expression of grief either has become merely conventional or has lost that element of insight which conditions true sympathy. They come to rest, as they take their rise, in the soil of experience.

I

God has a way of preparing the human soul for the initial shock of grief. He induces, together with the impact of grief, a temporary numbness of mind, in order that human judgment may be held in suspense until a clear perspective of life again becomes possible. In fact, one is quite conscious of everything else save what has actually happened. This is one of the merciful provisions of God. He limits, for the moment, the range of human comprehension. Just as Nature provides that it shall take time for one to become aware of the loss of a limb, so God means that it shall take time for the mind to discover the full implications of an amputated life.

Very often irreparable harm is done by well-meaning men and women, who interfere with God in this most critical moment of all his delicate contacts with the human soul. Sometimes, this interruption takes the form of an ingenious attempt to explain the situation. Despite the kindliness of intention, the effect upon the mind of the bereaved person is akin to the effect upon a blind man of telling him that, by the mere closing of the eyes, one may understand just what it means to be bereft of sight. Sometimes, there accompanies the explanation an impulsive laying-on of the hands. Again, however well-meaning the touch or the caress may be, the effect upon the sensibilities of the sorrowing is, for all the world, as if one should set about healing a fresh wound by a localized process of massage. At other times, there is an attempt at consolation in the vain repetition of certain pious phrases that are about as full of solace as is an axiom in geometry. Texts of scripture are rudely lifted out of their context, and quoted with great unction. Sorrow is hailed as one of God’s choicest punitive measures which He visits upon the human soul. Or there is oftentimes loose talk about the privilege of bearing life’s crosses, as if God were a kind of celestial huckster of roods, and no life was complete without one.

Such utterances generally bespeak either personal inexperience of the fact of bereavement, or a purely official connection with grief. They are recorded, not with any desire to make light of some of the customary ministrations of well-meaning comforters, but only to make it clear that all such expressions of sympathy are impotent, not so much because the form in which they are cast is abjectly conventional, as because the occasion of their utterance is so ill-chosen. It is the hour when, at all costs, God must be unhindered in his remedial contact with the life, shocked by the impact of grief. God must be free to prepare the way for his own self-vindication, over against the inevitable moment of complete awakening wherein the human soul cries, ‘clinging Heaven by the hems,’ ‘O God, what is this You have done to me?’

Fraught with immeasurable significance to the human soul as is this moment of disillusionment, it is of greater consequence still to God. Upon his answer to that query, and its reception or rejection, hangs something of his very life. Small wonder, then, in view of all this, that we had best be at great pains so to comport ourselves in speech and in action that by our silence strongly maintained, by our presence unoppressively near, by the anticipation of immediate needs before they are spoken, by the disposal of obvious details before they are become anxieties, we may make it easier for the fresh-broken heart of man and the oft-bruised heart of God to approach the crucial moment of expostulation and reply.

When the bereaved soul, in the first stark moment of complete disillusionment cries out to God, ‘What is this You have done to me? ’ God makes invariable reply: ‘What I do thou knowest not now, but thou shalt know hereafter.’ God would not, even if He could, get out of earshot when this passionate query is raised from out the fresh-broken heart of man. Rather than attempt to evade the suggestion of responsibility implied in this cry, God is forever coming forward, as it were, to assume it. But in his proffered acceptance of responsibility for the blow that has fallen, God makes one request of the human soul. God asks for time in which to make the whole situation clear. We may flatter ourselves by thinking that we have some conception of the element of time, some idea of its value and importance. But a day is a day with us, while with God ‘one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.’ So that, when God asks us for time in which to make things plain, He is asking us to believe with Him, that the part of existence which we can see and touch and experience here and now is but a slender time-point, in comparison with the vast totality of life.

It is here that there open before the grief-stricken soul two possible lines of action. God has been charged with being in some way responsible for the fact of bereavement. God has accepted the charge, with the single proviso that time be given Him in which to account for the full implications of his responsibility. Now, either God’s request for time is rejected, and grief becomes a bitter rebellion of the soul against God, or God’s boon is granted, and grief becomes a vocation, wherein the soul, ‘with painful steps and slow,’ follows on, to know just what it is that has happened, and why. In the fullness of time, knowledge that is human in its partiality will come to be knowledge that is godlike in its entirety. Upon the premise that God be taken at his word, when He declares, ‘What I do thou knowest not now, but thou shalt know hereafter,’ whereby the fact of grief becomes not a rebellion but a vocation, the pages that follow are founded. They venture to suggest in brief some of the practical and positive steps by which the stricken soul may move, if not swiftly, at least surely, toward that day wherein shall be clearly manifest the deep and hidden ways of God.

II

The religion of Jesus Christ offers to its adherents no cheap and easy solvent of the fact of grief. Rather, there is a sense in which a genuine faith in God enhances the poignancy of sorrow and suffering. To the person whose life never held any brief for God, or who thinks to have politely or impolitely bowed God out of his universe, the fact of grief, while it may induce an acute sensation of individual loss, presents no insoluble moral difficulties. Such an one can simply say: ‘This is just what I have anticipated. There is no such being as a Father-God, who really loves and cares infinitely for all human kind. There is no such thing as an Omnipotent and Omniscient Mind, that has the power to compass a world-view and to consummate a world-plan. Here is proof final and positive.’

The fact of grief should be welcomed in some quarters as a perfect vindication of a God-less estimate of life. It should give some people the chance to say with genuine fervor, ‘I told you so.’ To the person who has become content with an emaciated conception of God and thinks of God as a ‘good fellow,’ possessed of fine intentions and trying honestly enough to make things better, but having on the whole a pretty hard time of it, the fact of grief, while it may occasion momentary suffering and sorrow, offers no baffling mental perplexities. Such an one can honestly say: ‘Here is an instance when God was either not strong enough to contend successfully in the unequal struggle of life, or else He made a serious misjudgment. Nature, after all, is supremely indifferent, and her ways are ever retributive in their character. God tried hard, but somehow lost out.’

The fact of grief might well be hailed by some people as evidence of their primary contention that, while God in the dawn-mists of Time fashioned the universe, and devised its mechanism, in these latter days He has allowed it to get out of hand.

But, to the man or woman who has come to see in the person and work of Jesus Christ the full manifestation of the person and work of God, who has accepted Jesus’ characterization of God as a Father, caring infinitely for every soul of his own fashioning, dealing differently with his different children, and yet with all in love — to such an one the fact of grief, with its consequent suffering and pain, presents what appears at first sight to be a hopelessly insoluble problem. Between the spirit of the prayer wherein Our Lord enjoins us to address God as ‘Our Father’; between the ascription contained in such a hymn as ‘Love divine, all love excelling’; between the quiet confidence and peace of the Twenty-third Psalm, and the impact of the fact of grief, there seems to have opened a vast gulf of moral and mental embarrassments. There is nothing to be gained by seeking to minimize this situation, or by trying to evade its reality. For it is in the inevitable reality and hardness of the fact of grief that an initial foothold of hope is to be discovered in the abyss of grief.

There is a provision in life whereby bodily exhaustion seems in some way to create the capacity for sustained physical endurance. It is this that men experience who go to explore the poles of the earth and to scale its highest peaks. It is this that makes tired armies to win battles, and teams apparently beaten to emerge from contests victorious, and men and women, hard pressed in the strife of life, to

How to account for this provision in life is impossible, save on the score of the spirit of man momentarily burning through the bodily shell of man, and pressing its flaming point in irresistible contact against the material exigencies of life, so that nothing is so welcome as the hard. This is just what may happen to anyone who, in the dread impact of grief, refuses to minimize the harshness of the blow, or to evade its reality, either by affecting a pallid piety that would substitute feelings for facts, or by striking some bold attitude of fatalism. The soul that enters upon the midnight of sorrow, fully aware of its hardness and clad with the spirit of him who said of old, ‘I will not let thee go, except thou bless me,’ will be sure to discover, with the inevitable daydawn, that the arms that gripped him about were not those of some gaunt spectre of despair, but the everlasting arms of God.

Quite the first step, then, in the vocation of grief, is to realize its hardness. In the very moment of this recognition there are sure to be released in the human soul powers of endurance that are unsuspected.

So the poet tells us, but it is a fair question whether there be many who hold with him. If so be, there is little indication of the fact in human life. Jesus had his wilderness experience oft repeated in nights of vigil upon lonely uplands. St. Paul had his sojourn in Arabia, an experience reinduced, we may be sure, in hours of studied withdrawal from the rush and press of missionary labors. But it cannot be said of many people, as of Francis Thompson, that ‘he made of silence his familiar.’ For few have sedulously cultivated those resources of mind and spirit that make solitude endurable, or have trained themselves to keep silence before God; to feast the inner eye of the heart upon Him; and to bend the inner ear of the soul in the secret places of the Most High. Without in any way discounting the beneficent mechanisms which have come to make the vast world a neighborhood, or making light of the gregarious instincts that are in a fair way to make the world a fellowship; without having in mind an ascetic withdrawal from life, or the tolerance of a morbid introspection of soul, it may be greatly affirmed that there is an instinctive need in every human life for that solitude which is heightened by the Presence of God, for that silence which is broken by voices not of this world.

The vocation of grief, beginning with a sense of irretrievable loss, seems all too likely to spend itself in an impasse of loneliness. Desolation of body, together with a consequent isolation of soul, appear to empty the spirit of all recuperative power. No further evidence than this is needed to demonstrate the hardness of grief. But we have maintained already that in this very fact of its hardness there are to be found unguessed energies for enduring grief. The bereaved soul makes, for itself, this momentous discovery, when it comes to realize that solitude, far from being an aching void in which settlement is obligatory upon the soul, is rather a voluntary and ‘fiery brooding’ of the spirit upon the facts of life. It is the discovery of the range of

and within whose vision the totality of life is encompassed, and seen to be all of one piece, a perfect whole, with none of the rough edges that present themselves to our immediate touch. It is this sight that fills the apparent emptiness of life with a wonderful sense of ‘presence.’ Rooms that one dreaded to enter are found to be populous with life. Roads that one held to be forever solitary are come to echo with the familiar beat of soundless feet. Objects poignantly suggestive of tender associations past are become symbols of holier trysts to be. In due time, the human heart comes to welcome solitude as the immediate way of escape from the world of sense to that eternal city of God, whose spires break many a dull sky-line of life.

III

It is time to deal, at this point, with another foothold by which one rises from the abyss of grief to unsuspected levels of endurance. One cannot phrase the matter better than in the words of Richard Roberts, wherein he asserts ‘that the greater and the better part of life is out of sight.’

To declare that ‘the greater part of life is out of sight’ is to state a truth by which we consciously or unconsciously live every day of our lives. We cannot see the air from which our lives draw sustenance with every breath. We cannot explain the nature of the agency that more and more is serving to turn the wheels of industry and commerce. Nor can we wholly chart the content of the subconscious self, which we know to play so genuine a part in the totality of life. Nor can we press with our hands the motives or the ideas by which we know ourselves to be ever led. Invisible are the highways that lead from out the centre of our thought, thronged with the soundless traffic of the mind. Beyond a peradventure, our daily experience is forever bearing witness to the fact that the greater part of life is out of sight.

To assert that the better as well as the greater part of life is out of sight, is to reinforce the practical considerations already touched upon with a moral conviction of surpassing grandeur. To the authority of daily experience there is added the postulate of a timeless faith, that life, so far from being a blind alley of existence, is a vast channel of development, great with the possibility of endless growth and progress. In this faith a man studiously refuses to allow any other than God to have the final word in his universe. Though his ears be vexed by a jargon of imperious queries, though his vision be harrowed by the wraiths of fleeting doubts, though it be an eternity in coming, man waits for the ‘everlasting yea’ of God, which shall satisfy his every query with its answer, and confirm his faith in understanding.

The conviction that ‘the greater and the better part of life is out of sight’ is a strength-bearing thought, and the more quickly it is planted in the hard soil of bereavement, the richer is the increase of comfort assured. It comes to the grief-stricken soul with a refreshing suggestion of space, in which movement is forever possible without the jar and pain of the material contacts that irritate. It carries with it a sense of utter timelessness, which breaks the inexorable fall of the days, with a fine disregard for the temporal limitations of life. Best of all, it opens upon the soul a new world, and that not remote, but close at hand; not to be gained at some distant day, but to be enjoyed here and now; not to be spoken of with awesome tones, but to be lived in with immediate enthusiasm and ardor. From so simple a beginning as the faithful reiteration of the thought that ‘the greater and the better part of life is out of sight,’ there may come the growing assurance that there is in God the completion of all that is fragmentary and broken in life, and that our human life is but a troubled moment in the calm hour of God.

Of ‘this greater and better part of life’ which ‘is out of sight,’ no mortal has written with more feeling than the poet Francis Thompson: —

And Jesus, living as He did in two worlds at the same time, was able to say of the one, from the vantage ground of the other, ‘Let not your heart be troubled. . . . In my Father’s house are many mansions. . . . I go to prepare a place for you. . . . I will come again and receive you unto myself, that where I am, there ye may be also.’

Ever the ‘valley of the shadow of death’ opens upon the land of the spirit, where it is given to the griefstricken soul to mark out here and now its little claim, and to go apart at will to improve its tenure. When at last the day of God breaks, and the shadows of the present hour are forever dissipated, and the old forms of life are become eternally new, it is the broken heart which shall find itself strangely rich in the treasures that are hid in heaven, and possessing already that ‘inheritance incorruptible and undefiled, and that fadeth not away.’

IV

In the office appointed for the burial of the dead, there occur the words: ‘The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.’ It does not in the least impair the power and splendor of such a profession of faith on the part of Job, to observe that, for some people, its introduction at the initial shock of grief is sometimes calculated to intensify rather than to allay the pain of grief. There will always be those who find, in the converse of the words of Job, that source of solace and strength whereby grief is held to be not a chastisement to be endured, but a vocation to be mastered. Therefore it may be well in this instance to place the primary emphasis, not upon that aspect of the fact of grief which seems to impoverish the human heart, but rather upon that element of compensation which will not be denied expression in this as in so many of life’s occasions.

There is to be found in the life of John Bright an imperishable example of this quality of positive enrichment that tints the gloom of life with a kind of glory. He says: —

In the year 1841 I was at Leamington, and spent several months there. It was near the middle of September there fell upon me one of the heaviest blows that can visit any man. I found myself left there with none living of my house but a motherless child. Mr. Cobden called upon me the day after that event so terrible to me, and so prostrating. He said after some conversation, ‘Don’t allow this grief, great as it is, to weigh you down too much: there are at this moment, in thousands of homes in this country, wives and children who are dying of hunger. If you will come along with me, we will never rest till we have got rid of the Corn Law.’

Blessed indeed is the soul which, in the first passage with grief, has a Cobden to point out the way of immediate self-identification with some form of distress, of instant self-investment in the infinite sorrow of the race. There are those hinterlands of human experience, into which entrance is impossible save to those who have come into possession of the talisman of personal sorrow and grief. There are those exigencies in human affairs, the understanding of which calls, not so much for the wisdom of the scholar or the persuasion of the preacher, as for the comforting presence of someone who is known to be of the true fane and fellowship of bereavement. There are ever in life those events that are inscrutable mysteries, and remain so to all save the initiate, who have been given to look upon death and live.

This fact it is which warrants the conviction that there is about so devastating a fact as grief an acquisitive quality, whereby the soul makes a certain holy gain out of what seems, at first sight, irreparable loss. So it is that, far from being impoverished by the incidence of personal sorrow, there is that indubitable sense in which the grief-stricken soul is made rich in a new and positive capacity to assuage with its own the world’s sufferings. For the first time, it may be, a life finds itself, by reason of its own need, to be in possession of a power to discover for others where flow the hidden streams of solace. It may be that a life, erstwhile obscure and isolated, suddenly finds itself to be sought out by an increasing tide of human kind, who seek a sympathy that is compounded of experience and insight. Gradually life comes to be lived, not so much as a chalice of pain to be drained to the last bitter dregs, but as a vast measure of opportunity, to be filled with those healing ingredients that shall staunch the many and bitter wounds of the world, and make the burdens of human sorrow less grievous to be borne.

To think of grief as a vocation to be learned is to admit of grief as a teacher to be trusted. There is a blending here of the impersonal with the personal, which is altogether salutary. Not the least of the positive aids that may accrue to the human soul from grief undertaken as a vocation, and from bereavement regarded as a tutor, is the realization that grief is able to bring to fruitage, in a moment, as it were, many a rare virtue, into the cultivating of which under other auspices there may go years of unrequited effort.

There is no more favorable ground for the growing of humility than the soil of grief. Herein are latent properties, which somehow seem to lend themselves to the production of a state of mind that is remarkably free from the stain of self-sufficiency and the dross of pride. It may be by reason of the soul’s voluntary acceptance of God’s proffered assumption of responsibility for the incidence of grief, and a consequent willingness to give God time in which to make his inscrutable mysteries plain. Or, it may be that the glimpse of that greater and better part of life which is out of sight makes the soul supremely indifferent to the lure of all worldly preferments, and to love only in response to the invisible leadings of the spirit. Certain it is, however, that there may come to pass within a life, in the compass of a single hour, and under the tutelage of grief, such a breaking-up of the hard crust of self as may induce the culture of true humility, which years of conscious effort cannot avail to produce.

There is a rare sense of human fellowship that springs full-grown from the soil of grief. The very universality of sorrow seems to promote a corresponding community of understanding. The bitterly divisive power of such elements in life as nationality and creed and color cannot forever front the mighty fellowship of grief. They who are become initiates in the vocation of bereavement find themselves bound together in a comradeship that will admit of no surface distinctions of race or rank. Companions in a groat venture, they move onward toward a common hope, which is not revealed to other eyes, ever attended by tolerance and good-will. The mothers of the world, whom war has made childless; the lovers of the race, who await no earthly consummation of their love; the children of all lands, who must needs age into a happy childhood, keep step together to the eternal music of God’s promises, which only they who sorrow may hear. This is that mighty crusade of compassion, which shall yet possess the citadel of human life for Christ and his love, and raise there the Cross of his eternal mercy.

The soul that grieves is ever the soul in flight. Like a bird startled from its covert by some rude alarm, the soul seems to take wing at the first shock of grief. It is this restless fugitive quality inherent in grief that oftentimes bears hardest upon the sensitive soul. Yet even here the bane is not without its blessing. For so it becomes possible for the storm-driven heart to envisage all life in terms of its own motion and flight, in the pursuit of goals rather than in the preservation of bounds and limits. Thus the very blow that desolates the soul is become as well the touch of deliverance upon the mind and the spirit, whereby it finds itself at once consorting with all souls of all ages who have worshiped a living God, who have cherished a growing religion, and who have dared to keep their minds mobile and open, in the face of driftings of doubt.

It is not to be gathered that grief is any fleckless Eden, where virtues grow in untrammeled loveliness. There are coarse growths and rank which issue from its soil, and which require a single eye for their detection and a firm hand for their uprooting. Yet, for all this, should there be overlooked those tender blooms of meekness and love and aspiration, which grow most readily in the soil of bereavement?

Jesus Christ is often spoken of as ‘a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.’ This does not mean that He was devoid of the capacity to enjoy life, or that He was lacking in that resiliency of spirit which makes human life tolerable. He was no pallid ascetic, who drooped and languished under the lash of untoward circumstances. Rather, from childhood, Jesus looked at life clear-eyed, and it took shape, before his eyes, as a vocation to be learned and mastered. In such a spirit, and with an enthusiasm that was contagious, He set Himself about his Father’s business. Sorrow and grief were his; but instead of being mastered by these twain, He laid them under the tribute of his belief in life as a divine calling, whereby the soul might grow to infinite stature and grace.

There are three events in Jesus’ earthly ministry which, though separated in point of time, are bound together by a single moral purpose. The Wilderness experience, with which his public ministry opened, the Cross upon which it was held by some to have ended, and the Open Tomb, whereby his life was completely and forever vindicated — these three facts in Jesus’ life are large with moral and spiritual import. There was the initial struggle for self-possession; and herein is to be seen the real meaning of the temptation experience. One cannot give away what one does not possess, and the fact of the Cross, with its self-denial, is inexplicable apart from Jesus’ selfpossession, sternly won and steadily maintained. By the same token, without self-denial, there can come to pass no real self-fulfillment. ‘Except a kernel of wheat fall into the ground, it abideth by itself alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.’ The Cross made inevitable the Open Tomb, with its eternal guaranty to all men, not merely of immortality, but of a complete self-expression, which is, after all, that for which men hunger and thirst.

It is with the assurance, which is ours, through Jesus Christ, that life can not and will not stop short of a complete fulfillment of itself in God, that we may conclude these pages. Once more we find ourselves seeking refuge and strength in the thought that ‘the greater and the better part of life is out of sight.’ For it is this conviction that has within its possession the power to break down all barriers of time and space, to merge the future and the present in a blessed sense of timelessness, and to fill every mood and posture of the soul with a holy suggestion of Presence. When the heart that is weighed down by its grief once sees for itself where gleam the spires of that eternal city, not made with hands, then is possible a new sense of direction to life. While many of the old landmarks may have been swept away by the sudden incursion of sorrow, there shines, more than ever lucent in the moral firmament, the star-promise of God. It is bright with the assurance that the exile march of human life, with all its weariness of body and heaviness of heart, shall not long be halted or ever concluded in the desert of despair and futility, but must move with irresistible purpose to the consummation of all that is partial, to the completion of all that is fragmentary, to the revelation of all that is hid, in Him from whom all life is come forth, and to Whom all life is set to return.