grief

grief can be hard to express

I think that’s something we’d all easily agree to. The pain can be so deep, it’s hard to put into words. It can be so blinding, it’s hard to take in anyone else’s words. And part of the difficulty is how we think people might judge our words if we can actually get them out.

I’ve been studying a Psalm of grief, a Psalm of lament, Psalm 88, all this past week in preparation to preach it to my church family at Grace tomorrow morning. It’s a Psalm that Hebrew scholar John Godingay has called “A Cry from the Grave.”

As I have studied and read, I came across this quote from C.S. Lewis,

No one ever told me grief felt so like fear.
I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning, I keep swallowing.

At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me.
I find it hard to take in what anyone says.

I was struck by that last line. Let’s all remember it the next time we’re ministering to someone in grief, in pain.

And if you have that chance, remember this prayer below, what many have called the saddest in all the Psalter.
You could refer to it to give someone in pain, in grief, words they can speak to their Father, who is in heaven.

PSALM 88  (a translation by J. Goldingay)
A song. A composition. The Qorahites’. The leader’s. On “Pipe” [a tune?]. For affliction. An instruction. Heman the Ezrahite’s.

1  Yahweh, my God who delivers,
by day I have cried out, by night before you.
2  May my plea come to your attention;
bend your ear to my shout.
3  Because my whole person is full of trouble;
my life has arrived at Sheol.
4  I have come to count with the people who go down to the Pit,
I have become like a man without strength,
5  an outcast among the dead,
like people slaughtered, lying in the grave,
of whom you have been mindful no more,
when they are cut off from your hand.

6  You have put me in the deepest Pit,
in dark places, in the depths.
7  Upon me your fury has pressed down;
with all your breakers you have afflicted me.
8  You have distanced my acquaintances from me,
made me a great abomination to them.
I am confined so that I cannot go out,
9  my eye has become dim through affliction.

I have called you, Yahweh, each day,
I have stretched out my hands to you.
10  Do you work a wonder for the dead,
do ghosts rise to confess you?
11  Is your commitment announced in the grave,
your truthfulness in Abaddon?
12  Is your wondrous act made known in the darkness,
your faithfulness in the land of forgetting?

13  But I, Yahweh, I have cried to you for help,
in the morning my plea meets you.
14  Yahweh, why do you reject me,
hide your face from me?
15  I am afflicted, dying since youth;
I have borne your terrors, I despair.
16  Your acts of fury have overwhelmed me,
your acts of terror have destroyed me.
17  They are around me like water all day long,
they have surrounded me altogether.
18  You have distanced friend and neighbor from me,
my acquaintances—darkness.