How do you live through a season of grief? How do you cope? Where do you turn?
The pain is not going away
The doctor asked, “on a scale of one to ten, what’s your pain level?” Good question. How acute does the pain have to get before you act? Many of us have lived with so much acute denominational pain for so long that we’ve simply learned to live with it. We’ve developed a host of unhealthy coping mechanisms including avoidance, fits of rage and threats of amputation. Like a patient avoiding a very dire diagnosis, we deny the root causes and deal exclusively with surface level presenting issues. Many in our family have become exasperated with our inability to deal with truth and reality and have simply gone on with their own lives. One thing is certain, although changing the standards of ordination are viewed by some as “the” answer to the problem, Amendment 10A is not going to alleviate the pervasive pain of division in the body anymore than adding G-6.0106b has done. We cannot legislate the body back to health.
The bones are out of joint
It could be described as a cancer or as heart disease, but the analogy that seems most fitting is that the Presbyterian Church (USA) is a body out of joint. If you’ve ever dislocated a finger, a shoulder or a knee, you know the agonizing pain that results. Left uncorrected, dislocation results in deformity, dysfunction, immobility and sometimes, paralysis. In many ways, the PCUSA has become paralyzed. Notably, before doing what the friends of the paralytic desire (restoring him to physical health), Jesus deals with the underlying sin issue. The real question that paralyzes us is sin and a corporate unwillingness to submit to the revealed will of the one true God of the Scriptures and allow the Holy Spirit to genuinely conform our deformed body to the perfection of Jesus Christ. Without Him, we remain cut off from the possibility of wholeness, healing and genuine life.
The grief is real
We tend to think of grief as being related to death, but grief is produced by loss of all kinds. As Presbyterians, even if you find yourself in a healthy, growing congregation, we have collectively experienced massive loss.
The obvious losses are: the loss of millions of members, hundreds of congregations, our generational effectiveness, many national staff. But there are other less obvious losses: the loss of a sense of who we are, the loss of standing and influence in the world, the loss of dignity and civility and respect, the loss of a sense of ability and purpose, usefulness, fruitfulness and blessing. Finally, there is the loss that comes by being left and the loss exacerbated by being disabled. All this loss produces genuine grief.
This grief is being experienced across the theological spectrum. We know well its myriad manifestations and we know the process: denial, anger, projecting blame, acceptance, healing. Maybe what we need is a national effort of denominational “grief recovery” through which we could seek the life-giving, renewing, transforming power of the Great Physician to do for His body what we cannot do for ourselves: give us new life.