Sanctuary

Here is an annoying thing about grief. Like feelings of "romance," it comes and goes when it pleases, with no warning and no consideration for place or timing. You know what I mean? You might be out in public somewhere with your love, and suddenly you are over flowing with passion for your beloved, but the time and the place is all wrong. Later on, you are home alone together, cast a look over, and - mheh - the feeling has passed. Now you just want to laze on the couch with a book, by yourself.

Grief is so much the same, but not in the good and fun way that passion has.

I'll be at church, or I'll be in bed at 11pm with a just about sleeping husband, and BAM. There it is. The sadness, the sorrow, the tears welling up ready to sob. A place and time where it is not comfortable, not considerate or not private enough for me to feel I can let go and cry. So I stifle it, choke it all back and try not to think about "things."

Later on, when I am alone in the shower, or having a heart to heart with a friend - I got nothing. I can't muster up the feelings for a good cry-fest. I want to unburden myself. It's all in there somewhere, a dull throbbing like a heart-headache. A general feeling of malaise that won't pass. A heaviness that I carry around somewhere at the back of my emotional refrigerator as it slowly goes bad.

I long to weep. I step into the shower and think hard about all the things bothering me or making me sad. I even squeeze out a few tears. But it just won't be forced. I locked em in somehow, and now it has rusted shut. Merely turning a key will no longer release it.

I don't know what to do about the late night times I want to cry. Steve notices if I get out of bed, and he notices if I cry, either way it means HE ends up sad and sleepless as well. I can't see a way to do it without robbing him of rest.

A friend said I should just go ahead and cry in church. That's really hard for me. Everyone there (it's a VERY small church) has only ever been caring and supportive and understanding. Still, the thought of openly weeping Sunday after Sunday, well... it's hard for me to get past myself. I'm worried I'll be distracting (did I say it's VERY SMALL?) to everyone else. I'm worried I'll be rushed by concerned people who think something really awful has just happened to Joel, when in reality something awful HAS happened to Joel, it just happened at the moment of his conception, not in the last week. Horror of horrors, in my mind, I see myself losing control and sobbing until my pastor has to stop the sermon and ask if I need prayer! I don't feel comfortable with that much attention on me all at once.

Some of it is my own silly fear of being so "needy." I shouldn't care, but I worry that people will talk. Say I'm not "taking it well."

And it is hard to be so raw in front of people. So raw that I am unable to handle any well meant attempts at comfort. I'm afraid instead of crying with me, people will try and comfort my tears away. Really, my tears ARE my comfort. They are my release of the sad, the painful, the negative. It is my "brave face" that I desperately wish people would comfort away, until all the tears spill out in a torrent and wash my emotions clean. Yes, sometimes I long to be peeled down to the core, but I lack the ability to ask this, or to give the key, while others seem oblivious that there even is a key, or a core to whittle out.

Part of it, though, is just sort of the nature of grief itself. It is hard to grieve in a crowd. Sorrow, by it's very nature, is a somewhat private affair. As the poet says "Smile and the world smiles with you..." but "one by one we must all file on through the narrow aisles of pain." Sometimes there is room enough for two or three, but most real grieving isn't done in a large group. There is just something intimate about it all. So very personal. All this peeling, and whittling and comforting is best done in a quiet place... a place of "closeness."

So I bottle it up from time to time. A sour and bitter vintage, if it ages too long. Would anyone like to share a cup of sorrow? It's a bad year, and if you try and wrest out the cork, you'll find it disintegrates right into the wine itself. I've lost the corkscrew as well, another problem...

I suppose I could/should share at prayer meeting some time. The whole thing about how I might be seeing crying in church from time to time, and everyone should pay it no mind. I'm really ok, and there has been no new tragedy. I'm just grieving.

And the house of the Lord is one place where I often feel the layers of clothes slipping off until I am naked before God. I'm not really talking about the building, but being with the group of people who are the church. Oh, church buildings are nice. I'm not knocking them. They really are just a building, but it does seem to me that all the praising and the prayer done inside seems to change the very air of the place. Until even the wood and plaster and paint and carpeting seem to be imbued with something special.

But what I am really talking about is the group of people that change the building, by worshiping God there. It is being with this group of people, engaged in singing and praying that really do something hard to explain if you've never experienced it. It's like the material world around has become "thin." And what is invisible can be seen glowing through. So that when I'm there, in the building with these people singing about God, His presence, which is with me always, takes on a hue. A depth. A sound. People say they "felt His presence." Because He's always there, but there is a special thing being together with others worshiping and all I can say is that the reality of the material world going on around you grows a little more faint, and the reality underneath it all, the immaterial and spiritual world, seems to get more vivid, more alive to you.

What I am trying to say is that being in church like that often just opens up the lock. God is not kept out by emotional Tupperware, or rusty lock boxes of self-control. He always knows just how to whittle away my brave face until everything inside is burning brightly and threatening to overflow while I struggle to hold it in. It's a good thing, this peeling. It's a powerful thing, being exposed to the core. And sometimes it is a difficult thing. I'm working on letting go more, not being so afraid to let it out.

Sanctuary. noun holy place; place of refuge.

You can find a sanctuary in the church. Sometimes you can find it just with a couple of friends who believe in Jesus. Where ever you come across it, it is the perfect place to grieve. A holy and safe place.