The space between Grief and Peace

To be deeply wounded is to be caught about your shoulders and spun like a gyroscope. You drift across the hard surface of remembrance, and your momentum seems to carry you between two poles. One is called Grief, and the other is named Peace. Many of us are urged in this modern age to hurry toward Peace, to be at peace with our loss, to grasp the peace that passes all understanding, to count it all joy. We hear it even in our funerals, where the living are encouraged to celebrate for this newly departed, this happy creature who freshly has passed into newness of life.

There is indeed peace to be grasped, but I think we skirt too quickly past grief. I remember a well-meaning friend once admonished my wife, not a year after our daughter had been tucked into the earth, to rejoice. It says so in the Bible, after all. More than once I've heard a funeral-in each case it was for a young person, no less-declared at the outset to be a celebration. This is a grim thing, a mass of hurting people pretending that what has happened is good.

And when it's your shoulders that have been caught hold of, and it is your thin soul that is being spun about, it is hard to steer yourself to Peace. You find yourself drifting into Grief, and if enough time elapses between your wounding and this spinning you begin to feel guilty about it. You forget, I suppose, that Jesus wept, too.

Peace comes in its time, for those who know its source. And to tarry at grief too long is indeed the worst kind of celebration, the self-centered celebration of one's sorrow. But we needn't shrink from grief. And we needn't think it wrong when grief returns, perhaps years after the wound's scar has hardened, and we are for a time unable to keep from weeping.

We are at peace knowing that what has been lost will be restored. But we weep because we don't know how many days or years we have remaining between this lonely hour and then.