A lot of people who grieve are “treated” as if they’re mentally ill. Mental illness is one of the most under-addressed situations in the world. Many words should be written to help us attend to those parts of us around our mental, emotional, and biological processes as people.

But a lot of people are confused to believe that the inexplicable expressions of others are illness when those expressions are really the person’s best efforts at suffering (and usually and unfortunately alone) under a burdensome loss.

One of my preaching heroes said that because we love we are eligible for bruising. By bruising he meant loss. Love makes you eligible for loss. When you love, you have to let go of the people you love because people don’t stay. In a long-term way, people die. Being less fatal, people leave. People move. People move on. People move on from us.

All those leave-takings mean that we lose. And we adapt. But our adaptations don’t always engender our grieving. Sometimes we move on as if we were never touched by that significant other.

Grieving is the emotional work of dealing with a loss. We all grieve. We don’t all grieve well. Sometimes we stuff feelings about our losses until they get pressed down and cramped in our dark insides. We act like those feelings aren’t there. It’s easier. For a while.

And then we forgot those feelings. We live as if we didn’t love. We live as if she didn’t matter. We live as if he wasn’t important. As if that role was dispensable. As if that city was in a stream of places we’ve lived in and moved from.

And then love returns. In the form of a dream. Some reminder. Some moment. And we fall, or crash, into a fit that can only be explained by harsh clinical terms. We “must be crazy.” But we are not crazy.

We are lovers who lost and who didn’t learn that our feelings were important enough for a room of their own.

On Wednesday, all day long, me and a group of chaplains were going about the hospital saying a version of the same thing.

“You were created from ashes and one day you will return to ashes. Turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ. Repent and believe the good news that God loves you and longs for you to be whole.”

I’d ask for the person’s name, look her or him in the eye, and pronounce these words so that each word was clear, pronounced. And for each of us, me and the individual, we heard the echo of our limitation in life. We heard that we could respond to the good news and that we were going to die.

I have acknowledged two Ash Wednesdays in a hospital, and it’s a deeply sobering experience. Level 1 Trauma Center. Downtown Chicago. All kinds of people. Many different reasons for their hospitalizations when they’re patients. Just as many different stories when they’re on the staff. And my role—with other spiritual caregivers—is to remind them of their wonderful and simple createdness while also reminding them of their eventual end.

I have thought, on more than one occasion, about dying. Not all the details of my death. But the broad vague fact of it. You can’t flee from it when you see death a lot. When you’re alongside a doctor who checks for a pulse and who tells a wife that her husband of five decades is taking his final breaths. Or when you walk with people on the cusp of it. Or when you listen to last breaths being taken and released. Or when you hold all those tears of loved ones whose burdens are unutterable.

The contemplation of death is a prerequisite for the minister. The articulation of some hope in the midst of it is as well.

Part of our articulation is in the hope hinted at during Ash Wednesday. We hold both life and death in our mouths. And we pronounce that both are true, that both are to be accepted as (now or eventual) gifts.

It’s not a conversation starter, this ashes to ashes business. It’s not something you want to open the day with. And yet it happens to hundreds of people. It’s the one day I’ll see people as Christians. Non-Christians don’t get “ashed”. Catholics almost certainly do, and many Protestants will as well. Dark crosses become an acceptable part of the otherwise identical uniform. Some wear that chalky cross and some don’t.

I tell myself that these are the people who are more closely aware of their ends. They know their limits. They realize that death is coming.

And the coming of death for the Christian, ashed or not, is a confusing experience. We don’t welcome it because we love life. Yet we don’t see it as something worth running from when it comes since “to die is gain.” And of course as I’ll say in upcoming posts, the experience of grieving after loss is another long matter.

Dear God:

Speak gently in our silence.

When the loud noises of the outside world,

And the loud inner noises of our fears

Make you seem so far away;

Help us to know that you are still there—

Even when we can barely hear you.

Help us to cling to that still, small voice

That says, “Come to me, all you who are

Weak and overburdened,

And I will give you rest—

For I am gentle and humble of heart.”

God, let that loving voice be our guide this day.

May we find rest in your love,

And bring that love to others.

We ask now for healing

Of body, mind and spirit,

In your holy name.

Amen.

Theological education at Garrett-Evangelical is not programmatic, propaganda, professional training (trade school); instead, it is about the spiritual reception of the prophetic ethos (salt), the priestly passion (light), and “obedience of faith” (faithful discipleship) of the Gospel in the world. The work…is precisely to realize that which cannot be taught but can be caught, i.e., to foster a theological pedagogy of pneumatic creativity in the classroom.

Professor K.K. Yeo in the January, 2016 issue of Aware