Grief and Desire

Grief is a universal human experience. To live on this earth (in this current era) as a human is to experience loss and walk through grief. And often this experience hits us unawares, surprises us, disrupts us, or more or less blind sides us. My own work as a pastor is often helping people understand some introductory truths about grief, God, and (like I have said before) just not saying something stupid haha. One of the surprising realities about grief is that we are often surprised by it. This universal human experience is not something we are prepared for. I believe that one reason for this is our relationship to desire. Are grief and desire connected? Yes, intimately. 

What you do with your desire is your spirituality.* Wait, maybe read that line again. Many of us have a spirituality of denial, repression, ignorance, and general distrust. Desire is an energy within, a longing, a hunger as a modern poet puts it (Florence and the Machine), and it moves us. Some desires can easily be acted upon and resolved; others are much more complex, nuanced, and unfulfilled. And what happens when you desire something that cannot be? When you desire something/someone/etc. that you “shouldn’t”, what do you do with the resulting tension? Tell that desire to go away? How did that work for you? What about when you desire something that is not possible? What do you do with the tension that desires creates in you? That tension is exactly the point where our faith is so important. This is the flash point where character is formed and specifically where we can learn to grieve loss. 

Let me give you two examples: You are up early in the morning and are just sitting down to a cup of light roast (none of that dark stuff) coffee, obviously Fair Trade, Sustainably Farmed, and it got to you by horseback (you should care for the environment, I am just making fun of coffee people while I can). You are about to open a good book and have about an hour till the two kids wake up. Glorious. Quiet. Space. When all of a sudden you hear the thud of two 3 year old feet hitting the floor, a pitter patter of feet, a doorknob squeaking open and a cute three year old with sleepy eyes walking out. For the sake of the example, let’s say you don’t make the child go back to bed for whatever reason and you lose that hour of hoped for solitude. You could say, “I didn’t need it anyways. I didn’t want a quiet morning.” You could remind yourself all these days will be gone so quickly. You could do a lot of things, but most of them in my own life are some way of ignoring, minimizing, and denying my desire to have an hour free. This is important. This is a trivial example, but notice the pattern – I minimize because if I didn’t I would feel more honestly the tension of wanting something that now won’t happen, at least not today. Desire creates in us the potential to also experience loss. When we repress or ignore desire we think we can lower that potential to endure loss (by not having a tension creating desire, we won’t have to deal with loss of not getting something). What we actually do is lower our capacity to hold tension and miss an opportunity to practice a simple spiritual practice. Naming a desire as good – even if it may not be met. I can say two things: I really wish I had an hour free and I am sad and upset I did not get it. I also love hanging out with my three year old. I can hold and handle that tension of an unmet desire, not by dismissing one for the other, but holding both.  

Let’s take a more painful example. You walked through the death of someone close to you. Grief a constant companion in your journey. And you wake up one day to a day full of plans. But early that morning you notice this lump in your throat. And you recognize that you wish, you desire to have a day with your loved one again. There is a lot of traditional trite clichés that parade around like they are biblical truth, “they are in a better place”, “think positively”, “gotta stay busy”, “don’t cry for me”. Many of those are true. But most of those also tend to try to minimize a genuine, honest desire in order to reduce tension (pain) that you experience. What we can recognize is that desire to have a day with your loved one, to speak with them again, to hold their hand is an honest desire and a good one. Could you welcome that desire in your life, even if it brings the pain of loss rushing up into the present moment? What tension does it cause you? A spiritual practice is to name (welcome) that desire even though it causes tension and pain in your life. The other option is to try to forget all about the one you love, to ignore the desire in order to minimize the pain. (Who would want that?) Desire thus creates tension in our lives. When we recognize that some of our desires won’t be met now, or maybe will never be met in the ways we would like them to, or maybe never be met until the restoration of all things; we have a couple options. 1) Do we minimize that desire? Ignore it? Have apathy toward our own hearts? Do we judge it, get rid of it, avoid it, try to forget it, outwork it, busy our lives to forget deep desire? I would respond, yea, most of us do. 2) Do we keep welcoming that desire as something real, honest, and perhaps even beautiful? Even though it creates more potential for loss? How do you nurture a desire that may never be met? At least not yet? I don’t know, I am still trying to figure it out. But I am recognizing that our instant gratification church culture, our ignorance of our own honest real desires and our habits of repressing that desire – is not creating in us practices, habits, and the capacity to grieve and grieve well. In other words, we can’t hold tension. Pain must be resolved now. Empathy is reduced to fixing the situation in my heart. This of course is expressed in communities as a lack of ability to hold pain, to journey alongside those in deep grief, an inability to empathize with the oppressed and hurting in our communities, and deep apathy. But what if these daily experiences of desire are a doorway into a deeper spiritual life? A more vibrant and robust life in general? And perhaps part of that journey is grief – a process and experience of welcoming, holding, and learning from tension. Unmet desire. Loss. 

The archetypal example of this for me is Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. Jesus is with the Father, hoping his community can walk with him through this tension he is feeling. The tension is I DO NOT WANT TO DO THIS. It is a loud, honest, blunt desire. I want “this cup to pass from me.” I think if the three disciples were awake (come on guys!) and were modern day evangelicals they would respond to Jesus’ honest desire with a large amount of discomfort and some clichés of their own. “Jesus, you can’t say that! You’re the Messiah” “God doesn’t want to hear about your emotions.” (said in a monotone of course) “Think positively Jesus! I heard the nails are greased first. Roman soldiers aren’t that bad…” “Just remember the end result, it will all be worth it in the end.” “I know how you are feeling – ______________ insert story here” Obviously, Jesus did not need any of those good-natured empty words and perhaps it was better the disciples were asleep. In fact, Jesus shares this real honest desire and recognizes that space (honest, real, desire) is exactly where the Father meets him. He is able to name a real honest desire that in effect creates tension. He is bringing into reality the deep pain approaching, he is feeling betrayal, loss, pain, approaching death. And Jesus shows us that honestly sharing real desires is one aspect of spirituality and an essential part of grief. No wonder we can’t grieve when we have been trained to repress or ignore all our real desires. Now some people’s beef with this is that many of us have “bad” desires and we should not act on all of them.** We certainly should not act on all our desires, as in fulfill them. But I would argue you do act on all your desires, especially the ignored, repressed, and bad desires. They come out in bitterness, insecurity, inability to listen to others, and a deep lack of connection to your real self and to the real God wanting to be with the real you. But notice in this passage does Jesus act on this desire? He honestly shares it, and in that deep honesty, the tension it creates, he is able to hold on to his faith in the love and character of God. Grief is nothing less. Desire led to a deep experience of God and ultimately to Jesus saying yes to the will of God for his life even though it led through immense pain. Welcoming and naming desire was part of grief for Jesus. And I would argue that practice had prepared him for this ultimate test – living in the tension of life and death. Love and loss. If your spirituality cannot help you hold this fundamental tension, it’s not much of a spirituality. Deep character is formed in the dark space between what we want and what is. Deep character is formed in the dark space of who you really are and who God is inviting us to be. And deep character is formed as we navigate the tensions, the suspense, the incompleteness our real desires create for us. God is in those spaces. And quick resolution is not the goal. Deep transformation is. Minimizing desire resolves tension and reduces your humanity. Ignoring your real desires may lessen your experience of grief and it will also disconnect you from reality. To walk through grief is to be aware of our unmet desires, the tension that creates for us, and be on the journey of how to hold that with God and community. 

I read the other day that the true measure of a Christian is found when we do not get what we want. If that is the case, then the entire Church, especially the evangelical church could learn from those that grieve and lament. Those living in real tension that are able to name it like Jesus.

If you are walking through a season of grief and loss, perhaps you don’t need less desire. Perhaps you don’t need more positive thinking. Perhaps you need to share your honest desires and begin to learn how to hold that tension. With God. It is not easy. At least for me. But meaningful human life has never been easy. For Jesus, tension moved him toward God. To say something honest and true. Toward a recognition of his finitude and ultimately dependence on God. So, if you could say something honest, perhaps to God today, what would it be? And how might God meet you right there today just as you are? 

*“There is within us a fundamental dis-ease, an unquenchable fire that renders us incapable, in this life, of ever coming to full peace. This desire lies at the center of our lives, in the marrow of our bones, and in the deep recesses of the soul. At the heart of all great literature, poetry, art, philosophy, psychology, and religion lies the naming and analyzing of this desire. Spirituality is, ultimately, about what we do with that desire. What we do with our longings, both in terms of handling the pain and the hope they bring us, that is our spirituality . . . Augustine says: ‘You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.’ Spirituality is about what we do with our unrest.” – The Holy Longing by Ronald Rolheiser

** The biblical story on desire is deep and nuanced. It recognizes our original creation as good, the twisting or marring of desire, and the restoration possible in Jesus. Everyone in the world does something with their desire, has a certain way of welcoming or ignoring it, and all of us have to learn how to navigate our desires. For a Christian the goal is deep love of God and the ability to love neighbor. To love yourself too. You cannot repress, ignore, or minimize all desire and expect to reap a loving heart. The challenge we face is not getting rid of desire, but properly directing our desire to the only one, God, possibly able to fulfill the deepest desires we have, to be unconditionally loved and welcomed. There are certain desires that lead to sin, just like if Jesus had pridefully asserted and acted on his own desire that he not go to the cross, it would have been sin. But the honest sharing with God of what he was feeling – not sin. In fact, it led to a surrendering of his will into the hands of his Good Father. That is called trust. And in the midst of grief, that experience happened through an honest recognition of desire experienced painfully as loss.