Grief Shows Up Even In a New Member Liturgy

So in my preparations for our fourth Sunday of Advent, The Sunday of Joy (and yes, I know we were “out of order” of the traditional Advent “schedule”), grief showed up. It showed up the weekend of the winter solstice (longest night of the year) and just a few days before Christmas. And grief showed up, as it often does, in an unexpecetd way…As I was preparing for our new congregation’s first reception of new members since we started.

In an act of joy, grief showed up.

This was the first time I had led a service for receiving new members into a PCUSA congregation since 2017 (from early 2018 until earlier this year, I was serving a UCC congregation and used different liturgies). When I opened up my file from September of 2017, I saw the familiar PCUSA liturgy but I also saw something else (I whited out the names of those we were receiving that morning)...

Yeah, the last time I used this liturgy, my friend Lisa was still alive and we were still serving together in ministry.

About 5½ years later, Lisa died of cancer.

Almost a year before she died, however, she agreed to share the message at my installation service in Ft Thomas (the congregation I served prior to RJC). And then I was given the honor of sharing a message at her memorial service. I have written a lot about Lisa over the last few years (tattoo and other posts) but most recently a year ago when I shared about the unexpected gift of a Bible that Lisa had intended to give me but didn’t end up getting to before she died. Her husband found it going through some things and then brought it over to me. Here’s what I wrote in early December a year ago. When I looked up the installation service video, I noticed that Lisa was using that same Bible and those same pink pieces of paper were there as she shared the message even in the midst of physical challenges she was facing in her treatments.

Grief showed up with that new member liturgy and I continued thinking about Lisa Sunday in our worship service as I led our congregation through a prayer time honoring the struggles that this season can bring. I also shared about the Blue Christmas / Longest Night service at the congregation my wife serves and invited others to join me at that service.

So that evening, one of my daugters and I attended that service and it was deeply meaningful. There was a beautiful liturgy that she and the other associate pastor led lighting four pillar candles that had an echo of lighting the four traditional candles of Advent. But instead these four candles were acknowledging different aspects of grief and loss. And then later, we came forward to receive the Lord’s Supper and also to light candles in rememberance. I came up with my left hand over my labyrinth tattoo on my right arm and then lit one candle remembering Lisa and also lifing up her husband and their children in their ongoing grief.

With this post today, though, I didn’t want to simply share about my own grief that showed up today but to offer that, even if you didn’t attend a “Blue Christmas” service this weekend, that I (and others) honor that space in which you find yourself.

Your grief, your loss, your struggles are seen in the midst of everything else that is happening at this time of the year. Your grief might be the loss of a loved one, a loss of a job, a loss of something of your health, grief over the state of the world, fear for yourself or someone else, and the list goes on. But it is ok to not feel “joy to the world” at this time of the year.

You are seen.

So I wanted to offer a few things.

One is what I wrote the day after Lisa died in 2023. I did not go out that day intending to share a lengthy written and visual reflection on grief but that was what emerged. Here is that reflection if it is helpful to you.

The other is a blessing/prayer from John O’Donohue in his book To Bless the Space Between Us. This is generally about grief but he has other beautiful blessings in his book that speak to other losses and other challenges faced.

For Grief
When you lose someone you love,
Your life becomes strange,
The ground beneath you gets fragile,
Your thoughts make your eyes unsure;
And some dead echo drags your voice down
Where words have no confidence.

Your heart has grown heavy with loss;
And though this loss has wounded others too,
No one knows what has been taken from you
When the silence of absence deepens.

Flickers of guilt kindle regret
For all that was left unsaid or undone.

There are days when you wake up happy;
Again inside the fullness of life,
Until the moment breaks
And you are thrown back
Onto the black tide of loss.

Days when you have your heart back,
You are able to function well
Until in the middle of work or encounter,
Suddenly with no warning,
You are ambushed by grief.

It becomes hard to trust yourself.
All you can depend on now is that

Sorrow will remain faithful to itself.
More than you, it knows its way
And will find the right time
To pull and pull the rope of grief
Until that coiled hill of tears
Has reduced to its last drop.

Gradually, you will learn acquaintance
With the invisible form of your departed;
And when the work of grief is done,
The wound of loss will heal
And you will have learned
To wean your eyes
From that gap in the air
And be able to enter the hearth
In your soul where your loved one
Has awaited your return All the time.¹

Blessings to you. You are seen.

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Scout is with you too…

Grace, Peace, Love, Hope, and Joy,
Ed

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1. O’Donohue, John. To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings (pp. 117-119). Kindle Edition.