This article was published April 24, 2024 in The Living Church.
In the seven years at my current parish, I have commended to God the souls of over forty people. The first ten came in such rapid succession that I looked at the aging congregation and realized I needed to bone up on my understanding of dying, death, and grief, both biologically and spiritually speaking. After seeking out several possibilities of continuing education I became a certified death doula and conscious dying educator. One of the greatest gifts that came from that training has been a reformed vocabulary surrounding matters of finitude. How we speak of death is a witness to how we think about it, especially in theological terms.
Rachel Mann’s recent article in The Christian Century speaks to how death phobic Western culture contaminates our understanding of dying and death such that we employ euphemisms to hide the fact of our mortality. In The Denial of Death Ernest Becker wrote about our compulsion to set up “immortality projects” to deny death. Stephen Jenkinson may have been alluding to Becker’s idea as he writes about the Western obsession with success when it comes to medical interventions with terminal illness. He argues in Die Wise that the “medical industrial complex” identifies death as a failure and will go great lengths to avoid it. Unfortunately, often these so-called heroic measures fail a dying person’s need to attend to their dying time in a loving and conscious manner. Furthermore, this denies their family and community valuable time to love that person into their death. The medical establishment is so busy helping people not die, that they end up sentencing the terminally ill to not live. This fails everyone.
The denial continues even after our family and friends have died and we have laid their bodies to rest. We use words and phrases, such as Mann pointed out, to mask the stark reality of their absence among us. The word lost is one such euphemism that shows up as a symptom of our phobia. A careful look on the use of this word ought to make Christ-followers take notice of how we too are contaminated by Western culture’s failure to see the Divine when death and grief are present.
“I lost my mom ten years ago.” “We lost four members of our church this spring.” My question is a simple one: Have we really lost anyone when they die? My answer is unequivocal: No. When someone dies, their body ceases its metabolic processes. Persons of myriad faiths assert that the spirit moves from the body into another phase of living: an afterlife, rebirth or something else beyond this life. For Christ-followers, God receives the spirit or soul “into the blessed rest of everlasting peace, and into the glorious company of the saints in light.”[1] Mom isn’t lost at all; she is with God. Our friends in Christ find “rest from their labors.” We have one life, and it is lived out in various phases: before physical birth, as Psalm 139:13-16 tells us, this life, when we praise God and serve the Divine’s reconciling dream, and after bodily death, when we rest under the shadow of the Almighty’s wing “in light perpetual.” In every case, Christ-followers believe that nothing can separate us from the love of God. If we believe this, then we do not lose friends and family when they die; we release them to dwell in the fullness of that love.
Ironically, our usage of the word lost to speak of one who has died forgets its deep etymological beginnings. Lost comes from the Indo-European root lau, which means gain or reward. It comes to us in English via the Germanic guerdon, which has the same meaning, but also adds to it the notion of profit. A closer look at how lost evolves reveals that in Latin, lost comes from luere—to release from debit, and in Greek, it comes from lýein—to untie and set free. The English derivation arrives at “lost,” as in perish or destroy by way of analogy. “The knight’s reward for his betrayal was the sword,” for example. How far this word has travelled from its origins of reward to its antonym lost, the isolated, cut off meaning of it we use today!
Would that Christ-followers might engage lost’s deep time beginnings. Our present theology certainly speaks to reward and being set free. In my observation of and companionship through many seasons of grief, those who use the word lost are those who have an uncomfortable relationship with grief. I’ve learned that when we use the word lost to describe the condition of our dead ones we are, in fact, speaking to our own condition. We are lost without the presence of that beloved. We have lost our moorings in their absence. Lost speaks to our grief. Using it to describe what has happened to our dead pushes away grief. We are as grief phobic as we are death phobic. The use of the word lost when death comes puts our focus on the one who rests, not on our aching hearts. Is this the best way to remember our dead? Are we letting them rest? Praising them instead, which is what grief really is, provides the living and the dead with greater honoring.
In The Smell of Rain on Dust Martín Prechtel writes, “Grief is praise of those we have lost.... If we do not grieve what we miss, we are not praising what we love. We are not praising the life we have been given in order to love. If we do not praise whom we miss, we are ourselves in some way dead. So, grief and praise make us alive.” The Divine demands a sacrifice of our love. Loving the dead by remembering them, no matter how our heart aches at first, is such a sacrifice. This is what heals that person-shaped hole. This is what softens us to the grief afoot in other’s lives. This is what brings more and more healing into the world.
Grief rewards us with richer life. Mann pointed out that resurrection is predicated on death. For a religion whose center is a death that brings abundant and eternal life, Christ-followers require greater faith that indeed nothing separates us from God’s love, neither grief nor death. “Do not fear” we read time again in the Bible. It’s time we become better followers and witnesses to that commandment. Our dead are never lost; quite the opposite, they have arrived in their spiritual home. There is much to gain from finding the gifts in grieving those whom we love but see no longer.
[1] Book of Common Prayer, p. 499.
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