In a few hours I take a long drive to help a friend bury his mother. I go to help my friend grieve.
My wife, the counselor, helped me understand something important about such tasks. She said, “People need permission to grieve in their own way.”
Sometimes people don’t understand their own hearts. They run about manically, weep spontaneously, or withdraw into small, dark spaces; but they don’t know why. Their behavior doesn’t help them process the loss, and they don’t expect it to. In fact they have no expectations at all. This pain seems permanent, and they’re just waiting for the inevitable madness.
Other people though know how they need to grieve. Their ceaseless activity has a purpose. They are organizing chaos to remind themselves that meaning can come from pain. They are crying because the tears release pressure that they do not want to carry beyond the funeral. They withdraw so that they can think through their feelings, process and partition their doubts, reassess and reconfigure their future to include the absence of one they’d thought of as eternal. Thus, they chart a path out of the madness and into the light.
When I minister to people in their season of bereavement, I try to discern whether their style of grief is chosen or imposed. I empower them with overt permission to grieve their own way, and I ask family and friends to respect the face and form of one another’s grief.
You can offer comfort to people anyway you want to offer comfort, but they can only be comforted in the ways that respect the way they grieve.
I’ve learned that as it is with grief, so it is with love.
Some people fall in and live in love much as one might fall into quicksand----unsuspecting, flailing, and panicking before surrendering to whatever fate happens to come.
Others understand the way they love and thus the way they need to be loved. Respect the way those you love need to be loved. When she says, “I need you to hold me,” don’t respond with the reasons she shouldn’t need to be held. She NEEDS to be held. Your holding means love.
When he says, “I need to be alone,” don’t attack his solitude or punish him for it later. He NEEDS to be alone. Your distance in that moment means love.
Though there are surely many legitimately logical reasons why other acts of love are more romantic, mature, and convenient they are not for them acts of love. They are acts of so-called romance, acts of condescending superiority, acts of selfishness.
You can love me anyway you want, but I can only be loved the way I need to be loved.
---- Anderson T. Graves II
Rev. Anderson T. Graves II is the pastor of Hall Memorial CME Church
Call/ fax: 334-288-0577
If you want to be a blessing to this ministry, contributions may be made by check or money order.
Mail all contributions to :
Hall Memorial CME Church
541 Seibles Rd.,
Montgomery, AL 36116
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