On death and dying

Saturday, April 5, 2025

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On Death and Dying

I am like a trusting lamb led to slaughter.

In you I take refuge, O Lord; rescue me lest I become like the lion’s prey, to be torn to pieces.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s model of grief (DABDA): denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, delineates stages which overlap and change positions often. But because it’s so famous her model runs the risk of becoming a cliché, trivalized and incompletely understood. In his book Turn My Mourning into Dancing, a book published after his own death, Henri Nouwen applies a writer and pastor’s interpretation, giving Elisabeth’s five words new life.

Henri writes of five movements our grief gives us the opportunity to make:

From Our Little Selves to a Larger World

From Holding Tight to Letting Go

From Fatalism to Hope

From Manipulation to Love

From a Fearful Death to a Joyous Life

All this takes work, all this takes time, all this takes the willingness to turn away from what the world teaches about grief and toward my personal, incomplete and often angry relationship with God. Can I complain to him long enough to get it out of my system? Can I wait for him while I become quiet enough to recognize his presence and his love?

The voice of evil tries to tempt us to put on an invincible front. Words such as vulnerability, letting go, surrendering, crying, mourning, and grief are not to be found in the devil’s dictionary. Someone once said to me, “Never show your weakness, for you will be used; never be vulnerable, for you will get hurt; never depend on others, for you will lose your freedom.” This might sound very wise, but it does not echo the voice of wisdom. It mimics a world that wants us to respect without question the social boundaries and compulsions that our society has defined for us. (p. 8)

Jesus meets us in the real world, and he wants us to meet him right there, right now. There’s no reason to try and get away. What am I running from? Surely not the love from which I came, and the love to which I will return. I might be dust, but God has given this dust self-awareness, and one thing I become aware of quickly in grief is just how much I am alone. Will I cry out, “Help, Lord!”

Because he will.

For in our suffering, not apart from it, Jesus enters our sadness, takes us by the hand, pulls us gently up to stand, and invites us to dance. We find the way to pray, as the psalmist did, “You have turned my mourning into dancing” (Ps. 30:11), because at the center of our grief we find the grace of God. (p. 13)

Another pastor and writer, Walter Wangerin, also entitles his book Mourning into Dancing. He describes Jesus’ life on earth in four sacrifices:

1. Jesus emptied himself into a man in his incarnation.
2. Jesus offered himself in the passion: he was despised and they esteemed him not.
3. Jesus “gave up the ghost” while hanging on the cross, and died.
4. In all his relationships Jesus was forsaken, utterly sundered from his communal, internal, natural and primal relationships. All done, all gone.

Wangerin describes four stages of grief: shock, wrestling the angel, sadness only, and resurrection, when for Jesus and for us, our relationships – natural, internal, communal and primal – are renewed. Here is an unforgettable story from his book, a story of “ministry so ancient, so common among us, so eminently and generously human that no one needs post-graduate degrees in counseling or psychology to perform it.”

Watching Lazarus in the tomb and how Jesus “wades” right in, Steve Garnaas-Holmes seeks to glimpse the essence of dying and resurrection, bringing Jesus’ experience home to us:

Between Deaths

Jesus has waded into the depths of death

and fished Lazarus out.

 

His feet are still wet with death

as he moves now toward the death

of the Passover lamb, and his own,

and he knows it.

And Mary knows.

This is why she washes his feet.

She has seen his weeping,

seen the strange quiver in his eyes

as he faced the grave,

almost like recognizing a friend in a crowd.

 

This is where he lives,

between death and death,

and where we live our lives,

between our first risings and our last.

This is the promise of our First Washing:

every act we commit, each word we speak

we are always between deaths,

in the company of the Crucified One.

 

Whatever struggles we face,

whatever losses or griefs,

we go with the courage of those who are

between resurrections.

Whatever struggles. Whatever losses. Whatever griefs. Wade into them with courage that makes sense, because we have always been between resurrections.

O searcher of heart and soul, O just God, in you I take refuge, for you are a shield before me.

 (Jeremiah 11, Psalm 7, Luke 8, John 7)

(posted at www.davesandel.net)

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