The Joyful Widower

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Matthew 5:3

Human beings measure things. We count, we weigh, we quantify. We then take those measurements and use them to compare. How did we do this year versus last year? How much does this person have relative to that person? Who has more? Who has less? What’s fair?

Some things, however, defy measurement. We can’t quantify them. We can’t assign a number. We can’t compare them. Or maybe we’re trying to use the wrong measure.

Losses are things we can count, and maybe even assign a gut value to rank our feelings of loss. I broke a coffee mug; pretty minor on the grand scale of things, I’m sad for a few minutes, then I get about my day. I broke a coffee mug that had been a gift from a good friend; there’s a bit more sadness there, because there’s more sentimental value attached to the thing that was lost. I’ve lost touch with a friend and miss the good times we had; there’s an even greater sense of loss. My wife has died; okay, top of the list. My second wife has died; tie for first place.

I can make a list of losses. I can count them. I can assign them a rank as to how painful those losses are to me. Maybe in jealousy or pettiness I can try to peek at someone else’s list (or what I think is their list) and try to compare my list to theirs. But I’ve come to the realization that grief is not the same thing as loss. Losses are the particular things that happen that we can count, and we carry their memory with us. Grief is that place in the heart where we carry our losses. How do we even begin to measure grief? Can we? Should we? Losses are particular, but the place of grief is universal.

When we remember anything that we have lost, it takes us to that one place in the heart where we feel every loss. That’s why something we might formerly have considered to be a small loss can suddenly seem magnified after we’ve experienced a much greater trauma. In the wake of Melinda’s death, and also in the wake of Tracy’s death, things that I’d normally just take in stride felt so big, of such tremendous importance. It’s because small losses take me right into that place where every loss is felt, and they are all there, connecting up to each other in ways I’d never expect, like coronaviruses with spikes that find places to hook in and stay. Over time that place of grief feels crowded, confined, constrained. And every loss becomes one more way into that one place of grief.

Every one of us, over the course of life, will gather losses and carry them along. That is the nature of love; to love is to remember, and to remember is to love. And I think therein lies to key to what we need to do with grief.

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” I think the New English Bible renders this verse a little more clearly for us modern readers: “How blest are those who know their need of God, the kingdom of Heaven is theirs.” Loss brings us to that place in the heart, to grief, where we are poor. It is where we realize that we are not God, and that we desperately need Him. Loss reveals to us our weakness, our poverty, our ability to love but also our fear of love when it is painful, and that is a terrifying place to be. And it is in that fearful place, that place we don’t want to visit, that place we’d prefer to lock up pain and ignore it, that Christ will meet us. To what purpose?

Precisely to enlarge that space. If we are willing to meet him there, to acknowledge our utter poverty of spirit, our need for him and his healing, then he can begin that work of healing the heart, of making it larger, more flexible, more capable of love. In Christ we hope for the restoration of that which has been lost. There is hope that one day every tear will be wiped away, and there is comfort that he is with us now, understanding our pain and helping us to carry our losses.

This work is never quite finished, but there is a joy rather than hopelessness in that truth; as our capacity for love grows, we find a growing eagerness to love more. It can be such a difficult work at first. The ghosts in C. S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce rejected heaven because it was too painfully real for them, even though they were reassured that in time they themselves would become more real, more suited to heaven, and become capable of living there. And virtually every one of them chose to return to hell, to the small place they’d come from, because they preferred to close themselves off to divine love rather than do the hard work of acknowledging their spiritual poverty. But a brittle heart can hold only so much before it becomes overfull and, like pressure cookers of yesteryear, explode. A heart that is willing to endure the painful work of growing soon adapts to that work; a heart that is unwilling diminishes and wastes away. There is heaven, and there is hell. That is the choice before us.

If we choose to do that hard work, we find that we are called ever deeper into that place of poverty in the heart that also becomes the place of compassion, of empathy, of communion with Christ and all those he came to save. “Further up and further in!” was the triumphant cry of the heroes of C. S. Lewis’ The Last Battle as they journeyed deeper into Aslan’s country, as Heaven is called in The Chronicles of Narnia. And further up and further in, into that place of the heart, our spiritual poverty, is where we find a fuller, richer relationship with Christ. I have caught only a glimpse of it, but it is enough to spur me on. The only measurable capacity for love is zero, and that is in the heart that refuses to acknowledge its poverty, that concerns itself with self-preservation. But the heart that acknowledges its poverty, that allows Christ to transform it, has ultimately an immeasurable capacity for love.

I pray, as we prepare for Christmas this year, that we may each have the grace and the strength to enter into our poor, small hearts and to find there the One who chose to be born into poverty, into a small stable, so that he might lead us to Paradise.