Topic: Grief

When Jesus says “I am,” he’s not just making a claim — he’s pulling a thread that runs from a burning bush through a valley of dry bones to a man walking out of a tomb.

Healthy spirituality requires an honesty about our experience of pain and confusion in the real world, and that means that lamentation is a part of healthy prayer.

Hope for our troubled world requires turning anger into tears, resentment into prayers, and financial power into generosity.

In order to find our way into the good news of life in all its fullness, we need to first stop denying and distracting ourselves from the bad news we are drowning in.

If you set yourself against the other, you also cut yourself off from the Father who loves you both. You diminish yourself, cut off the other, and break the Father’s heart.

Christ’s grief gathers up our griefs and achieves the promise of a day when tears will be no more.

In calling us into the culture of God, Jesus calls us to give up our addictions to tribalism, competitive grief, and selective compassion.

Though the experience of grief often feels like an absence of God, it is a deep experience of the heart of God, and is symbolised as such in the brokenness of the Eucharist.

The good news of resurrection meets us in the darkest places of our lives and so is initially incomprehensible and disorienting.

Even in the midst of our worst troubles, uniting with God brings purpose and joy (which is not the same as mere happiness), and joy is an antidote to fear.

In times of rupture, we, like Isaiah, can pour out our words, images and even anguished songs as we try to gather up the pieces and make some sense.

Grief and suffering bring us close to the heart of the suffering God and can open us to God’s transforming and resurrecting power.