It Came Apart

She was forty one and she was holding a plate.

It was a Passover meal, at a colleague's house, and she had gone because she was asked and because she had been curious in a vague way for about twenty years. She had expected to feel like a tourist. She had brought the sort of wine you bring when you are not sure.

What she had not expected was to know things.

Not all of it. But a phrase would come up, and something in her chest would go oh, the way it does when you hear a tune from a house you lived in as a child. The bread. The bitter herbs. The youngest child asking the question. The bit about a night being different from all other nights.

Halfway through, an older man at the end of the table said something about slavery and freedom and God bringing a people out with a strong hand, and she thought, without deciding to: that is my story. And immediately afterwards, in the same second: is it? Am I allowed to say that?

She sat there holding her plate with both hands.

Because she had been in church since she was nine. Forty one years old, three Bible studies a week for a decade, and nobody had ever mentioned that the thing she belongs to had once been one thing. Not a wing of a thing. One thing, in one room, with these words in it, and hers came out of it.

She did not know when it had come apart. She still does not, and this is not the page that is going to tell her.

She only knew, on the way home in the car, that something had happened in her that she had no word for, and that it was closest to grief.

Grief does not need a verdict first

Here is what usually happens next, and it is the wrong turn, and almost everybody takes it.

The mind goes looking for the story. When did it happen. Who did it. Which century, which decision, which council, which failure of nerve. It is a completely natural move, and it is the reflex of a person who has been handed a sadness and cannot bear to hold it without a file attached.

We are not doing that here. Not because the history is unimportant, and not because it is unknowable, but because it is not what you actually came in carrying.

What you came in carrying is a loss. And a loss does not require a verdict before you are allowed to feel it.

Consider what the letter to Ephesus says, in the middle of a passage about two groups of people who had been at a distance from each other.

For He Himself is our peace, who has made both groups one and has broken down the middle wall of partition.Ephesians 2:14

You are allowed to be sorry about this, and being sorry is not the same as taking a side. Scripture says he is our peace, who hath made both one (Ephesians 2:14), and it is the Holy Spirit who is the Comforter, the one who comes and stands alongside, which is the position somebody takes beside a grief rather than in front of an argument.

Read what that sentence assumes. It assumes there was a wall. It assumes there was a distance between two peoples that was real enough to be described as masonry. And then it says something about it that is not an argument at all: He Himself is our peace.

Not He explains our peace. Not He adjudicates our peace. He is it.

Which means the thing you are sad about is a thing He is personally, presently, standing in the middle of. You are not grieving something God has no view on and no involvement in. You are grieving a separation in a house that He calls His, and that grief is nearer to His own heart than any account of it you could assemble.

So you are allowed to say it. It came apart. That is a true sentence. It costs nothing and it accuses nobody, and saying it does not put you on a side, however it has felt every time you have almost said it.

Grief with a verdict attached becomes a case. Grief without one stays what it is, which is love with nowhere to go, and it is a great deal more honest than a case.