Gratitude and Grief, a Sacred Dance
Making a list of all we’re grateful for seems so simple. I remember reading Voskamp’s One Thousand Gifts, in awe of the simple power she seems to harness through a practice of extreme blessing counting. I was endeared to her trauma and depression-torn heart as it wove itself into a present experience of life and God through calling gifts . . . gifts! Not givens. What a difference a few letters can make.
But here’s the thing: I’ve always thought I excelled at blessing counting. I’ve wrangled it to manage difficult emotions my entire adult (and Christian, same terms) life.
As a child: “this is hard but it could be worse.”
As an ambitious teen: “I feel so disappointed but I’m sure if this opportunity had materialized as I’d hoped, I would miss something better.”
At 27: “I should be thankful my second pregnancy slipped away silently at 18 weeks, if it hadn’t I wouldn’t have my son Leo.”
At 33: If Leo wasn’t autistic, I would have missed the exponential growth and deepened compassion this year has brought me. I would have missed the connections with other moms and had this whole big blind spot indefinitely!
And now I find myself asking, “Could it? Would I? Couldn’t I?”
Does disappointment negate gratitude?
Do I have to believe in some sort of cosmic math that makes everything acceptable in order to live a lifestyle of gratitude? In the churches and circles of my theological home this is wrapped up in sovereignty. God is good, God has pre-ordained days and times, and perhaps everything in between. So what do we have to offer up, helpless creatures we, other than gratitude? Gratitude that His knowing is ALL knowing, gratitude that His knowing can be trusted.
But can we really be genuinely grateful if it eradicates our permission to feel deeply disappointed? Is gratitude meant to smooth over the hard edges of human experiences and to make those feelings unqualified to be felt? I’ve never known otherwise than to point joys back to God and to believe that griefs point to an unseen joy and then back to God. I actually still and will always believe that this is ultimately true.
But sometimes we frame conversations about gratitude as a sort of counterpoint to suffering. I have always sensed in my spirit a resistance to this, and am just now starting to see a framework for why. I think this creates both an anemic gratitude and an untouched (or exacerbated) grief.
There isn’t a math. You can’t solve for x in a sin stained world. In heaven the dissonance will all resolve! But here, it remains. As citizens of heaven, we possess that living hope, but as guests on earth we don’t escape those realities by accounting for a future resolve. They co-exist in dissonance with one another.
We can be grateful for our obvious blessings. We can hold grief (ours and others) with tenderness and patience. We will be resurrected to gratitude for the assurance of future hope, should no comfort materialize here. But we don’t exhume death and make it life, God does. There is a grief that despairs, that withholds thanks. This is not for the believer. There is a shallow thanks that glosses over realities, and when those pains are buried alive instead of given air I promise they metastasize.
When gratitude and grief dance
Every day I carry my deep grief that my second daughter, lost at 18 weeks gestation, never walked in the world with me. Even as I reveled in the absolutely blissful babyhood of my rainbow son with a heart dancing with gratitude. When a professional dream dies, or a window of opportunity expires, I grieve it, I feel it, I speak it. And even as I pray with arms lifted, open hands trusting my sovereign Father, I walk with the weight of those earthly disappointments.
When I sit in a Special Education meeting and realize that my goals for my son aren’t necessarily the goals God has ordained for his magnificent little self, I thank God for the blessings in the journey, but I hold that up in one hand while in the other I lift up my vial of tears to His kind heart.
When gratitude and grief dance, we can be whole and unsuppressed humans, walking the full range of human experience. We can trust as the Psalmist did that a God who shaped the universe and stewards our very life breath second-to-second can hold both without conflict. And there we will find ourselves walking in an honest, Holy-Spirit filled, genuinely human gratitude that will gift our life and those around us with a beautiful clarity.
An unbelieving world needs to see that same capacity for grief AND gratitude to be drawn to the beauty of the gospel. We can live and give the truth about Christians; we grieve and we give thanks. And on the other side, it’s all just thanks, praise be to God!
Meet Rachel Mary Perry
Rachel Mary Perry is a New York State based writer and poet who is also a student, advocate, wife and mother to three. She loves to spend time out of doors and will always have a bigger pile of books to read than hours in the day to read them.
Where to find her . . .
Begin Within is a series to inspire a year-round lifestyle of gratitude that will impact not only your own life, but the lives of your neighbors as well. Gratitude is a theme we talk about often around here because it ties so closely into other missional living rhythms. Practicing gratitude reminds to keep our hearts soft and expectant and our eyes open. Therefore, the more we embrace gratitude, the easier it becomes to truly see our neighbors and where we can join what God is already doing in our neighborhoods.
If you would like to contribute to Begin Within, you can find the submission guidelines here.
Creating Ripples
If you would like to cultivate rhythms in addition to gratitude that will empower you live on mission in your neighborhood, check out Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors. This small book will help you make a big impact in your neighborhood as you learn to let missional living flow from the inside out. Get the 30-day missional living challenge free when you purchase the book.
