Yet underneath is the unsettling knowledge that thinking my grief is permanently easing is an illusion. In roughly two weeks I will fall apart all over again on the Sunday after Easter, because our son died on the Sunday after Easter. Then I'll fall apart again on April 15, the actual date that he died four years ago.
I do know that, after collapsing I will rise and start the slow movement towards the easing of grief and the ongoing finding and creating of new life. But it's not forward movement. It's cyclical. Every new cycle of the year carries reminders: in Autumn, his birthday. In Winter, memories of the child at Christmas. In Summer, memories of trips to the places he lived. Every person who grieves learns that one is forever vulnerable to the uncontrollable ebbs and flows of grief. What a prick to our pride, our illusion that we're in charge of ourselves. What a gaping wound, to remind us that our outward perfected appearance is an illusion.
But only wounds and littleness connect us with our God, not pride or perfection. I may be little and vulnerable. But so is my God, in Jesus. I am grievously wounded, and so is he. Fr. Richard Rohr says
"It takes all of us a long time to move from power to weakness, from glib certitude to vulnerability, from meritocracy to the ocean of grace....In Paul's letters, he consistently idealizes not power, but powerlessness, not strength but weakness, not success but the cross. It's as if he's saying, 'I glory when I fail and suffer because now I get to be like Jesus - the naked loser - who turned any notion of God on its head.' Now the losers can win, which is just about everybody.
"The revelation of the death and resurrection of Jesus forever redefines what success and winning mean, and it is not what any of us expected or wanted. On the cross, God is revealed as vulnerability itself (the Latin word 'vulnus' means wound)....The path to holiness is so different than what any of us would have wished or imagined; and yet, after the fact, we will all recognize that it was our littleness and wrongness that kept the door to union and love permanently wedged open every day of our life. In fact, there is no way to close it."
Our son Peter died on the Second Sunday after Easter, Divine Mercy Sunday. When I am naked to the world with tears running down my cheeks and an aching heart, Easter finds me and recreates me. For Easter finds us and creates new life in us through the discovery of an empty tomb and a risen Savior with a blood-stained side, the place where his vulnerable and loving and merciful heart was pierced with a lance. Jesus' physical heart pierced with a lance, as well as his lashed back and nail-pierced ankles and wrists, are the physical proof of God's merciful love for us, yet they are not all his wounds. He also grieved deeply - over our sinful alienation from God. As St. Bonaventure said "Through the visible wounds, we see the wounds of invisible love."
The heart is a primordial symbol for the whole person's capacity to feel and to love - as we see on St. Valentine's Day. And so we think of Jesus' heart as the place where he is vulnerable, where he hurts and grieves, and where he loves. Jesus' heart "is an emblem of God's love, which became incarnate in Jesus Christ." (Cardinal Walter Kasper, in "Mercy: the Essence of the Gospel.") St. Bonaventure also interpreted the wound in Jesus' side "as a wound of love, because whoever loves is wounded by love." How true that is! When I am so wounded by love that I can barely speak or move, I think of Jesus, wounded for and by love for us. Jesus seemed to fail though his death on the cross; yet that supposed failure was his triumph of love. Knowing how much he loves us can awaken our hearts, apathetic with grief, hurt by our weaknesses and failures.
"Thus our pathetic and so-often dull heart can be newly ignited and catch fire time and again from the fervency of the love of Jesus' heart. Jesus' love can also wound our heart, yet we cannot help but love his heart. Bonaventure can, in fact, say: Jesus' heart becomes our heart." (Kasper.)
Amazing what our wounded, vulnerable hearts are capable of. Yesterday, once again, I hugged and comforted a crying woman at Church whose dear husband is ill in the hospital and will soon be entering a Hospice program. She knows my loss, my heartbreak. She kept crying, "You understand. I know you understand."
Only another pierced heart could comfort my friend's pierced heart during this hour of her and her husband's mutual crucifixion. In comforting her, and others, I have found new life, a reason for my living. In my failures of nerve, my off-again, on-again attempts to achieve a "new normal," I have gained humility, a new flexibility in forgiving others. I'm neither perfect nor normal; why should they be? And my broken heart rushes out to others' hearts broken for a variety of reasons.
In the same way, only the pierced, vulnerable heart of Jesus can understand us, comfort us in our grief, and give us an Easter of new life and love. His pierced heart constantly speaks to our pierced hearts. In this never-ending cycle of grief, loss, vulnerability, and new life, I have learned that only our littleness and vulnerability can transform us into the image of our crucified and risen Savior. When we are open and vulnerable enough to allow Jesus' heart to become our own, our hearts are stretched beyond belief into a new understanding of where and how far our love can reach.
"With Jesus we can plunge into the Golgotha-night of the world, endure it with Jesus, and on behalf of the many suffer though it to the end. The Church, as the body of Christ in the Holy Spirit, collectively shares in the agony of Christ in the world. According to Blaise Pascal, Jesus' agony continues to the very end of the world. Thus, as the body of Christ, the Church can share representationally in the world's suffering, accompany it sympathetically, and thoroughly bear its pain. In every 'night' of the world, we know with certainty, by looking at Jesus' pierced heart, that in it God's heart beats for this our world. God's heart is the heart of the world, its innermost power, and its complete and entire hope. We are thus able to endure the darkness of Good Friday in the certainty of a new and eternal Easter morning. It is the certainty that nothing, neither life nor death, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ." (Romans 8: 35 - 39.) (Kasper.)
From the pierced heart of Jesus flows an ocean of grace to us. In our grieving and naked littleness, may we be open to receiving comfort and new life from the One Who conquers Sin and Death because he IS vulnerable, naked, and wounded. May our wounded hearts become like his heart, opening and stretching so that our prayers and concern enfold this hurting, dark, and sinful world.