John Claypool

“Hopeful Coping with Grief”

December 1 , 2002

Biography

Dr. John Claypool is rector emeritus of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Birmingham, Alabama, and theologian-in-residence at Trinity Episcopal Church in New Orleans. John is the author of many books and is one of America’s great preachers.

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“Hopeful Coping with Grief”

At least three of the writers of the Gospel tell us about a harrowing experience that Jesus once had with a very deranged person. We see Jesus trying to get away from the press of the crowd in Galilee, so he decides to cross over the Sea of Galilee to the eastern shore to a much less populated area called Gadarenes. No sooner had he landed there, he is literally assaulted by a man who was tragically demented. This man screamed all through the day and night, he lacerated his skin with rocks. His family and friends had tried to restrain him with chains, but he had broken them apart. The most interesting thing was he made his home in a cemetery.

I had a professor once you used to say that where he was living is probably the clue as to why he was a deranged person. He said that in all probability this man had brought someone he loved to the cemetery and then had not been able to get beyond his grief. That’s not surprising because grief is a very perilous experience in every way. When we grieve, we don’t get our way. Something ends before we want it to. There is a Gethsemane dimension to all of our grieving. We go in like Jesus, asking for one thing and we come out with something else. Here was a case where an experience of grief had absolutely driven a human being crazy.

In the story, Jesus doesn’t back away from him in fear. He delves into the heart of his anguish and through his very, very skillful casting out of certain things in this person, lo and behold, the man recovers his sanity. As the story ends, he is clothed in his right mind. Jesus did a wonderful thing in bringing about a healing to a terribly grieving person. I would like to suggest that Jesus has that same power today, to give us relief from the grief that were experiencing. I think this thing of “casting out” of certain things in us may be the key.

It’s my experience personally, and also working as a pastor, that some of the things that complicate our grieving more than anything else as adults are images that we have come to of death in the earlier part of our lives. Someone has said that children are keen observers, but poor interpreters. That is, they are aware of everything but because they have so little experience they very quickly come to the wrong conclusion. Many times early in our pilgrimage, we get images of death and unless we are able to unlearn and relearn those images, it’s going to complicate our coping with grief.

I want to suggest today that Jesus can help us cast out some of these primitive and untrue images, and can give us a new sense of what we are dealing with in our grief. The two things that happen to us in early childhood that may be the source of much of our difficulty is that we think of death as annihilation and we think of death as somehow robbing us of something that was rightfully ours. I say this confessionally because my first personal experience with grief was when I was four years old.

A few months before, my favorite uncle had made me the gift of a puppy. He said, “It’s time for you to have a dog and learn how to take care of him.” So he brought me this little butterball of fur. I named him Jiggs and we became, from the first day, bonded to each other. One summer afternoon I was playing out in the backyard and wanted to go in for a drink. We had a big screened in porch on the back of our house and so as I was going in, I didn’t realize that little Jiggs, with his short legs, was trying to follow me. The heavy screen door happened to come shut right on that little puppy’s neck. The first thing I knew was there was the sound of animal pain. I turned around and saw Jiggs falling back out into the yard. His body went through some convulsions and then he went limp. Well, of course, I rushed and tried to revive him but could not. The wonderful African American lady that lived with us came out and she too was unable to get him to respond. We got my mother and a neighbor, and for the first time in my four years of living, I heard the word “dead” applied to something that was very precious to me. That night my father came home and we told him the whole story. He, too, tried to revive Jiggs but could not so he took it a step further. We got a shoe box and put that little body in it, took it out in the backyard, dug a grave, covered it up, and put a little stick cross over it.

I never saw Jiggs again. Because I was a little child who was very concrete and very literal in the way I perceived things, the fact that I never saw Jiggs again gave me the impression that whatever death touches it absolutely obliterates, that anything that comes in contact with death simply goes out of existence. A primordial kind of fear developed in my little heart in relation to this phenomenon of death and since Jiggs was my puppy, I had the feeling that something that rightfully mine had been stolen from me. I began to have an enormous sense of anger at the injustice of that having taken place.

What I want to suggest is that I think many people begin life with these understandings of death and if we don’t do what St. Paul says, that is, put away childish things, and if we continue to look at life through the lens of these particular images then it’s going to greatly complicate how we cope with further losses. If we think of death in fearful terms, as annihilation, or if we think of death as if it is a thief that has stolen something from us, it sets in motion tremendous fear and tremendous anger. I would like to suggest that today that Jesus has the power of casting out those images just as he cast out the things in this grieving man that were causing him to be so demented. Jesus can cast out those images and bring us back stronger and better even though we experience loss.

How does Jesus do this? Well, first of all, I think he would have us to re-think our understanding of death. I believe Jesus would say to us that what happens to us at the end of our lives in history is best compared to what happened to us at the beginning of our lives. We all start out as two tiny cells in our mother’s body. Then we grow and become more complex, and after thirty-six or thirty-eight weeks there is this trauma of separation. From the vantage point of the womb it is a death. It is being taken from the familiar, the place where everything was provided and where there was great protection. But from the vantage point of time and space that same experience is called a birth. It is moving out of one place that has served it’s purpose into a context where we can grow and develop more fully. I believe this is the way that God gives us the gift of life.

We are again and again having to die to that which has served its purpose that we might be born to an arena that is every so much more conducive to our growth. Think of what you can become in time and space that you could never become if you stayed a part of your mother’s body. If we can ever get deep into our hearts that death is transition and not annihilation, that death is a movement from one context of living to another, then it becomes clear to us even at the end of our life in history that every exit is an entrance, every experience of death is also the prelude to an experience of birth. It can give rise to an enormous sense of hope that God is able to give us new places to grow and new things to become. We cease to be totally afraid of death and see it as moving into another arena of God’s everlasting growing.

The other thing I think Jesus would have us to see is that life and everything we possess is truly a gift and not a possession. I had the great misfortune many years ago of losing my only daughter to leukemia. Right after she died I was so filled with sadness. I went down one night to my study, and took down from my shelf a copy of a commentary on the book of Genesis. I turned to the twenty-second chapter of Genesis which tells the story of Abraham being asked to offer his little boy, Isaac. I never understood that story, but that night through the teachings of this particular interpreter, he helped me to see that the issue at work here was whether or not Abraham remembered where Isaac had come from. Did he remember that life is gift, that birth is windfall, that everything comes to us through a graciousness that is utterly beyond us? As I sat there in the middle of the night listening to those images out of the book of Genesis, it dawned on me that my daughter was a gift and not a possession; therefore, I had the sense that I could take the road of gratitude rather than the road of resentment out of the valley of the shadow of grief. I began to realize that my choice was mine to make, either living my life with my fist in the face of God or being grateful she had ever been given at all.

These childhood images of death as annihilation and of death as thief need to be unlearned and re-learned. The great truth I think Jesus would give to all of us—that which casts out our demons of fear—is that death is, in fact, transition and best of all, life is gift and we can trust the One who gave us the good old days to give us good new days as well.

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Interview with John Claypool

Interviewed by Floyd Brown

Floyd Brown: John, in your book Mending the Heart, you say, “Grievance, guilt and grief are part of the human journey from womb to tomb.” My question is how are they different and how are they related?

John Claypool: They are different. I actually wrote this little book in the wake of the second great grief of my life which was the death of my mother. My little girl died when she was ten, my mother died when she was ninety-three. Grievance is what happens when others hurt us, guilt is what we experience when we hurt other people and grief is what we feel when life hurts us. I do believe that God’s mercy and forgiveness are the Balm of Gilead, that help us to heal particularly from grievance and from guilt. When other people do us harm, as I’ve often heard said, forgiving them is a gift we give ourselves because we don’t let an old wound keep on wounding us. And, of course, when it comes to guilt, you’ve got to understand that there is something bigger than we are which is the grace of God, that God is not a perfectionist and that God is willing to work with us even on the other side of our mistakes. I often say what John the Baptist said of Jesus, “I must decrease, he must increase.” That’s the secret of accepting and forgiveness. I must cease to be so preoccupied with myself and my performance and realize that the grace of God and God’s willingness to forgive is really bigger.

Now grief, as I tried to say in my message, rests finally on the recognition that life is given to us as a gift. None of us deserve to be born, we didn’t earn our way in here, to realize that every beloved person or thing in our lives comes to us is a gift. It doesn’t diminish sadness when you lose. I don’t know any shortcut through sadness. But, Floyd, life is not fair because it begins in grace. You and I start out with this enormous gift of life. I call birth a windfall. When I kept clear that my little girl never did belong to me, that she had always been a gift, then it made me very sad to lose my contact with her but I couldn’t accuse God of being a thief because I had never deserved her in the first place.

Brown: Tell me a little bit about healing. How does it differ with death, from loss of job, divorce, these kinds of things?

Claypool: Healing comes when you are willing to let God become an equation in your life. When you are willing to let something bigger than you are begin to carry you. Just like when you are learning to swim, you discover that the water will hold you up and that you don’t have to do it all by yourself. That’s when you begin to realize that there is hope. I think the grace of God floats us out of the grievance, the guilt and the grief. Life is gift.

Brown: What a wonderful message! Thank you very much, Dr. Claypool.

Claypool: Thank you.

http://www.csec.org/csec/sermon/claypool_4609.htm