Friday afternoon I heard the news of the massacre in Newtown, CT. I turned on the television to learn children – the age of my youngest – were murdered. Emotions are very close to the surface for me, and in that moment I felt varied emotions of sadness, grief, and loss. What was I to do with what was in front of me? I thought of responses to that question on a number of levels, but I want to share with you how I attempted to answer it as a pastor with our church family just yesterday.

Grieve.

Grieving is messy. In grief you experience the range of human emotions. Anger. Sadness. Emptiness. Tears. Wailing. If you do it well you look quite dissheveled in the process (a light bit of humor in a more serious post). Grieving means you don’t let that which caused the grief to pass you by. You don’t ignore it. You engage it. This is how I encouraged our church family to respond. There is something holy about grieving well.

Grieving lets God know there’s something wrong. Does he know it? Sure, but there’s no issue in reminding him. In fact, it’s quite biblical. Tragically, it’s something absent in our churches. Let’s just sing another upbeat song. For more reasons than I could list we have a fear of being honest about the dark parts of our heart, the struggles of our faith, or the grief we experience in life.

In spite of this fear I would suggest that grieving in times like these is the most appropriate response. I could do without hearing how the absence of prayer in schools is the cause of such atrocities. This in and of itself testifies to our very limited view of God and the toxic nature of making sense of such evil by constructing nice little boxes to fit answers into. Screw that. Wail. That’s a response.

I was drawn back to Henri Nouwen’s work, Turn My Mourning into Dancing. In it he writes this, “The world in which we live lies in the power of the Evil One, and the Evil One would prefer to distract us and fill every little space with things to do, people to meet, business to accomplish, products to be made. He does not allow any space for genuine grief and mourning. Our busyness has become a curse, even while we think it provides us with relief from the pain inside. Our overpacked lives serve only to keep us from facing the inevitable difficulty that we all, at some time or another, must face.”

Would an appropriate response be to grieve well? To me this is the beauty of God in the midst of the ugliness of evil. Where is God? I believe He’s in our tears if we allow them to be shed. Where can we find God in this? We find God as we find him at home in ourselves (Jn 14:23) and join with what we find Jesus doing as he experiences the grieving of a community upon the death of a friend: he weeps.

May we learn to grieve well. May we find solidarity with one another through grief. May we not avoid it but enter into it as Jesus entered into our world – fully engaged with the suffering of humanity to bring hope and redemption. Amen.