A Grief Unobserved

A multitude of psalms are lament.  Which got me thinking about how terribly our culture grieves.  We do not have time in our busy schedules to do this.  "The show must go on" as the saying goes and we find that after having a few days to organize funeral arrangements we must get back to work.  This is the case for even close family members it seems.  A friend of mine who is a professor at Baylor studies death and dying trends in our culture. She sees more and more outlets for grief like stickers on the back of cars remembering loved ones and tattoos of the person's name.  




    It is no surprise to her that our culture has a renewed fascination with immortality and death scene in pop culture films that feature vampires and zombies. 



In Egypt, people are expected to spend at least 40 days in morning.  Some people wear black for a year as a symbolic act of grieving their loved ones.  At first, it sounds strange but I think there is something to this. 40 days of not talking to anyone or going to work (if it was a close family member).  Perhaps one doesn't need the whole 40 days but at least you are given the opportunity to move through the stages of grieving.

I think this is severely lacking in our culture.  My mother is still grieving her mother's death ten years later because there was no time to carve out of her demands at work when it happened.  I think the psalms point us in a good and healthy act of expressing emotions that are distressing and may make others uncomfortable.  We need to be leaders in normalizing grief in our churches and being good, healthy examples ourselves.