In my own grief, I’ve experienced a tension between grieving deeply and intensely while trusting fully and faithfully in God. On the one hand, it is challenging to reconcile how someone can trust in God and yet feel so depressingly low emotionally. Is grief a sign of weak, dying faith? On the other hand, a Christian’s emotions should gauge between joy as “the fruit of the Spirit” and thankfulness since “all things work together for our good.” Is faith better off when a stoic detachment masks the negative emotions?
In her poem, A Better Resurrection, the 19th-century Christian poetess, Christina Rossetti, captures a rawness of her pain that exposes violent emotions. The three-stanza poem contours the dark, depressing side to her grief that eclipses and assaults her living. The petrifying distress drags her down—soul, wit, hopes, eyelids. There is no Spring or Summer in this descent. Only faded leaves, dwindled harvests, barren dusks, bud-less, wilted Springs, broken bowls, frozen living—expressions of cold emptiness and dark solitude. Whatever the nature of her loss, her strong and vulnerable emotional pain grows exhausting, numbing, and debilitating:
I have no wit, no words, no tears;
My heart within me like a stone
Is numb’d too much for hopes or fears;
Look right, look left, I dwell alone;
I lift mine eyes, but dimm’d with grief
No everlasting hills I see;
My life is in the falling leaf: O Jesus, quicken me. (first stanza)
From the silent depth of the weak, grieved self, the narrator calls on Jesus three times in each of the stanzas. She calls on him for revival (O Jesus, quicken me), for indwelling (O Jesus, rise in me), and for service (O Jesus, drink of me). The language of her pleas reflects a faith that Jesus is more than capable of meeting each of her needs for life, healing, and missional use. She knows that no one else outside of Christ can and would be able to breathe life back into her wit, words, tears, hearts, hopes, fears, eyes, life, and grief. Though the poem ends with the narrator still waiting for God’s intervention, what’s been established is the reality of bringing conflicting emotions of grief in faith to Jesus, waiting for God to act.
In my own grief, I’ve experienced a tension between grieving deeply and intensely while trusting fully and faithfully in God. On the one hand, it is challenging to reconcile how someone can trust in God and yet feel so depressingly low emotionally. Is grief a sign of weak, dying faith? On the other hand, a Christian’s emotions should gauge between joy as “the fruit of the Spirit” and thankfulness since “all things work together for our good.” Is faith better off when a stoic detachment masks the negative emotions?
