Grief and Faith Side by Side
If you are a person of faith, your beliefs and hopes can be a comfort to you in the grieving process. Having a belief in an afterlife can bring peace and hope. Reassurance from scripture or religious writings or talks can be an absolute comfort. Having clergy to counsel and minister to you can be something to value. A faith community or congregation can be a source of comfort and emotional and physical support during difficult times. Prayer and meditation can often bring peace. Faith can give people perspective and help us make meaning of the difficult times we go through. There are many ways that faith can be an asset to us as we grieve.
However, sometimes I see people pitting their faith against their grief. There's just no reason for this. Grief and faith can co-exist. Experiencing grief does not mean that you lack faith. Experiencing grief does not mean you don't have a testimony. Experiencing grief does not mean you don't trust in God's plan. Experiencing grief means that you are a human on the earth right now. Grief is the normal and natural response when we experience loss. It is the conflicting feelings that come with the end of or a change in a familiar pattern of behavior. It's built-in to our experience as human beings. I love that the word conflicting is how we describe the feelings of grief. It means that there can be multiple feelings, and they can be all over the place, and that's okay. I think we can take great comfort in that.
It is okay to embrace both grief and faith. You can believe you will see your wife again in the afterlife and still be devastated that she's not here to share the rest of your time on earth. You can believe your grandpa has reunited with grandma and enjoy imagining their happy reunion, and still feel sad that they aren't here to watch your kids grow up. You can believe that God has a plan for you and your life and still feel disappointed and upset that infertility is part of your journey. You can believe you were following a prompting from God or an answer to prayer in marrying someone and then be so hurt when your marriage ends that you can wonder how God was ever involved at all. You can believe in a God who loves you and also wonder why this life contains so much seemingly senseless suffering.
If you are part of a strong faith community, it can be really common to worry about what other people think, especially when they comfort you with things like "At least he's with God now." or "We are so grateful to know God's eternal plan for each of us." Those beliefs can be very comforting on a long-term level. But what about your new reality of this life in the here and now? Sometimes we fear looking like we are weak or lack faith -- whether that's to other people or even to ourselves, so we shove all our negative emotion down and pretend we are okay. And then we wonder why we feel so bad! I'll tell you why -- grieving is difficult and utterly exhausting. Pretending you are not grieving when you really are is even more difficult, and it is not sustainable. It will catch up with you -- whether that's with your mental health or in the use of short-term coping mechanisms that help us feel better for a minute but certainly don't solve it and actually create new problems for us most of the time.
Grieving doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with you -- even if you believe all kinds of beautiful things about God and heaven and salvation. There is also nothing wrong with needing professional help to support you in your grief. It's not just for "other people" who don't have faith to fall back on. One of the things I love about teaching the Grief Recovery Method is that while it is not faith or religion-based, you can incorporate your own faith traditions and beliefs. But if you don't come from a religious background, it does not try to impose any traditions or beliefs on you.
Faith can be a beautiful part of your healing process. Use your faith as a tool to help you heal, not as a tool to beat yourself (or anyone else for that matter!) up. Embracing the AND of faith and grief can be hard to do, but when you give yourself permission to hold both simultaneously, your load becomes lighter instead of heavier.
