Your not Processing; Your Grieving

As some writers have noted, we have replaced many of our ordinary modes of discourse with therapeutic and pseudo-scientific language (a. , b. c.d.). A consequence is that we lose touch with our humanity.

For instance, we describe ourselves as ‘processing’ when we are grieving or as getting a dopamine hit when we are playing tennis. These terms are dehumanizing and misleading.

Processing either describes a mechanical activity (i.e., that of a computer) or it describes a journey from point A to point B. Neither of these are very accurate descriptions of grief. The point of grieving is not to get to point B and leave behind point A. The father who has lost his little child is not just working through this sorrow in order to get to a new place. He also learns to live with his sorrow, and if a Christian, to live in hope. Sorrow is not merely ‘processed.’ He does not suddenly get it  and move one. To someone who told him he needed to process his sorrow, an appropriate response might be, “get bent.”

I would like to suggest four reasons we opt for such language:

A. It is ubiquitous and we imitate those around us

B. We like to look intelligent and like to think we understand ourselves deeply

C. We have a reductive understanding of what it is to be human–we reduce ourselves to chemicals and mechanics, and largely ignore or relegate ourselves to passive viewers of these processors (which we are not). We possess a profound unity which is not purely rational but deeply rational and reasonable

D. We are ashamed of being human

It is this last one I wish to say something about. When we describe ourselves as processing, whether we understand this as active or passive, we place ourselves in a position of doing or accomplishing something. While grief often demands courageous activity in the face of sorrow and sometimes very difficult confrontations with ourselves and the world, the fact is that sorrow is not merely something we process away. Grief is part of who we are and the fact that we love and lose.

In the past, men and women walked through life bearing grief, unafraid and unashamed to bear the signs of morning. This did not mean wearing a sad face all the time (Matt. 6:17), but it did not entail a responsibility to work through grief as if it were an embarrassing problem or mistake (Matt. 2:18; Gen. 47:9).

I am far from saying that we have no work to do when we are weighed down by grief or when we cease to be able to live as we are called to. I am simply insisting that the human heart is not a processor. If the heart is made to love our fellow human beings, it is surely made to grieve their loss, and until we meet them again, we are in a state of grief, one which may be transformed, but which only passes away entirely if we cease to love.

It is perhaps no accident that therapeutic language coincides with a kind of self-control, agency, a modernistic self-sufficiency and inward focus which falsifies our dependencies: I am enough and I am in control. But it is just as true that this way of speaking and thinking falsifies our deep commitments and values.

The hearts capacity for sorrow is a sign both of our capacity for love, but also of God’s infinite capacity for compassion, an indomitable love that overcomes all things.

Grief does reveal that we are have in some sense been conquered, but when it is rightly ordered it reveals that what has conquered us is not just the weakness of our flesh. Or rather, that this very weakness, the very fact that we are flesh and not machine, means that we have been given human hearts.

Let us not be ashamed of tears, of heavy hearts, of grief, confusion, and all those things that are a function of our humanity and let us not cover them over with the pretension of knowledge or with the pretensions entailed by ‘self-care’ or a ‘journey of maturity.’

Let us be unashamedly wounded. For the Christian, to be so is most certainly to be more like our Lord.