Friday, January 27, 2023

Sermon 4 - Grief and Dying to Self

Sermon 4 - Grief and Dying to Self

And this is love, that we walk according to his commandments; this is the commandment just as you have heard it from the beginning--you must walk in it. - 2 John 1:6

I am a grieving widower.  I have experienced grief.  I have also been studying grief, and, if I can put it this way, the grief industry.  That is, the people and organizations providing support and counseling to the bereaved. (I am a systems analyst.  If I am going to grieve, I am going to study grief, and find out all the aspects of it.)

One of the items that I have come across, in my studies, is a book about how the brain deals with grief.  Well, at least the author is a neurologist, and seems to have a feeling that she has some insight into how the brain actually processes grief. 

According to Mary-Frances O'Connor, the grief, and the grieving, are not the same thing.   Grief is the feeling, possibly the emotion, possibly a syndrome of emotions, experienced when you have had a loss.  Grieving is not the experience of grief, but rather an adaptation.  It is the learning, or the relearning (or even the unlearning), of the difference between the world as you knew it with the loved one and the new world without the loved one in it.

I have found the book extremely interesting.  As a teacher, and as a lifelong learner, anything to do with learning is of interest to me.  And so, looking at grief, or to use O'Connor's terminology, grieving, as a form of learning is an interesting speculation.

We build mental models of the world around us.  When you have a close relationship with someone, be that a parent, a spouse, a partner, or any other close relationship, our map of the world includes that person and that relationship.  When we lose that relationship our map of the world becomes flawed.  That map is still there, and that person is still there in our mental map.  But the map no longer corresponds to reality.  The disparity, discontinuity, or difference, between the two causes confusion, which we feel, in a variety of ways, as grief.

In any case, her central thesis is that grief is our brain's reaction to the fact that our mental model of the world, following a bereavement, still is based upon the existence of the loved one who has died.  Grief is, in some way, our experience of what is happening while the brain is correcting the model: unlearning the references to the existence of our loved one in the immediate world, and relearning new references to the world without the loved one in it.

I was explaining this concept to a pastor.  The pastor's almost immediate response was that this was an interesting illustration, or reference, to the Christian concept that one needs to die to self in order to live for Christ.

We build mental models of the world.  We have these models in our minds, as references to guide us as to how the world works.  These models are not mere inventories of facts.  When I was trying to explain the concept of the mental model, with and without the deceased loved one in it, to a colleague, his reaction was that if you were unlearning the mental model after the loved one died, did that mean that you forgot all memory of them.  This is not the case.  But our mental model of the world, when it contains a significant other, does provide us with expectations.  We expect that when we are sad or disappointed, the significant other will try to support our mental state.  The significant other will try to make us feel less bad about whatever the problem is.  The significant other will possibly try to distract us, with more cheerful thoughts.

We have learned this about our significant other.  Over time we have come to realize that we can expect this assistance.  This is something about the way the world works, and it becomes part of our mental model of the world.  When the significant other has died, and is no longer there, we have to unlearn these expectations, and relearn other expectations about how the world works when we are sad, or lonely, or angry.

We have other aspects to our mental maps.  And, of course, our mental map of the world has a central idea which we either believe, or we don't.  We believe that there is a God who is in charge of the universe, and created it.  Or we don't.  We believe that God is a personal God, and a good God, and loves us.  Or we don't.

There is an interesting piece of advice that the Bible gives us with regard to marriage.  It says that we should not be unequally yoked with unbelievers.  A lot of people may simply see this as the same advice given in a song in the musical play "West Side Story," to stick with "your own kind."  In one sense it probably is, but it does go somewhat deeper than that.  Marriage, which is a complicated business, is difficult enough at any time.  You don't need to make it more difficult by being married to someone whose central belief about this basic fact of the universe differs from yours.

Our mental model of the world, if it does not account for God, is probably fairly self-centered.  After all, if there is no God, there is nothing in the world more important than you.  Okay, yes, there may be other people in the world.  You may even like some of these other people in the world.  But there is no particular reason that any of them are more important than you are, because they are simply people, the same as you.  And there is no reason to prefer them to you.  There is no reason that they are any better than you.  So, if there is no reason that they would be any better than you, there is no reason that you have to defer to them, when their desires are at odds with yours.  Your ideas, desires, and concepts can take central place in your mental map of the universe.  There's no particular reason to do otherwise.

This is a central pillar of our mental models of the world: whether there is a God.  If there is a God, and if God loves us, and if God loves us so much that he has, at great sacrifice, created a means for us to have a relationship with him, when we don't deserve it, we have to react to that.  We have to change our mental model of the world.  Our mental model of the world has to be significantly different then it was before we believed this.  So different, that you might almost say that it has to be completely destroyed and rebuilt again.  Almost as if we died.

So we have to die.  Our original mental model of the world, which did not account for the existence of God, has to be destroyed.  It has to die.  We have to build an entirely new set of expectations.

If God exists, God is much more important than we are.  God's concepts, ideas, and desires are more important than ours.  They are probably more correct than ours.  God has the owner's manual for the universe; we don't.  It is automatic that God is better than we are.

It is also automatic that God has the right to instruct us, and direct us.  God can tell us what to do.  After all, God created us.  God knows what we are for.  The fact that God loves us, knows what is best for us, has made provision for what is best for us, and wants us to have what is best for us, is an added bonus.

We have to rebuild our mental maps.  We have to rebuild our ideas of the universe.  We have to kill our original concept that we know enough to direct our own lives.  We have to die to that idea, and that idea has to die as a part of our mental map of the universe.

Dying is painful.  Even changing our mind is painful.

I like learning.  I am a proponent of lifelong learning.  I like to learn new things.  But I feel pretty strongly that I am in the minority in this.  Most human beings do not like to learn, at least not very much.  We have a saying: "learning experience."  This is what we say of a particularly nasty or unpleasant experience.  People will say to you, "Well it's a learning experience."  To which my usual response is, "I hate learning experiences."  And, it's true.  As much as I love learning, I hate learning experiences.

But many people don't just hate learning experiences, but learning itself.  Change is bad, and learning tends to indicate a change.  Maybe it's a change in your situation which is forcing you to learn something new, or maybe it's simply that when you learn something new you change, and change how you relate to the world around you.  Which tends to make a problem for somebody.  So, overall, human beings don't think too kindly of learning.

If the author of this book about grief is correct, changing our mind, changing our mental model of the universe, is painful, because grief is excruciatingly painful.  The wholesale changes that we have to make in our mental image of the universe results in a lot of pain.  We want to avoid pain.  So we resist changing our minds.  And we resist changing our minds about whether or not God exists.  We don't want to give up our idea of ourselves at the center of the universe.  We don't want to change our model to have someone else, even God, at the center of the universe.  It's a change.  It's painful.  We don't want to do it.

But, of course, until we do change our mind, until we do change our mental model of the universe, we are wrong.  Not only are we wrong, but we are doing the wrong things.  We are basing our decisions on a flawed model.  We are basing our choices, and our relations with the world on an idea that is fatally incorrect and flawed.  There isn't any way to get it right, until we change our mental model.  Until we die to ourselves.

Once we have the correct model; once we know that God is in charge and we are not; a lot of our decisions are going to change.  We are going to be making our choices based on what God wants, rather than what we want.  We are going to be using his laws, and commands, and expectations, to guide what we do in the world, and how we relate to the world.  And, particularly, how we relate to God.

Change is painful.  That is partly why grief is painful.  We are changing.  We have to change: change our ideas, change our ways of doing things, change our considerations, change the way we view the world.  So it is not easy becoming a Christian.  We have to change.  And we suffer grief because of the pain of that change.  We also suffer grief over our sinfulness.  We suffer grief over the time that we have wasted without God.  We suffer grief because of the wrong that we have done, and even our failures, now that we do know God, to follow his ways as well as we might.

As well as feeling grief, we are grieving.  As O'Connor has it, the grieving is our adaptation, our change.  We are grieving and relearning the ways of God as opposed to the ways of the world.  We are grieving, as we are changing and learning, what it is that God wants us to do.  We are changing our model of the world, and we are grieving.  This is good grieving, productive grieving.  This is the grieving that we were meant to do.  We just have to do a little more of it now.

And we have to go on grieving, because we find that it isn't just once that we have to change.  We find that we make one change, and we improve, and we get closer to what God wants us to be.  But then as we get closer we see a little bit more clearly.  And when we see more clearly we see we have to make another change, and then another, and then another.  And at each stage change is involved, and we are grieving.  And then at one point we realize the biggest grief of all: we never will be good enough.  It is not our changing, it is not our improving, it is not our grieving that makes us acceptable to God.  It is not our works.  Our works will never be good enough.  What we have to do is accept that God has accepted us, and God has made provision for us to meet him, and we just have to accept it.  Though we still give grateful thanks for his acceptance of and provision for, us, and we try and be as good as we can, for Him.


Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)