Sermon 74 - Grief is Hell
Ezekiel 24:16,18
Son of man, with one blow I am about to take away from you the delight of your eyes. ... So I spoke to the people in the morning, and in the evening my wife died.
This sermon is about hell. It's a real old hellfire and damnation sermon. Not one that you might expect, since I'm not big on lakes of burning fire, and whether heaven is hotter than hell, and those kind of staples from the old hellfire and damnation sermons. However, I am going to at least propose what I think hell might be like, and how terrible it is, and encourage you to avoid it at all costs.
The sermon is odd in another way, too. Usually I can tell you where a sermon comes from. How I got the idea, who said what to prompt the idea, or something that I read, and various things like that. For this one I can't. I can tell you the date, and, pretty closely, even the time. I was sitting in church, as I very often am on a Sunday morning, and I was wondering, as it has often happens over the past four and a half years, what the heck I was still doing here, without Gloria, or purpose, and why I was still here. On earth. And suddenly the idea for this sermon came to me, with only a little work needed to fill out some of the verbiage. And it's a little scary. I couldn't think about anything else until I got it all out. It's the closest thing that I have ever experienced to being given a prophecy. And I certainly don't want to claim that this is a word or message directly from God, since I could very well be wrong. Although I do hope that, now that I have written it down, that maybe the reason that I have been living in such grief and pain for the past four and a half years has been fulfilled, and that God will finally let me die, and go home, and rest. I have been tired and lonely, and I have certainly been living in hell.
I am a grieving widower. A lot of you will know that. It's not fun, but grief teaches you a lot of things.
CS Lewis also teaches us a lot of things. I'm pretty sure that it was CS Lewis who proposed the fact that grief is the price of love. If you love greatly, then you grieve greatly. That's the deal.
I'm not sure that CS Lewis was the first person to assert that every human being has a God-shaped hole inside of them. But it was certainly CS Lewis who said that this God-shaped hole proves that God exists. If there is something that we can never fill, with any of the pleasures of life here on earth, something that no joys or rewards can distract you from, that no accomplishments are ever good enough to fill, then the obvious inference is that we were not meant for earth. Our destination is heaven. There is a God-shaped hole in us that only God can fill, and it is only going to be when we do, in fact, have a full relationship with God that we are ever going to be satisfied.
CS Lewis also wrote a book called "The Great Divorce." "The Great Divorce" is a really interesting book. Some people would see it as kind of an extension of some of the fantasy and science fiction that CS Lewis wrote. But "The Great Divorce" really has a significant point to make. I believe that the primary point to be emphasized about "The Great Divorce" is that we are not going to get into heaven if we allow anything to stand in our way. If we set up demands of God, and require that heaven be a certain way, and that if God doesn't fulfill our demands we will not go in, then we are just not going to get into heaven.
A number of the characters in "The Great Divorce" refuse to go into heaven. They are being given an opportunity to get on the bus and go. But they raise objections. Or they want to take something with them. Or they want to make demands. You can't bring your baggage into heaven. You can't take money, you can't take your status, you can't take your accomplishments from Earth, and you can't make demands of God. When I read first read "The Great Divorce," I realized that, well I don't have many accomplishments. I don't have money, I don't have fame, and I certainly don't have any kind of physical skills. But I have always been very proud of my brain, and my ability to think, and the knowledge and education I have accumulated. It's the only good thing I've got. (Aside from Gloria. And now Gloria's dead.) And I realized that, when the time comes to get into heaven, I may be asked to give all that up. After all, God doesn't need me to be smart, in heaven. God is smart enough for all of us. God doesn't need me to know the things that I have learned. God knows everything. He doesn't need our knowledge. So, I might be asked to give up my cognitive abilities and my education in order to get into heaven. And I had to decide, that if that was the price of getting into heaven, then I'd rather go to heaven. I'm not going to demand to take it with me. I can't.
There are a lot of people who say that they don't believe in God, because God is obviously cruel, in turning away those who don't believe in Him from getting to heaven. "The Great Divorce" kind of turns this argument on its head. A secondary point of The Great Divorce" is that it is *our* choice about whether or not we get into heaven. If we don't accept God, and God's rules about our getting into heaven, simply on the basis that it is where God is, then, well, really, and inherently, we cannot have a full relationship with God. Therefore, we don't get into heaven. But that is not *God's* choice, that is *our* choice.
(A kind of tertiary point in The Great Divorce" is that, possibly, after death, we might get a second chance. However, that's not really the point that I want to make here, although I really recommend that you read The Great Divorce." It's got some really interesting points to make.)
Now, I'm going to tell you a little bit about grief. Because grief is hell.
I know a bunch of stuff about grief, but I'm not really an expert. I'm also not really an expert about relationships, or marriage, or romantic relationships, or love. But I was married. And I had a good marriage. As a matter of fact, knowing what I know about a variety of other marriages, I would say that I had a *great* marriage. This is not because it was *my* marriage, or because I particularly know anything special about marriage or relationships or love: I don't. As a matter of fact, I don't know anything about getting married. I don't know anything about dating. As far as I know, I have never had a date. I never had any girlfriends before I married Gloria. Gloria knew more about dates than I did, and even *she* couldn't figure out whether we actually had any dates before we got married. So I don't know how to woo anybody and I don't know how to get married and I can't give you any advice about that. As far as I know, when they talk about marriages being arranged in heaven, ours must have been, because I had *nothing* to do with it. Our marriage was arranged by a mutual friend who kept pushing and nudging us together. It happened around the time of Expo 86, and Gloria hadn't gone to Expo 86 very much, and I knew absolutely everything there was to know about every pavilion on the property, having spent some time pretty much every single day of the first month that the fair was open going around to the various pavilions. And our mutual friend kept telling Gloria that she should get me to take her around Expo, because I knew everything there was to know about Expo. And then she spoke to, no, not me, my *mother.* And told my mother that I should take Gloria around Expo because I was such an expert guide. And so we set up what I thought was a date to take Gloria around Expo 86, except that the friend came, with her husband, and my parents came, and Gloria's parents came. So that wasn't really as much a date, as it was me hauling a fairly sizable group around Expo 86 for the evening.
But I do know that we had a great marriage. At one point Gloria found an article that talked about the fact that most married couples, after they have been married for some time, only spend about fifteen minutes per week actually having a conversation with each other. Beyond just "pass the salt." Gloria and I talked to each other constantly. We had to record whatever we watched on television, including the Canucks games that she loved, and even the TV news, so that, while we were watching it, when she asked a question, we could pause what we were watching, and talk about whatever it was that she wanted to know or discuss. I didn't mind that a bit. And when I was out teaching, even though we passed email messages back and forth to each other all day long, I have the telephone bills to prove that we had to spend at least forty-five minutes, each and every day that I was away, talking to each other on the phone.
We are supposed to learn things from marriage. We are supposed to learn about love from marriage. We are, in fact, supposed to learn things about God. Marriage is seen as an analogue, possibly the closest analogue that we have available, of our relationship to God. The relationship between God and His people is often described in terms of a marriage. And, since, as CS Lewis pointed out, love and grieve are inseparable, then grief has to teach us something.
We learned about each other's interests. Gloria was into quilting and embroidery. Her favorite was cross stitch, and so I cross stitched a portrait of Gloria. I learned enough about cross stitch to do that, and I used my computer skills to create a pattern so that I could. Gloria learned about computers. Actually, Gloria was already pretty skilled at understanding what computers could, and couldn't, do. When I started writing books, and Gloria was the reason that I was able to start writing books, Gloria edited all my stuff. I would tell people, and I maintain, to this day, that it was valid, that Gloria was, by the time she finished editing my first book, the fifth leading computer virus expert in Canada.
People who are bereaved are also are often told that the loved one is not really gone. I think that the people who say that kind of thing tend to mean that you remember them. When it said in a TV show, or a movie, it tends to be you always carry them in your heart; as long as your love for them is still there, they are still there. I have a somewhat different take on your loved one still being around, even after they have died.
My take is that Gloria is still around, even though she is dead, because I was married to Gloria, and Gloria loved me, and I am different because of it. I learned whatever I know about love from Gloria. I wrote books because of Gloria. Gloria taught me things about my own professional life. I am a management consultant, and Gloria's experiences informed some of my own ideas about management. As a teacher, the questions that Gloria would ask, and the areas that I would explain, and she *didn't* understand, changed the way that I teach. I also learned an enormous amount about teaching given Gloria's amazingly intuitive understanding of how children learn. In regard to my work in information security, Gloria definitely affected the way that I think about privacy. She also contributed a metric to my work on software forensics, and at least one entry in the "Dictionary of Information Security." Gloria is still with me, because I am different, because I was married to Gloria.
And then she died. And I died, too. I just haven't stopped breathing yet.
Just as a digression here, if we are grieving, and you don't know what to say, well, first of all you don't need to say anything, you can just listen. But, if you do want to say something, you don't need to avoid saying the name of our loved one who is dead. In all of my experience in grief support, I have never once had anyone refuse to talk about their loved one (or dearly departed, if you prefer), with anyone who cares. It doesn't hurt us to hear our loved one's name. It doesn't hurt us to hear anyone's remembrance of our loved one. (We may cry, but we do that anyway.) We don't talk about our loved ones, because we know that you guys don't care. We don't like to talk about our loved ones to anyone who doesn't care. I will talk about Gloria to anyone who will listen. To anyone who can't walk away. (As you might have noticed.)
So, as I say, Gloria died. In the book of Ezekiel, in chapter 24, and verses 16 and 18, God says to Ezekiel, "Son of man, with one blow I am about to take away from you the delight of your eyes." And then in chapter 18 Ezekiel goes on, "So I spoke to the people in the morning, and in the evening my wife died." And that was pretty much the way it was for me. At one stroke God took away my best friend. I have had friends in my life. With my professional life, I have friends all over the world. I have had some good friends. I have had some friends that I have known a lot longer than I have known Gloria. But Gloria was my best friend. Gloria was the person that I most wanted to talk to. In any situation. About any topic. Gloria was my love. Gloria was my family. Gloria *gave* me a family. At one point, when we were arguing, Gloria said to me that she figured that I liked her family better than I liked my own family. I argued that I didn't, and gave her a counter example: I said that I liked *my* mother-in-law more than *her* mother-in-law. Gloria helped me in my work. And, because, as she said, frequently, her body was never her friend, for about half of the time that we were married, I was Gloria's caregiver, in one way or another. So, when I lost Gloria, I lost my job. I lost my purpose in life.
And now I am alone. I am grieving. I am in hell.
(This has nothing to do with Port Alberni. There is a lovely lady who attends the computer activity. We have a standing disagreement. She holds that I have an unreasoning prejudice against Port Alberni, and never miss an opportunity to say something nasty about it. I maintain that I simply tell the truth about Port Alberni, albeit in the most amusing way possible.)
Anyway, this is not about Port Alberni. This is about grief.
Grief is hell. And, since equivalences can be reversed, hell is grief.
I have lost Gloria. There is a Gloria shaped hole in my life. It is terrible. It is painful. It is hell.
And that is only a *human* sized hole. That is only a hole in my life because someone came into my life and made a space in it. And, now that that person is gone, there is a hole in my life. It is a hole that wasn't there before.
Another digression. I asked Gloria to marry me, and, a couple of hours later, she said yes. (We will not, currently, examine the fact that it took her a couple of hours to say yes.) The point that I want to make is that, a week later, she said she wanted to change her mind. She said that she didn't think that she loved me as much as I loved her. I said that I was willing to risk it, and we did get married. And, a few years later, Gloria started calling me a worm. It was in relation to the fact that she didn't, initially, love me all that much. But that I had *wormed* my way into her heart.
So that's human love.
But what is human love in comparison to God's love? What is a human-sized hole, that wasn't there in our lives in the first place, in comparison to a God-sized hole? In comparison to the fact that we were *created* with a God-sized hole in our lives? What is the chief end of man? Why were we created in the first place? To glorify God and enjoy him forever. We have a God-shaped hole in us, that only God can fill.
And so, hell is grief. I am grieving over the loss of Gloria. But I never loved Gloria, I never *could* love Gloria, as much as God loves Gloria. I never could love Gloria as much as God loves me. And so whatever pain I am feeling now over the loss of Gloria could never be anything to the unending pain of the grief of not having a relationship with God, in eternity. A never ending grief, a never ending ache, over a void that will never be filled, and never could be filled with anything else.
I am grieving, and I'm in hell, and I'm in pain. And I distract myself with volunteer work of various kinds. And with writing sermons that nobody ever listens to. And with still researching little tidbits about my profession and career. So I have some brief distractions, at times, from my pain over Gloria's absence.
But, of course, in eternity there aren't going to be any distractions. And the grief of not having a relationship with God is going to be so much greater than my grief over Gloria.
Hell is grief. Painful, unending, horribly massive grief over the absence of the One who loves us more than anyone does, or ever could.
So, possibly I am in hell, temporarily, so that you, or so that someone, is warned away and doesn't have to be in there permanently.
Grief series
Sermon 22 - Grief Illiteracy
Sermon 4 - Grief and Dying to Self
Sermon 7 - faith and works, and intuitive vs instrumental grief
Sermon 10 - Why Job
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