We join the families of those twenty children as we watch their funerals – two yesterday and, probably, more today. Jeremiah wrote a book called Lamentations in the midst of his unspeakable horror. David wrote two-thirds of the Psalms out of his pain. Consider the words of Gerald Sittser. May they serve you as they have served me. In A Grace Disguised, after the horrific loss of his daughter, wife, and mother in a car accident, he wrote: “Catastrophic loss by definition precludes recovery. It will transform us or destroy us, but it will never leave us the same. There is no going back to the past…It is not therefore true that we become less through loss – unless we allow the loss to make us less, grinding our soul down until there is nothing left…Loss can also make us more. I did not get over the loss of my loved ones; rather, I absorbed the loss into my life…until it became part of who I am. Sorrow took up permanent residence in my soul and enlarged it…One learns the pain of others by suffering one’s own pain, by turning inside oneself, by finding one’s own soul…However painful, sorrow is good for the soul…the soul is elastic, like a balloon. It can grow larger through suffering (emphasis added).”
19
Dec
