Valerie's voice on the phone was hoarse with emotion, and of course my thoughts flew right to the kids. We've known Chris and Valerie's oldest, six-year-old Jack, since the day he was born. As close friends and neighbors, we were his first visitors in the maternity ward, and since his biological grandparents live so far away, were quickly adopted as stand-ins.
When a rambunctious daughter was born into this young family a couple of years later, it felt natural and right to become her godparents. And her little sister's recent birth has been a blessing for all of us. Our own grandchildren didn't begin arriving till this year, so these three have filled the role of cherished extended family. Thus, the obvious grief in Valerie's voice chilled me. Had something happened to the kids?
Thank God, I thought, when she assured me that everything was fine — at their house at least. Instead, she was calling to tell me about someone else's tragedy. A family in Southern California had lost all three of their children in a terrible car accident. No, she said, when I asked if she knew them personally. But they live close by. And that poor mom was just doing what I and all the other moms do every day: driving her kids to school. They were strapped in their car seats. She was waiting to get off at a jammed freeway exit. And one minute later, her car was rammed by a semi and they were gone: a boy and two little girls, the very same ages as ours.
In Valerie's voice I heard the ancient grief foretold by the prophet Jeremiah: "A voice was heard in Ramah, sobbing and loud lamentation; Rachel weeping for her children, and she would not be consoled, since they were no more."
When we love what is mortal, we automatically enter what Psalm 23 calls the "valley of the shadow of death." Every step on the path of love is a step closer to the final farewell. Friends grow old and lose their memories, beloved spouses succumb to cancer, children are killed by truck drivers.
The alternative, however — refusing to love because we fear the painful cost it will almost certainly extract from us — invites a different and worse kind of death, the death of the spirit. For we have been invited into the life of a God whose very nature is love. In the first letter of John, this truth is stated with unmistakable clarity: "Beloved, let us love one another, because love is of God; everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God. Whoever is without love does not know God, for God is love."
More, "there is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear because fear has to do with punishment, and so one who fears is not yet perfect in love. We love because he first loved us." In other words, despite the realities of natural disaster, human carelessness and cruelty, and physical death for all that lives and breathes, we can safely open our hearts to one another and to the world, for God is with us in our suffering and grief. And he knows what we need — strength and sustenance in the worst moments of loss — and has promised to provide it.
"Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted," Jesus tells the crowds on the Mount of Beatitudes. Our tears of grief are not evidence of weakness to be overcome, but are rooted in who we are and who God has created us to be. He does not require us to be stoics. Neither does he require that we bear the crushing pain of an open heart all on our own. John's great vision in Revelations of the "new heaven and the new earth" brings out this deep and tender concern for the grief that inevitably follows human loving: "He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there shall be no more death or mourning, wailing or pain, for the old order has passed away."
I tried my best to get some of this across to Valerie in those first moments of horror at what had just happened to a family so much like her own. I tried to tell her that no matter how vigilant we are, no matter how we try to avoid it, the possibility of blazing devastation haunts our every moment here on earth. But by continuing to open our hearts in love despite this dark reality, we declare that death is not the victor. We add our witness to the joyful Christian declaration that Christ, indeed, has trampled down death. And we offer our love as a living sacrifice, in the same way he offered his.
(Reprinted by permission of the Monterey Observer — originally titled "Keeping An Open Heart," June 2007 issue).
