The Search for God and the Sense of Loss

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As a young man I worked part of a summer in a cemetery, mostly cutting grass and pulling weeds. I had to help dig graves a couple of times and I had to bury Mrs. Fogarty whom I had known since childhood. Yet another time while waiting to help with a burial, I had my first and only experience of keening.

For those unfamiliar with the term, keening is the wailing – sometimes done by professional keeners – that grieving people in some cultures do at burials. In this case, the Italian widow of the deceased released ear-splitting cries, screamed to heaven and attempted to fling herself into the grave. Such behavior may appear to people outside the culture as senseless and insincere, but it’s one way of dealing with extreme loss. 

To me, it’s also an extreme example of the significance of “loss aversion.” The idea, according to Wikipedia, “refers to people's tendency to strongly prefer avoiding losses to acquiring gains. Most studies suggest that losses are twice as powerful, psychologically, as gains.” I can easily see this in my life and those of friends and family members.

First, there are the “great” losses: deaths, divorce, break-ups, grave illnesses, disastrous financial losses, career or personal failures. They can be devastating, making you wonder if you’ll ever recover.

But aside from these, you may, like me, have periods when you feel down for no apparent reason. When I’ve analyzed them, I usually can see that I’m “mourning” some minor loss or irrationally anticipating one.

I don’t know whether it provides some “evolutionary” advantage, but it’s obvious that human beings have a great need to possess and preserve. And when they can’t possess and preserve – whether people or things – they get bummed out.

David Brooks
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New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote a column a year ago noting that contemporary Americans are nearly obsessed with “happiness” but that it’s their experience of overcoming loss that brings peace that tends to last.

“…The theologian Paul Tillich wrote that people who endure suffering are taken beneath the routines of life and find they are not who they believed themselves to be. The agony involved in, say … having lost a loved one smashes through what they thought was the bottom floor of their personality, revealing an area below, and then it smashes through that floor revealing another area.

“Then, suffering gives people a more accurate sense of their own limitations, what they can control and cannot control. …Try as they might, they just can’t tell themselves to stop feeling pain, or to stop missing the one who has died or gone. And even when tranquility begins to come back, or in those moments when grief eases, it is not clear where the relief comes from. The healing process, too, feels as though it’s part of some natural or divine process beyond individual control.”

(Brooks has become one of my favorite “theologians,” by the way, writing about subjects that often touch on God and the transcendent, but usually not using those words. He had a recent interview about why careers, including his, don’t make you happy. It was posted on National Public Radio’s web site at http://www.npr.org/2015/04/13/399391894/take-it-from-david-brooks-career-success-doesnt-make-you-happy.)

This blog is about the search for God, and I obviously have no expertise in psychology. Loss may be ultimately good for the soul, but in the short term, it can be a hindrance in the search for God. Here’s wikiHow’s top three suggestions for dealing with it:

 

1.    Face the Loss. Confront it; don’t try to mask it by sedation – drugs, alcohol, promiscuity, oversleeping – and set a limit on extended grieving.

2.    Let the pain out. There’s no right or wrong way to express pain. Do you need to cry, scream to the top of your lungs, even engage in keening? Do it, but don’t, of course, do harm to yourself or others.

3.    Share your feelings. It could be with a friend or a professional therapist. (Religious persons shouldn’t forget that clergy are often helpful.)

Of course, I believe that faith plays an important role in coping with loss. And for the seeker of God, there are additional means to deal with it.

1.    Prayer. I’m not referring just to formal prayers, like the Our Father, but to quietly talking it out with God. As I’ve written before, prayer may seem like “talking to yourself,” but just try it.

2.    Gratitude. My daughter has a framed message on her wall that says, “It’s not happy people who are thankful. It’s thankful people who are happy.” That may seem a bit Pollyannish, but I believe gratitude reduces the sense of loss and brings us closer to God.

3.    Trust, in God and God-in-others. A skeptic may have a problem with this and it may come in advanced stages of a search for God. But seeking to be more trustful can surely help overcome loss.