“All change is loss; all loss must be grieved.”
This saying is attributed to Don Garner, retired professor of Old Testament, and he has the credentials to be heard.
Not only was he a teacher with a specialty in wisdom literature, especially the book of Job, he is a father who lost a son in a tragic car accident. He knows something about loss and grief.
Scott Erwin
We are living in an unprecedented time of change. Not only are the changes we’re experiencing massive in impact, they are massive in rapidity.
How many times since 2020 have we said something along the lines of, “This is a once-in-a-lifetime experience”?
I’ve had enough of these experiences. Change has touched so many parts of our lives. It has affected our families, our churches, our politics, our nation and our ways of thinking about the world.
“I’ve had enough of these experiences. Change has touched so many parts of our lives.”
So many people had to say goodbye to loved ones in COVID without being able to see them. My mom died in June 2020 because of COVID. Three of the dearest people in the world to me have been battling cancer, and one recently lost his battle.
Matt Cook, a respected church consultant, said at the beginning of COVID that churches changed more in six months than they had in the previous 60 years. Not only is that true, it is mind-blowing.
After the pandemic, so many people have not returned to church. Every type of congregation is seeing unrelenting losses in members and income. Thousands of churches are closing their doors.
I don’t need to say anything about our political landscape other than to point out it is causing families, relationships and communities to be shattered. Because so much is happening so fast, the only way to be heard is to be the loudest most outraged voice.
Most of my professional career has been spent in institutions struggling through extraordinary change. I have served as pastor of two churches experiencing massive transition. I have worked in a number of nonprofits in transition.
My consulting with churches and religious nonprofits has focused on change management. I realized early in that process that many people were showing traditional signs of what I had learned to be grief. People were in denial, they were angry, some were bargaining, many were depressed, and a few were accepting.
Elizabeth Kuhbler-Ross’s five stages of grief are helpful to identify what I was seeing but left me at a loss to help people move through this kind of grief.
In her book Searching for Sunday, Rachel Held Evans pointed out there was no space for grieving the loss of faith as she previously had known it. Brian McClaren, in Faith After Doubt, starts with a chapter called “Doubt as Loss.”
Both authors point out that in response to their experience of grief, people most often responded by drawing lines, offering up pithy statements or dismissing the matter altogether.
So many of us know these responses all too well.
When we lost our daughter, Annabelle, late in utero, some people said horrific things with good intentions: “God needed a new angel,” “You already have three children; it is probably for the best,” “Heaven needed another flower.”
“How do we grieve our losses caused by change regardless of how large or small?”
You’ve likely heard such things at funerals. We are bad at grief in general, so if Don Garner was right, how do we grieve our losses caused by change regardless of how large or small?
God sent my friend Cathy Anderson to help me find the answer. She is a chaplain in Atlanta (and a brilliant human) who introduced me to Resilient Grieving, a book by Lucy Hone. The author used her education and training as a means of dealing with the death of her daughter, Abbi. She outlines six specifics in the early experience of facing grief:
- There are no rules
- Focus your attention
- Take your time
- Feel the pain, don’t run from it
- Anticipate grief “ambush”
- Establish routine
She then outlines five ongoing strategies:
- Share with others
- Cultivate positive emotions
- Utilize skillful distractions
- Balance rest and activity
- Use rituals
That is a lot to take in for one article, so let’s focus on just one facet. How might we focus our attention when attempting to navigate the grief and loss of change?
Hone relies on work in resilience done by Karen Reivich, who proposes a basic beginning I find extremely helpful every day. She calls it “Hunt for the Good Stuff.”
Find something good. Savor it. Hold gratitude for it.
This echoes many of the mystics in our faith who find God in the little things. The Hebrew Bible calls them hepzibah or “my delight.”
This brings me back to Cathy. This past year, her amazing husband, Bruce, was diagnosed with and died from prostate cancer. Cathy is now teaching me about holding grief in one hand and gratitude in the other.
When change is overwhelming me, I now look for the good stuff. If possible, I take a picture of it. I take some time to savor the moment. I practice gratitude.
I know none of this fixes anything in our culture but it helps reorient the day so I can be better prepared to the work I am called to do.
Scott A. Erwin is a consultant with churches and religious nonprofits working mostly in change management. He earned a master of divinity degree from Princeton Theological Seminary and has been ordained pastoral ministry for over 25 years.
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