Pastor's Corner: Sharing our joy, sharing our grief

Lutefisk: the piece of cod that passeth all understanding. I was so grateful to finally try this Norwegian delicacy at last week's Lutefisk and Swedish Meatball Dinner. I admit: I loved the fellowship more than the fish, but it's the fish that gives us the reason for the fellowship. And joy shared is joy multiplied.

I think the same is often true of grief. Grief shared is grief divided. At the Greater Havre Area Ministerial Association's February meeting, the pastors heard a presentation by the facilitator of a GriefShare group. GriefShare is a nationally known, 13-week program. At each meeting, the group watches a video, has a discussion, and is given material to work on, at their own pace, during the week. GriefShare is nondenominational, and participants can begin attending at any point. If you are grieving the death of a family member or friend, this could be an opportunity to share the burden. The facilitator, Les Odegard, is planning on starting another group in March, Mondays at 6:30 p.m. at the Fifth Avenue Christian Church. If you are interested, please speak with any pastor in town, and we can direct you to Les.

A few years ago, there was a death in my extended family, and even me, a more distant relative, got the message loud and clear to not post on social media about the death. And it got me thinking about the guidelines for grieving in the digital age. Society has changed so much and so fast that some of the standards for how families react to deaths haven't been able to keep up.

In past generations, there were pretty strict standards and clear formulas for how families and communities dealt with grief over the death of a member. And given the universal nature of death and grieving, it's no surprise that every culture on every continent created rituals for dealing with death. These rituals, almost across the board, provided ways to honor the dead, allowed the bereaved to give public voice to their private grief, and reincorporated the bereaved members back into the group. For example, in one Native American group, a widow wears sackcloth during the period of official mourning, but once that's over, she throws off the rags to reveal a dress made with the colors of the rainbow. In the Western model, the widow might wear black for at least a year, and then reintroduce muted colors slowly.

These practices gave form and function to grief, which can be helpful. But they also sometimes stifled the unique ways that each person deals with deep loss. What if you still want to wear black after a year has passed since the death? What if you want to wear color after just a few months? Typically, society's rituals didn't leave a lot of room for individual expression.

But our society has changed. Most of us no longer live in the kind of tight-knit societies that so carefully dictated the patterns for our grief. Some religious expressions still provide a really high level of ritual, but many religions and denominations today don't have that kind of reach. When a whole bunch of German Lutherans lived really close, or a lot of Orthodox Jews, or a big community of Amish, then those customs could still be practiced and understood by your neighbors or by the people you'd see at the store. But today, we're all spread out. Our society has become more individualized. The "standards" that once guided how we mourned have been loosened.

So there's more freedom in some ways for how we grieve - we're not forced to wear black for a year or forced to stay at home all the time. But this freedom has come at a price. There are no longer ways of acceptably grieving in public. There's pressure to hide our grief and deal with it privately. There's also less guidance and communal wisdom around what to do with grief, for both the bereaved themselves and the community who surrounds them. Groups like GriefShare can fill in the gap, offering support, community, and a way to grow thru grief. Perhaps they can even offer us the peace of God that passeth all understanding.

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Pastor Megan Hoewisch

First Lutheran Church