JR. Forasteros - November 26, 2017
The End of Lament
In times of trauma and grief, it feels like all the structures that keep our lives stable have been stripped away. But as we enter into the process of Lament, those structures begin to reemerge. It’s not daylight yet, but we can begin to sense that the long night of our grief is ending. Hope draws us together and invites those voices who have long been silenced to be front and center.
From Series: "Good Grief"
We avoid pain and grief as much as possible. When faced with someone else's grief, we avoid or offer platitudes. But the book of Lamentations invites us to sit with grief, to enter into the prophetic process of Lament. In this series, we'll explore how to grieve and how to be a friend to the grieving. Ultimately, we'll see how the process of lament invites us to be agents of healing in the larger world.
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Today’s about Ghost stories. Though they appear in many forms, the quintessential ghost story involves the spirit of a dead person who’s stayed around (usually a haunted house) because they have unfinished business. Maybe they have to deliver a message or ensure proper burial or get revenge. Whatever the case, once their business is complete, they leave into the afterlife.
Unlike our previous two monsters, today we’re not ghosts. Rather, to quote Peter Rollins,
We are the haunted houses. — Peter Rollins
We move through life collecting hurts, wounds and scars, evidence of pain inflicted on us by other people. Some may be slight, exaggerated in our heads – maybe someone who cuts us off or says something cruel or who causes us harm by accident. Others could be huge, life-altering. A spouse who left. An abuser. And there’s a whole range of hurts between.
Whatever their source, however legitimate or not, these people, these hurts don’t just exit our lives.
We carry them around with us, in our heads and in our souls. They haunt us, returning again and again out of the ether to drag us through the past, to relive history, to reopen old wounds.
The problem is we don’t know what these ghosts want. We don’t know how to resolve their business and get them to leave us. We can’t escape their haunting – especially if the person who hurt you is still a part of your life.
