Categories: uncategorized
Date: 27 February 2009 12:04:35
The phone call didn’t say “Would you mind..” or “would you be able to..” or “I was wondering whether...”. The phone call said “I have a hymn I want you to play for us on Sunday”. I wonder if it was a deliberate ploy, after all, this person knows what’s happening in our lives at the moment and how difficult I’m finding it to make my way through the whole of a church service without even a moment’s step outside to hide my tears. It’s a long time since I’ve played in church. A long time since I’ve stood at the front, in full view of everyone, and my seat of choice has moved from the front row to the back, near the door. But presented to me as a fait accompli, it was never going to be something I could easily refuse to do.
I stood in the kitchen after the phone call. Slightly shell-shocked, I think. The tune I am to play seemed to rub it all in. Jesus put this song into our hearts? The song we sang at my eldest son’s christening and thanksgiving service? I started mulling over the words. Song in our hearts, yes OK. Jesus taught us how to be a family? OK. Jesus turned our sorrow into dancing, turned our tears of sadness into rivers of joy? How could I play that, let alone sing it?
Odd, then, that I found myself not only mulling over the words, but singing them? Singing them at the top of my voice in the privacy of my kitchen? And not only singing them, but dancing them? The sorrow is profound at the moment, so profound that I’m a little afraid of it. Sentencing has moved a step nearer and I won’t see my son again before we’re together in that courtroom for (hopefully) the last time. But I know, deep inside, that I will survive it; changed, but intact and safe through God’s love for me and for him.
Sorrow can be scary. But just as Jesus wept outside the tomb of his friend Lazarus, I believe there is a place for weeping. I’ve set aside a safe time to grieve my loss once sentencing is over, and grieve I shall. I sometimes wonder, when a funeral is heavily biased towards being a celebration of life and fails to acknowledge the depth of loss and sorrow and give space for tears, whether it misses something healing. When I asked the doctor whether I needed something to help me sleep and eat better, she said that I needed not to mask my emotions, but to feel them and go through it – and she was right. I’ve managed six months without antidepressants and will go through the grieving process which is to come without them too, I hope. I shall grieve, but Jesus will turn my sorrow into dancing – I won’t grieve for ever.