Kate
Bradford
Early in my
time, ministering as paediatric chaplain I was called to attend to the withdrawal
of life support to a baby a few weeks old. The baby looked perfect in every way
but he had an in-operable genetic condition. I felt nervous and inexperienced.
I prayed
with the parents acknowledging the deep sorrow and pain of the situation, praying
that they may know God’s comfort as they and their little son, pass through
this deep, dark valley of the shadow of death. On that cold winter’s morning,
together we asked Jesus in his mercy to prepare to receive this little child
today into to his eternal care. At the moment the monitors ceased to register
any vital signs of earthly life, the father left the room.
I stayed
with the mother as a nurse gently removed intubation tubing and canulas, gently
placing Pooh Bear plasters over wounds where tubes and lines had been
removed. The baby was clothed in a baby jumpsuit and placed in his mother’s
arms. The nurse left.
The mother
cradled her baby, weeping noiselessly. We sat together in the silence. After an
interval she asked me, ‘Have you ever seen a dead baby before?’ I thought for a
moment and answered, ‘Not in this hospital, but in another on the other side of
the world.’ ‘Where?’ she asked. ‘A rural hospital in Africa,’ I replied.
The mother
asked simply, ‘What would they do in Africa? What would it be like there?’ I
explained that the room would be filled with women all sitting on the ground
with shawls and scarves covering their heads, some women would wail, but most would
be murmuring – weeping for you and crying out to God softly. Every one of those
women would be with you in your loss.’ We fell into silence.
After a
time she replied, ‘I think I would have liked that.'
Sometime
later I was leaving the room as the husband entered. As we passed each other at
the door he asked me directly, ‘How does a good God allow this to happen?’ I
replied without thinking, ‘We live in a very fallen and broken world.’ He
glanced at me with incomprehension and walked past me into the room.
I walked
back to my office.
◊―◊―◊
Thus a
journey had begun. How had I got it so right and then immediately, so wrong? I had
spoken truths to both parents, one had been comforted yet the other, utterly
bewildered. It became clear to me that truth and timing were intimately related.
The right thing said at the wrong time, was not half right – it was wrong. I started
to search for answers. I read John Munday and Frances
Wohlenhaus-Munday’s Surviving the Death of a Child (1995). John and
Frances include a chapter called; ‘There are no easy answers’. In this a
chapter the authors suggest a ‘theology of accompaniment’ and advise that if
something is easy to say, then, don’t say it.
I then read Stanley
Hauerwas’ Naming the Silences : God,
Medicine, and the Problem of Suffering (1990). He explained the mechanisms of theodicies and why
they are not helpful. I heard Christian sociologist and spiritual
director Susan Philips speak, Susan demonstrates that glib theodicies are not
only unhelpful but destructive, as they have a further consequence of
allocating blame to the sufferer. This theme is further explored in her book Candlelight:
Illuminating the Art of Spiritual Direction, (2008). I encountered the concept of the use of lament
in the writings on pastoral care by Eugene Peterson, Five Smooth Stones for
Pastoral Work (1992), and Walter Brueggemann, The Spirituality of the
Psalms. (2002). I later found Walter C. Kaiser’s Grief and Pain in the Plan of
God: Christ Assurance and the Message of Lamentations, (2004) and Henri Blocher’s Evil and
the Cross: An Analytical Look at the Problem of Pain (1994) helpful for
thinking through issues of sin, grief, pain and evil through theological grids.
I spent a lot of time looking at Wisdom Literature and The Writings
in the Bible observing the way in which they dealt with life as it was not as
it might, or should be. Wisdom was interested with the real not the ideal.
When I sat with the mother, there were silences and
accompaniment. I listened and responded appropriately as I shared the memory of
the African women. I offered a picture of a community who had come to help bear
the pain, the extended fellowship and companionship and time together with
honoured rituals of mourning and lament. The image had connected the grieving mother
to others who grieved far beyond the room in which we sat, there was a world
beyond this incomprehensible tragedy – we shared in a glimmer of love and a
fragment of hope.
In my brief exchange with the father, I did not hear his
existential cry of pain, ‘why have we been forsaken’, I had naively and thoughtlessly offered a theodicy,
a justification for his sons’ death, –the world was a fallen place– but it was his
son who had died, his, not someone else’s. I had offered nothing but
cold comfort.
I have
recently read John Swinton’s Raging with Compassion: Pastoral Responses to
the Problem of Evil, (2007). I wish I had discovered this book many years
ago. The first half of Raging with Compassion addresses each of
these issues from a deeply pastoral perspective; the subjects are dealt with
sensitively, with accompanying descriptions of a number of pastoral encounters
to illuminate the ideas.
In Raging with Compassion Swinton leads us not
towards the cold comfort of theodicy but rather towards warm silence of a
friend who listens and then towards lament – Godward prayers of anguish. For
Swinton wholeness is found in Christ. As we listen in silence and accompany
people through their valleys of the shadow of death, we lament with people in
their grief, exercising thoughtfulness. Over time we host a space where
forgiveness may be found, we share hospitality and friendship, sharing the hope
of Christ in both word and deed.
