My mother and grandmother were cooking in the kitchen when they ran out of greaseproof paper, so, being the small boy of the house, I was dispatched to run up the street to buy some more. Breathless, I ran into the grocer’s and asked for some “grief-proof paper”. The grocer peered over his half-moon glasses and sagely muttered, “Lad, there’s nothing grief-proof in this world.”
True, being the small boy of the house meant I was sheltered from many of the facts of life. I found adults whispering and when I asked my usual inquisitive questions, I heard what sounded to me like “little pictures have big ears”.
There had been a war on and when I had a few years previously asked for my Daddy, there was no way I could have understood that at the time of my asking he was likely then to have been somewhere up in the air in a Lancaster bomber on a night raid over Germany. Nor would I have understood that his brother, my uncle, had earlier been killed in Buna, New Guinea.
But, try as one does to protect children, time eventually seeps through the “grief-proof” covering and we do have to face the inevitable disappointments, the losses, and the failures in life. The longer this acceptance is put off, the harder the let down later on when eventual growing up has to take place.
This year of 2011 has been a hard one. We have witnessed scenes of utter devastation. Floods, fires, cyclones, earthquakes, tsunamis, nuclear meltdowns, and God knows what next, have each pursued one another each outdoing the previous disaster in horror. We have caught the grief of people of all ages losing homes, livelihoods, pets, loved ones, when they have been separated from more than they can bear. We lose our own “grief-proof” cover just by what we have seen on the news.
How do we cope with the reality of disaster around us? How do we view and review life which brings undeserved tragedy to so many fellow human beings just like us? We fuss over the right flavours when others now struggle to find the mere staples. We waste water when others now queue for it in containers. We snuggle into our favourite pillows when others now camp together in unfamiliar noisy halls. It is only an accident of geography that has saved us from being them.
Lent brings to our attention that we follow a person called Jesus who wasn’t “grief-proof”. We follow some one who put his comforts aside to wander around the country with a seamless robe as his back-pack along with those who went with him. He taught and he healed. He was arrested like a criminal and died an undeserved cruel death, a fact from which we cannot “grief-proof” ourselves. There’s no leaping over it for a short cut to Easter morn.
Travelling with Jesus this Lent will strengthen our backbone when we face the griefs that come around us or even to us. The spirit he leaves with us seeds us afresh with hope. Hope is infectious the more we let it spread and there are so many who need it now and through the times ahead.
We don’t need “grief-proof” protection any more. On the way nail-marked hands hold ours and that’s enough to start afresh.
