I Am Grieving a Man I Did Not Like

A woman told me she could not cry at her father's funeral and that she has been trying to work out what that means about her for four years.

She was not relieved. She wanted to be clear about that, and she said it twice. She was not one of those people who describe a death as a release, and she thinks the ones who do have a right to.

What she felt was nothing, and then, about six weeks later, an enormous amount, at a bus stop, over nothing at all.

Her father was hard. Not a monster, she said. Hard. Cold in a way that had a temperature you could feel in a room, capable of a remark that would sit in somebody for a decade, and never once cruel in a way you could take to anybody.

And she loved him. She said that as though she were admitting to something.

Here is the sentence I want to say before anything else. Two true things about a person can sit in the same chest, and nothing in Scripture asks anybody to cancel one to keep the other.

The word is about weight

Here is the commandment.

Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee. (Exodus 20:12, King James Version)

The Hebrew word behind honor is built on a root that means heavy. To honor somebody is to treat them as weighty, as carrying substance, as somebody who counts.

Notice what it does not say. It does not say like. It does not say enjoy, admire, be close to, or feel warmly about. Every one of those would have been available and none of them is the word chosen.

That distinction is not a technicality, it is a mercy. A person can treat somebody as weighty while being completely honest about what living with them was like. A person cannot manufacture affection on command, and Scripture never once asks anybody to.

You are not being asked to produce a feeling you do not have. Exodus 20:12 uses a word about weight rather than a word about affection, and it is the same Spirit, John 16:13 the Spirit of truth, who makes an honest account of a person survivable.

The psalm tells you what to do with what is actually in there

There is one instruction in the Psalms about what to do with a mixed and complicated interior, and it is not sort it out first.

Trust in him at all times; ye people, pour out your heart before him: God is a refuge for us. (Psalm 62:8)

Pour out your heart before him. Pouring out is not a considered presentation. You pour out a container by tipping it, and what comes out is whatever was in it, in the order it happens to come.

He does not say pour out the acceptable part. He does not ask anybody to arrange it into something coherent, which is the exact thing a person grieving a difficult man cannot do, because the contents genuinely contradict each other.

And then: God is a refuge for us. The reason it is safe to tip the whole thing out is that the room it lands in is a refuge, which is a word about a place you go when something is chasing you.

You are able to pour out the whole of it without arranging it first. Psalm 62:8 says pour out your heart before him and calls Him a refuge in the same verse. It is the Spirit of God, Romans 8:26 making intercession with groanings which cannot be uttered, who carries what does not come out in order.

Ecclesiastes leaves room for both

There is a list in Ecclesiastes that people quote at weddings and funerals and rarely read as a whole.

A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance. (Ecclesiastes 3:4)

What matters here is that it is a list of times rather than a list of stages. There is no order given, no duration, and no suggestion that a person moves through them and finishes.

Which covers a woman at a bus stop six weeks late. Nothing in that chapter says grief arrives on the day of the funeral, and nothing in it says a person who feels nothing on the day has failed at something.

And the same book says out loud, elsewhere, that there is a time to keep silence and a time to speak, which is worth knowing for anybody being asked at a wake to say something warm they do not have.

You are inside a list of times rather than behind on a schedule. Ecclesiastes 3:4 gives times without order or duration. It is His Spirit, Galatians 5:22 naming longsuffering among His fruit, who supplies patience with a process that does not run to anybody's timetable.

Hebrews is honest about human fathers first

And there is a passage that deals with fathers and God together, and the striking thing is how frankly it treats the human half.

For they verily for a few days chastened us after their own pleasure; but he for our profit, that we might be partakers of his holiness. (Hebrews 12:10)

After their own pleasure. Scripture says that about human fathers, in a letter, without softening it. It grants that a great deal of human correction ran on a father's own temperament rather than on a child's good.

So a person who says their father was hard is not being disloyal to Scripture. Scripture said it first and put it in writing.

And then Paul gives God a title in a letter that is about the worst period of his own life:

Blessed be God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and the God of all comfort. (2 Corinthians 1:3)

The Father of mercies. A title, and it is the one He is described by in a passage about affliction rather than about achievement.

You have a Father described by mercy in the middle of a letter about affliction. 2 Corinthians 1:3 calls Him the Father of mercies, and the God of all comfort, and it is the Holy Spirit, John 14:16 given as another Comforter to abide with you for ever, who does the comforting that a title like that promises.