Shepherds in the Night:
Ministering to the Bereaved

Soon after after September 11th, 2001, my fourteen year old daughter Jenny was killed in a car accident. In that moment, the global grief I had been witnessing at a distance became intensely personal for me. I shared the pain of every mother everywhere--American, Afghani, Iraqi--as she struggled to bear the unbearable.

For a year or more, all I could do was tentatively face the fire of my feelings, offer quiet prayers for peace on the planet and in the hearts of all who were grieving. I sat amid the wreckage of my own heart, allowing the shattered fragments to reform according to the inscrutable timetable of the Divine, relinquishing any last illusions that I had control of anything in this life.

Eventually, like so many victims of tragedy, I turned my attention to service. This was the only path that made any sense. The ordinary concerns of daily life had dissolved in the inferno of my loss. Struck by the rarified awareness that had begun to grow in me, I became intensely interested in those whose own losses had acted as a catalyst for spiritual transformation in their lives.

What I noticed was that while many mourners had dedicated themselves to grief as a spiritual path, the culture at large did not affirm this choice or provide a framework for such a conversation. In spite of significant advances in death and dying education since the 1970’s, American society on the whole still seems to suffer from fear and denial about the reality of death. In a culture where the casualties of our wars are invisible to the average citizen, where many of our elders are institutionalized and where most of our ill pass away behind the closed doors of impersonal hospital rooms, we are becoming increasingly unfamiliar with one of the most natural and sacred functions of living: dying.

The death of a child is every parent’s worst nightmare come true. When my daughter died, she was at the beginning of her blossoming, filled with indignation against injustice, hunger for justice, and the early flames of spiritual love. I had believed that Jenny would grow up to be someone who would make a conscious contribution to alleviating the suffering in this world. The loss of such potential, coupled with the primal agony of missing her, threatened to destroy me.

But there was another reality just beyond the edges of my anguish. A palpable sense of holiness began to pervade the emptiness carved by my shattering. As my family and community rallied to support me in those first hours and days of my loss, filling the air with their prayers and tears and singing, I noticed a radiance wash over my heart and the hearts of my circle of support. God was with us. And Jenny was with God. The exaltation accompanying this phenomenon confused me. The most terrible thing imaginable had happened and, while my suffering was acute, I was also being soothed and lifted by this ineffable holy joy.

As I began to sit with other mourners and listen to their stories, it became clear to me that I was not the only one who had experienced the sacred atmosphere that arises around the death of a loved one. I wondered how clergy people and spiritual leaders shepherded the souls in their care through the holy land of grief and loss.

I live in a small town in the mountains of northern New Mexico. Mine is a multi-cultural community, where Pueblo Indians, Spanish Chicanos, and “Anglos” (all others) have been living and dying together for generations. During the Spring of 2004, I spoke with two Catholic priests, two Protestant pastors, one non-denominational minister and the director of a grief and loss program about their experiences and views of the sacred passage of death in their respective congregations, in our community and in society as a whole.

What I found among this diverse collection of spiritual guides was a unanimous commitment to “bearing witness” and “holding a container” for the bereaved to have their own experience of grief. In each case, the clergyperson consciously curtailed the impulse to fill the void of mystery with his own preconceived notions about the meaning of life and death. “Feelings,” said Rev. John Snider, “are deeper than theology.”

And yet, while they willingly released their grasp on the unknown and unknowable in the face of a death in their community, each of these clergy people stood on the solid ground of their own faith traditions. They offered rituals, ceremonies and prayers as a means of blessing the deceased and consoling the bereaved. “From an early age, a clear experience of the afterlife was always with me,” says Fr. Bill McNichols, a Catholic priest and iconographer who worked with AIDS patients in New York City throughout the 1980’s. “I felt a friendship and communion with the saints. They were all dead, but I knew them as a living presence. This allowed me to unequivocally reassure those who were dying.”

Clergy people are in the unique position to help those suffering from the death of a loved one to transform their loss into a profound spiritual experience. The religious leaders I spoke to shared with me that to do this, they have had to cultivate the humility and wisdom to step out of their own way, to resist the temptation to gloss over the mystery with platitudes or tell the mourners what to feel and how to grieve.

Dr. Janet Schreiber is the founding director of the Grief and Loss Certificate Program at Southwestern College in Santa Fe. When someone we love dies, Janet reminded me, grief can serve as a catalyst for a profound spiritual crisis. The ensuing shattering may cause us to question everything we believed about ourselves and our God. “Grief,” says Janet, “is an experience of descent.”

Clergy people can support the deep and important spiritual work that is taking place in this darkness. Rather than trying to console us with words, Janet suggests, they can sit with us in the silence. Instead of trying to “make it better,” they could simply stay with the reality of what is happening. Grievers are re-creating themselves from the inside out. They need their clergy to bear witness to this sacred process, rather than to direct it according to their own unconscious fears and dogma. The spiritual leader may know from experience that the griever is going through a significant spiritual passage and that she will grow as a result, but he needs to keep this image in his own heart as he holds a safe and quiet place for the griever’s own journey to unfold.

By placing too much emphasis on the sorrow and loss, a well-meaning spiritual guide might inadvertently disenfranchise a grieving person whose heart is overflowing with an inexplicable sweetness and connection to the divine, instilling in the bereaved a sense of shame that her experience is “bad” or “wrong.” The twenty-third psalm, often recited at funerals, refers to “the Valley of the Shadow of Death.” Rev. Steve Wiard reminds his Methodist congregation that “you cannot have shadow without light!”

Rev. Ted Wiard is the founding director of Golden Willow Retreat, a grief healing center outside of Taos. In the space of six years, Ted’s brother Richard drowned in a fishing accident, his wife Leslie died of cancer, and his two daughters Keri and Amy were killed with their grandmother in a collision with a garbage truck. When well-meaning religious leaders tried to “fix” him with dogma, Ted rebelled. “There are no answers,” Ted says of his shattering. “What I needed was to be held in a space of reverence and honoring.”

Now, as a non-denominational minister and certified grief counselor, Ted provides this “holding” for others. The people who find their way to his isolated mountain retreat are invited to be present in the deeply sacred space that death has exploded in their lives, a place that words can’t touch. “I have to have faith in that person, that they are traveling their own scared path, and that their higher power will help them. Who am I to take that way?” Ted asks. “I have no right not to hold that faith.”

When Janet Schreiber and I sat together, we explored the notion of clergy people as “shepherds” of souls. “What is shepherding?” Janet mused. “If a sheep goes over the cliff, the shepherd climbs down into the chasm and hauls her back up. Otherwise, he just stays with them. Even if he has to hang out in places that are uncomfortable and unfamiliar, far from normal civilization.”

It is not always easy to rise above ingrained attitudes about death and dying. Ministers, priests and rabbis are just as subject to cultural conditioning as the rest of us. While we may project onto them some kind of omniscience with regards to the divine secrets, they too suffer from uncertainty and aversion. An honest, aware clergy person will acknowledge his own relationship to death in the face of a loss in his congregation.

The day I met Fr. Bill at a local café to talk about his experiences with death, we encountered Fr. Tim Martinez just finishing his lunch and we asked him to join us. The two men shared stories of the same deaths in their parish from their respective perspectives. As one recounted a particularly tragic incident, his eyes glistened with emotion, and I watched while compassion washed over the face of the other. “I’m grateful that we still feel pain and confusion, that we still feel close to it,” Fr. Bill said. “Each time, we are really raw.”

In the face of great distress, not all clergy people are skilled in allowing grieving people to fully feel their feelings. Our natural impulse is to soothe, to comfort, to relieve suffering. Rev. John Snider was a chaplain who earned the Silver Star during the Vietnam War. He witnessed “mass casualties,” sometimes daily. Throughout his forty-four year career as a Presbyterian minister, he has performed hundreds of funerals.

But none of this experience prepared him for the recent death of his wife, Linda. “Suddenly, I am the one receiving solace,” he told me. “And I’m finding that the simplest gestures console me. It’s the simple recognition of my loss, to see that this person I loved was valued by my community.”

All of the clergy people and grief counselors I spoke with bring the individual deaths they have experienced back into the context of the web of human connection. “It’s important to remember that the death of an individual ripples out through the family and into the community,” Ted pointed out. “Right now, we are experiencing global grief, on top of our individual losses. Those of us who have taken on ministerial work need to hold space for the whole human family that is experiencing the shattering of death and loss.”

When my own child died, I instinctively reached for the mourning rituals of many different traditions. We brought Jenny’s body home for twenty-four hours and held a vigil, singing Hindu kirtan, praying in Pali and Arabic, smudging her with cedar and sage, meditating in silence. Jenny’s body was blessed by a Catholic priest before we took it to be cremated. Later, when we erected a Celtic cross as a descanso on the side of the road where Jenny was killed, Fr. Bill read a Taoist Kwan Yin prayer. In honor of my own heritage, we sat shiva and recited the kaddish for seven days at sunset.

Fortunately, sensitive religious guides in each of these spiritual traditions made room for me to grieve in my own way, while supporting me with depth of their faith. The wisdom and humility on the part of these clergy people enabled me to transform the death of my daughter from a sheer tragedy to something more than that, something that has grown my spirit.

— published in SOJOURNERS MAGAZINE, November 2004