August 4 - Wrestling at the River: Transformation & Grief Week 5: Acceptance

Wrestling at the River: Transformation & Grief
Week 5: Acceptance

While I might quibble with the name of any of the stages of grief, I really think “acceptance” is inadequate. The graphic I’ve been using on one slide says by acceptance “return to a meaningful life.” To me this sounds as if everything gets back to normal. Except that in my experience whatever normal was before the grief-inducing event can never be re-attained. Going through the stages of grief do not return us to anything, certainly not back to where we were. Going through grief and change is a transformative process and at the end of us (hopefully) we are ready embrace the new being we are becoming. So instead of acceptance per se, it is a new orientation, a new perspective. It may be normal but it is a new normal that we walk into.

When the sun rose and Jacob was through with his wracking and wrestling, he crossed the river into a new day and a new life. He even had a new name. Now I recognize that this new reality was not all peaches and cream. His new name, Israel, not only reflects that through the night he had wrestled with God but it states in present-tense that he strives with God. Life is not guaranteed to be easy, just new. The rest of the book of Genesis shows that Jacob and his descendants continue to strive with God, make mistakes, and occasionally live up to the blessing that God has given them.

Henri Nouwen said that "Forgiving does not mean forgetting. When we forgive a person, the memory of the wound might stay with us for a long time, even throughout our lives. Sometimes we carry the memory in our bodies as a visible sign. But forgiveness changes the way we remember. It converts the curse into a blessing. When we forgive our parents for their divorce, our children for their lack of attention, our friends for their unfaithfulness in crisis, our doctors for their ill advice, we no longer have to experience ourselves as the victims of events we had no control over.

Forgiveness allows us to claim our own power and not let these events destroy us; it enables them to become events that deepen the wisdom of our hearts. Forgiveness indeed heals memories."

Nouwen’s definition of forgiveness seems to me as good a description of acceptance as I’ve seen. The process of grieving turns the curse into a blessing, even if it is a hard won one at that.  It is like the sunrise. It does not erase all the days gone before but it offers the freedom of a brand new day. Are we at SCUCC ready to walk into the new day with a blessing and the promise of a new future?

This may be a day when we can provide an experience of crossing the river like Jacob/Israel crossed the Jabbok. It might be a symbol of being done with what is behind us and walking into whatever it is that God holds before us.