Put Loss in Context: Symbolize It

It was Sunday morning, early October, in Libertyville Covenant Church north of Chicago. We were there with our children and grandchildren for Sunday School and Morning Worship. Brian Madvig of the Winnetka Covenant Church nearby was leading the second session of a Adult Class on loss. In the first session, we were told, he had asked the group to share a loss in their lives, i.e. witness to it, name it. On this morning he began by asking how it felt to name such in public? "I was left feeling a lot of pain over things yet unresolved," he offered. The group agreed. Before leaving that first session he risked asking the namers to create during the week some "symbol" of the loss to which they had witnessed. Could they? Would they?

Indeed. A brother pastor thanked him warmly for the pain of naming a grief he was living with and offered a torn copy of the membership directory of a church he had lately served that was now in disarray. A gentle man and good, his heart was broken for a people he had loved and served but now--at a distance--he could no longer shepherd and comfort. His dear wife, also a long-time friend, catalogued her grief over painful family memories going back to childhood.

One middle-aged father help us a series of tile-like photos mounted on a panel depicting his family's grief over the recent loss of a disadvantaged son, and a young woman offered a similar symbol of the pain she was experiencing over the loss of a friend with whom she used, among other things, to play cards.

Then an elegant elderly friend of many years named Dolores stood erect to detail for us in a prose/poem her feelings both of grief and resolution, grief over the loss of her husband and the comfort God has supplied, helping her to see her life now in larger perspective. Moved both by her pain as a human being and her strength as a woman of faith, I asked for a copy of her poem to ponder further myself and eventually share with others. Titled "Loss," it follows:

A young man saw a girl
and the girl saw him.
There was lake, woods and moonlight,
lovely halcyon days.
War clouds were parting.
Separation endured, prayers said.
Peace, homecoming, future plans.
Marriage, home and children.
Love and laughter, and some tears.
Years pass, growing old,
Gray hairs and illness.
Knowing God loves, come what may.
Then that too cold moment.
He's gone before me!
Oh, the loneliness and emptiness.
But the wonderful memories,
The caring friends, family,
The gratitude I must feel
For the loving Father and his Son
Who bear me up
When I want to surrender
And go into the dark
To wallow in grief.
God holds me in the warmth of his everlasting arms.

Bless you, brothers and sisters all. You ministered to me witnessing to how God is even now ministering to you. And thank you, Brian, for thus facilitating that witness. The symbols, I heard, were to be posted in the narthex for others to see and consider. I am now at a distance from that place, but it does not matter. For both the symbols and the witness to them so freely offered that morning are graven on my mind as gifts from fellow pilgrims clearly in touch with God.