Acquainted with Grief

Prodigal: VOOM, VOOM

Me: You and Brady are having a lot of fun!

Prodigal: Yes, we are!

Me: Well, now hush! You’re makin’ such a ruckus, you’ll wake up the possums.

Prodigal: Yes mam..we will try to be quieter.

This is from the book Reaching for the Invisible God by Philip Yancey

John Donne, the seventeenth-century poet and dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London was a man acquainted with grief. During his term at London’s largest church, three waves of the bubonic plague swept through the city, the last epidemic alone killing 40,000 people. Londoners flocked to Dean Donne for an explanation, or at least a word of comfort. Meanwhile Donne himself came down with an illness the doctors initially diagnosed as plague (it turned out to be a spotted fever, like typhus). For six weeks he lay tremulous at the threshold of death, listening to the church bells toll each new fatality, wondering if he would be next (“Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee”). During this dark time Donne, forbidden to read or study but permitted to write, composed the book Devotions, a meditation on suffering. He was tuning his instrument at the door, he said–door of death.

In Devotions, John Donne calls God to task. Sometimes he taunts God, sometimes he grovels and pleads for forgiveness, sometimes he argues fiercely. But not once does Donne leave God out of the process. The presence of God shadows every thought, every sentence.

Donne asked the “Why me?” question over and over. Calvinism was relatively new, and Donne pondered the notion of plagues and wars as “God’s angels.” He soon recoiled from that idea: “Surely it is not thou, it is not thy hand. The devouring sword, the consuming fire, the winds from the wilderness, the disease of the body, all that afflicted Job, were from the hands of Satan; it is not thou.” Still, he never felt certain, and the not-knowing caused him inner torment. Donne’s book never answers the “Why me?” questions, as none of us can answer those questions that lie beyond the reach of humanity.

But even though Devotions does not resolve the intellectual doubts, it does record Donne’s emotional resolution. At first–confined to bed, churning out prayers without answers, contemplating death, regurgitating guilt-he can find no relief from ever-present fear. Obsessed, he reviews every biblical occurrence of the word fear. As he does so, it dawns on him that life will always include circumstances that incite fear: if not illness, financial hardship, if not poverty, rejection, if not loneliness, failure. In such a world. Donne has a clear choice: to fear God or to fear everything else, to trust God or to trust nothing.

In his wrestling with God, Donne changes questions. He began with the question of origin–“Who caused this illness? And why?”–for which he found no answer. His meditations shift ever so gradually toward the question of response. The crucial issue, the one that faces every person who endures a great trial, is that same question of response: Will I trust God with my pain, my weakness, even my fear? Or will I turn away from him in bitterness and anger? Donne determines that it does not really matter whether his sickness is a chastening from God or merely a natural occurrence. In either case he will trust God, for in the end trust represents the proper fear of the Lord.

Deuteronomy 6:18

And thou shalt do that which is right and good in the sight of the LORD: that it may be well with thee, and that thou mayest go in and possess the good land which the Lord sware unto thy fathers.

Jennifer Van Allen

www.theprodigalpig.com

www.faithincounseling.org