Saint John the Baptist Orthodox Christian Church
  • Home
  • Orthodox Christian Faith
    • What we believe
  • Parish
    • Our Patron Saint - Saint John
    • Our History >
      • Where we were and where we are...
      • "Remember your leaders..." (Hebrews 13:7)
      • What's in the name?
    • Administration
    • Saint John's Faith Formation: Christian Education
    • Chapel
    • Become a member!
    • Parish Library
    • Service request form
    • Donate
  • News
    • Sermons & Articles
    • Pictures & Videos
    • Weekly e-Bulletin
    • Quarterly Newsletter
    • Friends & Neighbors
    • Looking Ahead to Next Sunday (LANS) [archived]
  • Calendar
  • Contact Us
  • Useful Links
    • Choose Life!
    • Online Christian Bookstores >
      • St Vladimir's Seminary Press
      • St Tikhon's Seminary Press
      • Holy Trinity Bookstore, Jordanville
      • Eighth Day Books
      • Hermitage of the Holy Cross Monastery, WV
      • Nevsky's Books
      • Fr Daniel Sysoev Bookstore
      • Издательство Московской Патриархии
      • Магазин Сретенского Монастыря, Москва
      • Православный Книжный Магазин
    • Orthodox Intro
    • Orthodox Christian Radio

Holy Week: Entering into Grief

4/8/2017

0 Comments

 
By Elissa Bjeletich, Raising Saints
Within a week of the day my son died, my priest’s next door neighbor, an old Baptist preacher, also died. His widow was a good Texas Baptist lady, and she was never seen without her makeup and her hair perfectly in place — she was always pulled together. Father would see her in the yard and ask her how she was, and she would insist that she was fine. After all, she would confidently declare, her husband was in a better place; the Bible calls us to rejoice at a death and to cry at a birth. Her stoicism drove my priest crazy. He knew she was suffering, but she would never admit it.
Picture
Sometimes it seems like today’s American reacts to grief and pain by trying to get rid of it. We need to fight off sadness; we are experts at distracting ourselves. Our family members no longer die in the parlor, attended by family members. We die in hospitals and nursing homes, and are quickly ferried away to funeral homes, where our blood is drained by professionals and replaced with formaldehyde, and our faces are coated in makeup to make us more lively. No more is the beloved body bathed by a grieving family — quick, get them out of here, and we’ll see them at the visitation.

Every time I see a Celebration of Life announcement when someone dies, I shake my head. My own father’s death was marked by a Celebration of Life — could we not sit with his death for a moment? Must we swallow that grief and move to the fun part so quickly?

In 2005, our son died of SIDS. He died right in our home, in our bedroom, and I was grateful to be able to live in the place where he breathed his last.

On advice from friends and loved ones, I attended a support group for infant loss, and I encountered a lot of non-Orthodox Americans trying to make sense of the same pain I was absorbing. We all reeled with the unfairness of it. Over that year, I saw people trying to create rituals and to imbue them with meaning. They had balloon releases and candlelit vigils, they tried to write meaningful prayer services that would satisfy this gnawing grief that knew no home and no limit.

It was then that I fully grew to love the Parastos or Panikhida — the Memorial services we Orthodox sometimes take for granted. I watched pastors scramble to think of something meaningful, and recognized that we Orthodox have had it all along. No, I couldn’t buy my son a bicycle or bake him a birthday cake, but I could make koliva to mark the anniversaries of his death and I could join with my beloved parish to pray for his eternal memory and his peaceful rest. I didn’t have to try to imagine that a balloon in the air somehow meant that his soul was free, because we had beautiful prayers whose history reached back thousands of years and who spoke to my pain and my fears and most importantly, to my profound love for my lost son. These rituals, cast aside by modern Protestant Christians, were my lifeline and my rock, as I watched the descendants of those protesting Christians scramble to build up a new tradition. Their efforts rang hollow next to the fullness of our time-tested and solid prayers, which testified to the enduring connection between us and the dead, who are never dead but truly alive in Christ.

Yes, it was his death that made me love Orthodoxy.

Funny enough, my mother-in-law raised her boys in the Church without ever converting — until one day, as we stood at her mother-in-law’s beautiful funeral, I commented that because she was not Orthodox, we could not pray these beautiful, familiar prayers over her body. I conjectured that we’d probably hire a Congregationalist who would say, “I didn’t know her, but I hear that she was a loving mother and grandmother, and that she loved Jesus very much.” My mother-in-law converted the following Holy Saturday. The Orthodox funeral services called her home; they are powerful.

Last week, I stood in prayer at my friend’s funeral and I was keenly aware that the church was full of non-Orthodox friends, grieving with us the loss of this very good man. I wondered how they felt about the priests’ frequent declarations of our Lord’s love for us, of His promise that we would enter into eternal life in His Father’s Kingdom. I wondered if, like my mother-in-law, these prayers could call one of them to the Church — or if it was all too strange to them, raised as they were in this culture that flees death and shields itself from consideration of the afterlife. I wondered if they were looking for a Celebration of David’s Life, and were disappointed that they did not find it?

We are not born knowing how to grieve properly, are we? It’s a skill; it’s not instinctive, but learned.

When I first met the man I’d marry, I was only seventeen but I’d buried several people who were important to me, beloved by me. I had asked the big questions and had prayed desperately in the middle of the night — I had tried it and tested it, and now I trusted that my loved ones rested in my Lord’s embrace.  Marko hadn’t experienced death yet. He hadn’t put any of the cliches he knew about death and heaven to the test. When he was perhaps 20 years old and his very beloved godfather passed away, he had to approach all of those questions for the very first time — and suddenly, I was grateful to have loved people who died when I was a child.  Better, I thought, to have worked this out over the years, than to reach young adulthood without ever confronting these big questions.

I always think about these things when Holy Week approaches.

I attended Holy Friday services for the very first time in 2006. In May of the previous year, my son had died, and over the course of that terrible and beautiful year, I had found myself in constant need of the Church. I had come to love — and even to need — weekday services, in addition to the Sunday liturgies I’d attended for years. Every part of church life was feeding me, and I was grateful. When my friend urged me to come all day for Holy Friday, I didn’t think twice. I came.

The services of Holy Friday caught me totally off guard. No one told me that I would be attending Jesus’ funeral, but that’s what the Holy Friday services are. We witness His crucifixion, we wrap Him in linens, we lament and we visit His tomb with spices and myrrh. I arrived, a woman who had recently buried her own son, to hear hymns in which the Theotokos stands at the foot of the cross, lamenting and contemplating the impossible death of her son. I couldn’t believe that no one had warned me. I don’t think anyone had used the word ‘trigger’ in this context back then, but I can assure you that I was triggered — I was revisiting the death of my son as we watched our Lord die before our eyes and I was watching us grieve Luka as we grieved our Lord.

For me, Holy Friday will forever be understood through this lens.

After forty days of Lenten repentance, of facing our own weaknesses and limitations, we finally come into Holy Week. We enter into the truth that one of us, one who loved our Lord and who witnessed His miracles and who heard His words, would trade God for mere silver coins. We are forced to recognize that we too have sold our Lord; we too have fallen asleep in the garden; we too have denied Him thrice.  We sell Him out every day.  In our weakness and in our foolishness, in our selfishness and in our meanness, we betray Him all the time.

And then, we hang Him on a cross.
​
We face it squarely:  humanity, when presented with perfect goodness, with pure Truth and Love, responds by hanging Love on a cross.  We stand and face that cross for hours. We listen to the gospel accounts of our Lord’s arrest and trial, His crucifixion and death, and then we remove His body from the cross and wrap it in linens, and place it in Joseph of Arimathea’s tomb.
​
We live in a culture that worships youth and avoids death, but our Orthodox Holy Week is like an antidote. We come to the Church and we practice mourning. We enter into a timeless grief as we travel through Holy Week, and then we emerge into the light of the resurrection. Every time we celebrate Holy Week and Pascha, we are recalibrating our relationship with death. We abandon the fears and delusions of our secular age, and we enter into the eternal truth that death is a part of life in this fallen world — we face death squarely, without hiding from it, and as we look closer we soon see that death is not the victor. We accept death, and we can face death, because we know that Jesus Christ has conquered death, and through death we shall enter into life eternal.
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Archives

    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    July 2016

    Categories

    All
    9/11
    Abortion
    Adam's Rib
    Addiction
    Advent
    Akathist
    AmazonSmile
    American Saints
    Anaphora
    Announcement
    Annual Report
    Annunciation
    Apostles Fast
    Archbp Dmitri Royster
    Ark Of Salvation
    Asceticism
    Baptism
    Baptismal Liturgy
    Beheading Of Saint John
    Be Still
    Bible
    Bible Study
    Bishop
    Calendar
    Canaanite Woman
    Children And Life
    Christian Burial
    Christianity
    Christ Is Risen!
    Christmas
    Christmas Sermon
    Clay In The Hands Of God
    Clean And Unclean
    Coming Home
    Compassion
    Conception Of The Theotokos
    Confession
    Conform To Christ
    Conversion Story
    Converts
    Coronavirus
    Courage
    Creation
    Creed
    Cross
    Death
    Deny Yourself
    Depression
    Division Vs Unity
    Donate
    Donations
    Dormition
    Dormition Fast
    Doubting Thomas
    Drug Of The 21st Century
    Elected By God
    Eve
    Faith
    Fasting
    Father Alexander Schmemann
    Father Andrew Stephen Damick
    Father Chad Hatfield
    Father Lawrence Farley
    Father's Day
    Father Sergei Kosich
    Father Stephen Freeman
    Father Thomas Hopko
    First Light
    Forgiveness
    Forgiveness Sunday
    Foundations
    Freedom In Christ
    Fullness Of Faith
    Funeral
    God's Invitation
    Gospel
    Grace Of Christ
    Great Flood
    Great Lent
    Grief
    Halloween
    Health & Happiness
    Help Wanted
    Hollywood
    Holy Friday
    Humility
    Icon Of Nativity
    Iconography
    Infant Baptism
    Interview
    Jesus Christ
    Journey
    Joy
    Keeping Kids Christian
    Kids And Faith
    Kids And Porn
    Kids Vs Technology
    Kiss Of Peace
    Kitchen Upgrades
    Knowing God
    Lamb Of God
    Lesson
    Life After Death
    Liturgical Commentary
    Liturgical Year
    Liturgy
    Living Together
    Lost Sheep
    Love
    Love Your Neighbor
    Maintenance
    Marked By God
    Marriage
    Mary
    Memory Eternal
    Mission Of A Parish
    Mission Of Orthodoxy
    Moral Compass
    Nativity Fast
    Nativity Of Christ
    Nativity Of Saint John The Baptist
    Nativity Of The Theotokos
    Newsletter
    New Testament
    New Year
    New Year Resolutions
    Normal?
    No War
    Nudity And Movies
    Orthodox Christianity
    Orthodox Church
    Orthodox Community
    Orthodox History In America
    Orthodox Saints
    Orthodox Wedding
    Orthodoxy & Catholicism
    Orthodoxy In America
    Orthodoxy Is Life
    Orthodoxy Is Not Religion
    Orthodoxy & Lutheranism
    Orthodoxy & Protestantism
    Paralytic
    Pascha
    Patience
    Patron Feast Day
    PayPal
    Pictures
    Pilgrimage
    Podcast
    Polemics
    Porn
    Porn And Brain
    Porn Is A Lie
    Porn Kills Love
    Power In Weakness
    Pray At Home
    Prayer
    Prayer Of St Ephraim
    Prayer Rule
    Prayers To The Theotokos
    Procession
    Pro-life
    Publican And Pharisee
    Reading Bible
    Relics
    Religion
    Repentance
    Resist Porn
    Royal Priesthood
    Sacraments
    Sacred Space
    Saint Alexander Hotovitzky
    Saint Alexis Toth
    Saint Herman Of Alaska
    Saint Innocent Of Moscow
    Saint James The Brother Of The Lord
    Saint John Chrysostom
    Saint John The Baptist
    Saint Juvenaly
    Saint Nicholas
    Saint Patrick Of Ireland
    Saint Peter The Aleut
    Saint Raphael Of Brooklyn
    Saints Peter And Fevronia
    Saint Theophan The Recluse
    Saint Thomas Sunday
    Saint Tikhon Of Moscow
    Salvation
    Sanctity Of Life
    Seal Of The Holy Spirit
    Search For Christ
    Self-care
    Sermon
    Seventh Day
    Sexual Revolution
    Sharing Faith
    Silence
    Sin
    Skillful Children
    Sower
    Sunday Of Orthodoxy
    Sunday Of The Blind Man
    Sun Of Righteousness
    Teaching The Faith
    Telling The Truth
    Temple Of God
    Temptation
    Thanksgiving
    Theophany
    Theotokos
    Thorn In Flesh
    Tolerance
    Tree Of Life
    Triumph Of Orthodoxy
    Unchangeable Christianity
    Unity
    Weakness
    Why Confess To A Priest
    Woman
    Words
    Youth Ministry
    Zacchaeus
    Антоний Сурожский
    Архим. Ианнуарий Ивлиев
    Вера и знание
    Воспитание
    Дети
    Иоанн Златоуст
    Исповедь
    Молитва
    Новый Год
    о. Александр Шмеман
    о. Ианнуарий Ивлиев
    Пасха
    Подготовка к исповеди
    Подготовка к Причастию
    Подготовка к Рождеству
    Пост
    Причастие
    Проповедь
    Проповедь
    Пятидесятница
    Рождественский Пост
    Рождество
    Современное поколение
    Троица
    Христос Воскресе!

    Archives

    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    July 2016

Picture

Jesus said to the crowds about John, “I tell you, among those born of women no one is greater than John the Baptist.” (Luke 7:28)


Address

29 Weaver Street
​Little Falls, NJ 07424

Email

StJohn.Singac@gmail.com

Telephone

(973) 256-0314

Join our mailing list

* indicates required
Picture
Picture
Picture

Search our website

  • Home
  • Orthodox Christian Faith
    • What we believe
  • Parish
    • Our Patron Saint - Saint John
    • Our History >
      • Where we were and where we are...
      • "Remember your leaders..." (Hebrews 13:7)
      • What's in the name?
    • Administration
    • Saint John's Faith Formation: Christian Education
    • Chapel
    • Become a member!
    • Parish Library
    • Service request form
    • Donate
  • News
    • Sermons & Articles
    • Pictures & Videos
    • Weekly e-Bulletin
    • Quarterly Newsletter
    • Friends & Neighbors
    • Looking Ahead to Next Sunday (LANS) [archived]
  • Calendar
  • Contact Us
  • Useful Links
    • Choose Life!
    • Online Christian Bookstores >
      • St Vladimir's Seminary Press
      • St Tikhon's Seminary Press
      • Holy Trinity Bookstore, Jordanville
      • Eighth Day Books
      • Hermitage of the Holy Cross Monastery, WV
      • Nevsky's Books
      • Fr Daniel Sysoev Bookstore
      • Издательство Московской Патриархии
      • Магазин Сретенского Монастыря, Москва
      • Православный Книжный Магазин
    • Orthodox Intro
    • Orthodox Christian Radio