A Time to Mourn

Dear Fellow Mourners:

Recently, I have been musing on the work of Peter Homans (d. 2009), Professor of Religion and Psychology at the University of Chicago Divinity School. In his seminal book, The Ability to Mourn: Disillusionment and the Social Origins of Psychoanalysis (University of Chicago Press, 1989), Homans argued that psychoanalysis emerged in response to the loss of shared religious symbols brought about by industrialization. Freud, Jung and others turned their grief inward, reflecting deeply on the nature of the self, and then outward, developing new critiques of culture, history and art.

Homans suggested that when a culture cannot mourn its losses—the decline of shared religious symbols, traditional community structures or a collective identity—it cannot process disillusionment constructively. Instead, the culture may experience forms of psychological and social breakdown, including collective melancholia and depression, radical nostalgia, splitting and scapegoating, and psychological fragmentation. In my pastoral experience, when I encounter these expressions of dissolution in a family or community, I consistently find at the core unprocessed grief. I also perceive these characteristics rampant in our current culture. We have lost something, and until we constructively mourn our loss, the associated grief will come out in destructive ways.

I cannot begin to describe all the ways our world has changed in recent decades. Not long ago, news of a catastrophe might take a full day to reach us, and accounts of a distant disaster could take weeks. Now we no longer have the buffer of information edited, digested and placed in context. With a swipe of a phone screen, we hold the world’s tragedies in one hand as they rush toward us in a relentless stream. We feel sad, tired, overwhelmed and helpless—the very elements of grief. No wonder we are depressed, nostalgic for an easier time, quick to lash out at one another and increasingly isolated. We need the ability to mourn. The longer we neglect our grief, the more vulnerable we become to manipulation and very bad choices. 

The church has a place in this breach of meaning. There are those who want the church to become a refuge for tradition and dogma, a return to old family values, simpler days before vaccines or democratic power surrendered to the whims of kings. Yet I do not believe the church should merely become a counterweight to the rightward turn of nationalism. I am weary of the debates, protests and hostile arguments directed at those who long for a simpler time. We are not at war. They, like us, are struggling with the unresolved residue of sorrow. We are grieving kin on the verge of coming to blows at the wake, not because we hate one another, but because grief has deprived us of a place for authenticity and rendered playfulness a dangerous game.

There is no template from the past that will secure our future. Our own motto penned in 1674 is ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda (the church reformed and always reforming), meaning that with each new loss the church can reform to address present sorrow. That is why we have a Holy Spirit, not to take us back, but to partner in our faltering steps ahead. We do not lose ground when we seek to creatively mourn and dwell in peace; instead, we avoid hurting each other and losing ourselves.

Knowing we either mourn together or fall apart, I remain,

With Love,
Jonathan Krogh
Your Pastor