The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Good Grief By Rev. Ina Golaiy, St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church "Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted." Matthew 5: 4 Most people use the words grieving and mourning interchangeably, but there is an important difference between the two. Grief is the constellation of internal thoughts and feelings, the internal meaning given to the experience of loss. Mourning is when you take the grief you have on the inside and express it outside of yourself. The journey through the wilderness of grief is unique to each person, but we all enter the wilderness when we lose a loved one. It is what we do in the wilderness that makes the difference. If we move away from the pain of our loss and heed the many misconceptions of grieving, our path through the wilderness becomes confusing and often compounds the pain. But if we move toward integrating the loss we experience into our lives not just by grieving, but through active and intentional mourning, our path through the wilderness of our grief will lead to healing and reconciliation. We never truly 'get over' our grief because we are forever changed by the death of someone in our lives. But we can 'get through' our grief and be transformed by the experience. To experience healing and reconciliation, we cannot go around or above our grief. We must go through it and express it. We must also have others who walk with us along our journey. Those who allow us to mourn openly, who encourage us and give us hope in our healing. Hope is confidence that God will be with us in our grief. Hope is trust in God even when everything seems hopeless. Hope is the assurance that God has the last word, and that that word is LIFE - even as we confront the realities of the death of someone we have loved. Sorrow is an inseparable dimension of our human experience. We suffer after a loss because we are human, but if we mourn we will, as Jesus says, be blessed and comforted.
