Becoming better grieving congregations

BOULDER, Colorado — Deborah Brandt knows the weight of grief. By her mid-40s, she had lost both parents, navigating memories while closing estates and selling her childhood home.

Determined to be the support she once needed, Brandt trained in Dr. Alan Wolfelt’s companioning model, an approach that honors grief rather than trying to fix it.

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Brandt, a coach, consultant and speaker, presented a workshop called “Becoming Better Grieving Congregations” last week during the annual conference of the Presbyterian Older Adult Ministries Network.

For the past decade, Brandt has served as a funeral celebrant. “I work with families on their worst day. Together, we co-create the ceremony. Together, we decide who’s speaking. We create some boundaries,” she said.

Brandt opened the workshop by passing around a battery-powered candle, asking everyone present to choose a word describing their experience with grief.

She offered up definitions for trauma, grief (the inner, natural response to an external event) and mourning, which she called “the outward expression of grief.”

Why talk about it?

“Grief is a normal part of life,” Brandt said. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, has turned “normal grief into a mental disorder,” according to The Lancet, and Brandt challenged a few myths about grief, inviting workshop participants to:

• Recognize and acknowledge that every experience of loss is unique
• Honor lived experience
• Be compassionate with yourself and others.

“At any given time, one in four people is experiencing loss,” she said. Loss is a frequent theme in the Bible, but we are given these promises in Lamentations 3:22-23: “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.”

Brandt then asked those in attendance to write the version of themselves they present to others on the outline of a mask she reproduced on a piece of paper. On the other side, attendees wrote the parts of themselves they keep hidden. Brandt placed the papers in a bag and then had each person draw one and read the qualities on a random paper out loud.

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“There are lots of things pastors can share in their communities,” said Brandt, who did a similar exercise following the murder of George Floyd. “What they shared [then] was so hard, even in a safe space, because they couldn’t share it in their own community,” she said. “We need more safe spaces for sharing our concerns.”

Brandt said she was “viscerally touched” by this summer’s flooding in the Texas Hill Country because she once worked at a camp there. “Sometimes, grief looks like shock or sadness, disbelief or shame, dry mouth or back pain,” she said. Among the biggest myths surrounding grief is achieving rapid closure or assuring the grieving person that everything happens for a reason.

“We get uncomfortable when people are grieving in front of us,” she said. Try saying “this is so hard” or “how can I support you?” or “I’m sad you are in this place” or “how do you like to be supported” or “tell me about your loved one” or even “I can bring dinner Thursday night,” she suggested.

“Being silent,” Brandt said, “is sometimes just right.”

Brandt called grief “a full-body experience — emotionally, physically and cognitively.” But, as the author bell hooks noted, “where there is grief, there is powerful, enduring love.”

“Uncomfortable is where growth and change happen,” Brandt said. “A good mourning community understands that.” Learn more in this study by the Dougy Center: The National Grief Center for Children and Families.”

Grief “is dynamic and cannot be fully defined by stages or phases,” Brandt said, adding, “there is no one right way to grieve.”

She cited some companioning skills developed by Wolfelt:

• WAIT, which stands for “why am I talking?”
• Follow the person’s lead
• Say what you sense
• Avoid problem-solving, advice and cliches
• Provide compassionate accountability, which Brandt called “a mixed bag.”
• Grief is “sacred and liminal space”

As Makeda Pennycooke, a coaching strategist, put it, “Living in the ‘and’ is a way of accepting what is while staying open to the possibilities of what might be. It’s learning to hold two things that feel like opposites alongside each other without judgment or without choosing one over the other.”

Brandt said faith communities can ask, “how are we inviting more vulnerability for grief in our congregation?” The writer and poet Cole Arthur Riley notes that “to be human in an aching world is to know our dignity and become people who safeguard the dignity of everything around us.”

“Rituals create lasting connection,” Brandt said. Each year on Nov. 1, faith communities celebrate All Saints’ Day, “and yet we have people dying all the time.”