5 Afflictions of Grief
In Tim Keller’s Walking with God through Pain and Suffering book, he quotes Simone Weil’s essay “The Love of God and Affliction.” She talks about the inner torment of the sense of doom and hopelessness that suffering can bring about. The closest word she found to that experience is “affliction.” This internal experience of pain and sorrow.
She mentions Five Marks of Affliction:
1. Isolation - “A barrier goes up between us and even our closest friends. One reason is that you the sufferer suddenly sense a new gulf between yourself and almost anyone who has not experienced what you are going through. People who, you once felt, shared a common experience with you no longer do.”
It’s important in people’s pain to show up. Be there for them. Don’t worry about whether you have the perfect thing to say, presence in grief is powerful.
J.I. Packer in his Grief Sanctified books says that “a most painful part of the pain of grief is the sense that no one, however sympathetic and supportive in intention, can share what we are feeling, and it would be a betrayal of our love for the lost one to pretend otherwise. So we grieve alone, and the agony is unbelievable.”
2. Implosion - “Intense physical pain makes you unavoidably self-absorbed. You cannot think about anyone else or anything else-there is just the hurt and the need to have it stop. In the same way, inner pain can virtually suck us down in ourselves, so that we can hardly notice what is happening in anyone around us.”
Suffering can do that, it can make you and your needs the only solid, real thing, and all other concerns vague, hazy, and unimportant. This self-absorption can make you unable to give, receive, or feel love.”
3. Condemnation - “This comes in part from a hard-to-define, barely conscious shame…affliction makes us keenly aware of our flaws and our fragility.” We feel guilt over the affliction and grief upon us and we feel we are being punished by God, we become more akeenly aware of our sins and so we wonder if God is punishing us somehow for our past sins.
There’s also the condemnation we may feel from others. Like Job’s friends. That we have done wrong, or that we are looked at differently now, like an animal at the zoo, our suffering is stared at with curiosity, fear and apprehension. We feel ashamed for the fact that grief isolates us and makes people see us differently, as if it’s our fault somehow for our suffering. People are uncomfortable with our grief and do not wish to be around it, and therefore this brings about further condemnation that in some way, we are the ones to blame for the suffering that’s happening.
Which can hinder the continual progress of suffering if one feels pressured to try somehow to smother, suppress or hasten the time of suffering because they feel the judgment and rejection of others. They desire reality to return to normal, their friendships, relationships, work and so they avoid grief to bring about some kind of normalcy in their life.
4. Anger - “Depending on the cause and context, the anger may be more or less directed at various objects. There might be anger at oneself, or deep bitterness against people who have wronged you or let you down, or specific anger at God, or general anger against the injustice and emptiness of life.”
5. Temptation - We are tempted into complicity. “We become complicit with the affliction, comfortable with our discomfort, content with our discontent.” It can make you feel noble, and self-pity can be sweet and addicting. Our affliction can be an excuse for sinful behaviors, or can be seen as some sort of penance for our sins.
In this article I will not write out the ways we can help care for people grieving, but I believe educating yourself is helful to know what to expect in times of grief with others. One thing I will encourage is to be a person who is present with another person, no matter what. Often, presence can speak more powerfully than words. Think of Jobs' friends, the power it was to sit in silence in grief. When I think of my own suffering, it was people willing or not willing to sit in it with me that mattered the most.
