Our Hardest Times; Birth Of The Next Greatest Generation?

Passover for Jews and Holy Week for Christians come this year during what has been projected as the most death-dealing week of the 2020 pandemic.

We are descending into an abyss without the normal physical embrace and comfort of extended family, friends, and community. There is no coincidence that these two most sacred observations coincide with what might well be one of the hardest of times. We are even restricted as to who can remain at the side of a dying loved one. And funerals are conducted when many can only attend online. Perhaps the truth we are being shown is that the most terrible things always yield to new beginnings. Could it be that our descent into darkness is leading to freedom from bondage and rebirth? Maybe the Next Greatest Generation is taking form.

It's hard to grasp that we must endure difficulties in order to fully triumph.  This is unfathomable in our modern world that rejects and honors only success and celebrates only strength.  We have been laboring under a Post World War II illusion that life is measured by achievement after achievement and continual accomplishments. 

There has been both a spoken and unspoken understanding that we should be climbing from one height to the next. The real struggle, descending into depths and failure, known well by The Greatest Generation, has been rejected.  Nowadays we love to celebrate the emancipation of Israelites from slavery in ancient Egypt and the empty tomb on Easter Sunday.

But waiting with bitter herbs while ten plagues destroy everything is not so uplifting. Sitting beside the tortured sacrifice on a bloody cross as dark clouds gather is not a place we wish to linger. Yet, turning away from pain and loss makes it almost impossible to accept the reality that hard times are harbingers of a phoenix who rises from his own ashes with renewed power and beauty.

“You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.
”

— ~ Ernest Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises)

The most terrible things that have happened always yield to something transformational.  I think about Auschwitz and The Holocaust with ghastly images and unimaginable misery. Their devastation cannot be undone. But from the ashes of horror came a homeland for Israel along with awakenings to our inhumanity from people like Elie Wiesel, Anne Frank, Viktor Frankl, and so many others.  We have been challenged to change. 

All of us are flawed in one way or another.  Never on a road of continual achievement and success, we travel downward into the place where we find out who we really are.  We find salvation on the same journey that Jesus takes with his cross and on which the Israelites find freedom.  But we must choose.  We can travel downward to receive wisdom and peace or we can run forward grabbing for whatever gives us temporary happiness.

By medicating with drugs and washing away reality with alcohol, money, sex, gambling, food, and entertainment, we flee from anything that hurts.  This flight from ashes is not anything akin to rising from them.  We are missing the point. 

For when we allow ourselves to experience dreams which have turned to dust, grieve losses and admit our failures, we are empowered to become a new creation.  We will have learned the lessons of humanity just like our ancestors.  We will have an appreciation for the suffering of others.  We will be endowed with a strength that comes from compassion rather than aggression.  We will rise.  We will rise. We will rise. Welcome to the Next Greatest Generation.

Grief Transformation; Cocoons and Butterflies

We have spent a month together this May delving into grief. From the Five Stages, to coping, and even celebrating.  There is always more to say. But one point always comes to the surface, as it did for my friend Elisabeth Kübler-Ross twenty-five years after an awakening she had three miles from Lubin, Poland at Majdanek Concentration Camp in 1946. The story she told me and recounted in a short book she wrote, The Cocoon and The Butterfly, provide perhaps the best understanding of the transformative power and nature of grief.

In 1992, while helping my patient and friend, Michael, through the struggles he was having with terminal illness and alienation from his family, I had a long conversation with his mentor Kübler-Ross. Her straightforward advice was that he should come back to her ranch in Head Waters, Virginia for a retreat.  Our talk then took another turn as I asked her why she chose to work with death and dying, particularly with children, which had been the focus of her medical career.  For the first time, EKR elaborated with me about her life.  Her initial one-word-response was this; "Butterflies." Then she went on to tell me a story.

In 1946, Elisabeth, one of three triplets born to her parents in Zurich, Switzerland, had at age 19, decided that she would become a physician.  World War II had ended in Europe the year before.  Elisabeth told me she felt compelled to join the International Voluntary Service for Peace in an effort to help decimated communities and provide assistance to countless refugees.  It was her visit to Majdanek Concentration Camp that changed everything.  The SS killed tens of thousands of an estimated 90,000 Jews deported to Majdanek.  Three gas chambers were used to choke the life out of prisoners, many of them women and children.  It was in the children's barracks and at one of the gas chambers that Elisabeth saw the butterflies.  She was sorting shoes on the floor of one of the gas chambers when she noticed the drawings.  Children had used their fingernails and rocks to carve butterfly images on the walls.  Hundreds if not thousands of the etchings were in the barracks as well.  She was shocked, shaken, and bewildered.  How could these little people, condemned to forced labor and death find a place in their hearts to draw butterflies....and Why? Though she did not have an answer, EKR made a decision then and there to become a psychiatrist and to work with children who were suffering and terminally ill. It was in 1971, as she recounted, after sitting at the deathbeds of many hundreds of children that her answer to the Holocaust puzzle came.  She told it to me in these words;

"The little ones were no longer in cocoons.  Now they were butterflies.  They would be set free from the hellish concentration camp. No longer prisoners of their bodies.  No more torture. No more separation from their mothers and fathers.  This is the message they were leaving for me and for all of those left behind.  I have used the image of the butterfly for the past twenty years to explain the process of death and dying."

The pain and suffering of horrific losses have the power to change us and to shape our lives like no other force.  After we descend into the darkness there will come a possibility of liberation.  We see this in the lives of people like Elie Wiesel, a child survivor of concentration camps, who went on to "combat indifference, intolerance, and injustice through international dialogues and youth-focused programs".  We witness the incredible work of John Walsh whose little son Adam was brutally murdered in Fort Lauderdale at the hands of a child molester.  John has gone on to expose every kind of crime as he advocates for justice with his television shows and writings.  Of course, there are many more like Elisabeth, Elie, and John.  They each have been transformed, taken from predictable lives, thrown into a cave of darkness, and have emerged with wings.  They point us to the possibility of new beginnings. They also give us a message that there is something more. Like the children of Majdanek, they signal to us that there is something more powerful than death.

When a caterpillar begins to spin her cocoon the most incredible things begin to happen.  Woven into what appears to be a shroud, the little creature starts a cycle of death.  Then, in an unexplainable moment, it becomes a goo of nothingness.  From that goo, a form appears and new creation begins to take shape.  Soon, with an incredible struggle that empowers its wings, a butterfly breaks forth from the cocoon.  She loosens, exercises, and then flies into the sky.  What a miracle.  So it is for each and every one of us.  EKR saw it happen without exception when her young patients transitioned from life.  As she was so fond of saying; "Life doesn’t end when you die. It starts.”

Grief and Vulnerability; So Hard to Go There

Someone once told me that vulnerability is what we most want to see in others and least want to be seen in ourselves. Becoming vulnerable can be one of the most difficult and uncomfortable experiences. Exposure of secrets, mistakes, flaws, and sins leave a person open to scrutiny which is hard to bear. We seem to be set up for all kinds of personal loss. Reputations painstakingly built up over long periods of time are rendered precarious or come crashing down in unmendable pieces. The grief which follows is almost impossible to bear.

We live in an age where it is increasingly difficult or even impossible to escape from who we are.  Rabbi Moshe Scheiner recently taught that suicide rates are increasing in adults partly due to the dynamic of transparency created by instant background checks on the internet.  Good names are destroyed every day. Children who suffer the loss of character due to perceptions of peers, bullying and cyber victimization can feel so trapped and hopeless that they consider or commit suicide. Becoming vulnerable can create the deepest feelings of shame when those whom we trust wound us. 

When we are grieving we become vulnerable.  In fact, it has been said that grief and vulnerability go together hand-in-hand.  Either can come first but neither walk alone. The word vulnerable comes from the Latin word vulnera which means to wound.  In our most wounded times, we are laid bare.  Lost is our stature and resolve.  No longer can we appear strong and self-reliant.  Our pain is visible to everyone. This begs a rather obvious solution.  Just never allow yourself to become vulnerable and then the grief would remain private. manageable, and controlled.  Voilà. Unfortunately, there is a horrible downside to that.  If we don't allow vulnerability, we will never experience authentic friendships, belonging, trust, or love. What we all have in common is our brokenness and when the risk of vulnerability is rejected true connections are impossible. If all of this is true then how could vulnerability and grief be so discouraged in our society? I guess because it is just so hard to go there.

Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan on 16 November 1581 is a painting by Russian realist artist Ilya Repin made between 1883 and 1885. The picture portrays a grief-stricken Ivan the Terrible cradling his mortally wounded son, the Tsarevich Ivan Ivanovich. The elder Ivan himself is believed to have dealt the fatal blow to his son

Perhaps we could find some answers from Dr. Brené Brown, a research professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work, author, and popular TED Talk personality. Dr. Brown has made it her mission to explore the power of vulnerability.  She emphases how important it is to dare greatly in order to live life fully and to achieve success. And more can be discovered in the spiritual wisdom of Richard Rohr, founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation who tells us that vulnerability is the path to wholeness and holiness.

In the final analysis, we have to come to the realization that it is not only okay to grieve and to become vulnerable, but it is also necessary.  If we are to heal we must be touched.  The work can never be accomplished alone.  There are big risks associated with all of this to be certain.  But from our perceived weakness will come a new kind of strength. Not the strength of the invulnerable but the strength of love.  For, as scripture tells us, the one who stumbles "shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary," (See Isaiah 40:31).