Hey Church!
I wanted to share with you a story I heard on a podcast this week. This comes from a transcript of the movie The Interpreter. It’s about grief, revenge, and forgiveness:
Everyone who loses somebody wants revenge, on God if they can’t find anyone else. But in Africa, in Matobo, the Ku believe that the only way to end grief is to save a life.
lf someone is murdered, a year of mourning ends with a ritual that we call the Drowning Man Trial. There’s an all-night party beside a river. At dawn, the killer is put in a boat. He’s taken out on the water and he’s dropped. He’s bound so that he can’t swim. The family of the dead then has to choose. They can let him drown, or they can save him. The Ku believe that if the family lets the killer drown, they’ll have justice but spend the rest of their lives in mourning. But if they save him, if they admit that life isn’t always just…that very act can take away their sorrow.
Vengeance is a lazy form of grief.
Here’s what struck me about this, and some of what I’m learning as I move towards grief in my own life:
- Anger and the desire for vengeance is normal and to be expected in times of loss, pain, or grief. But unless I make room for it and face and befriend it I will get stuck there. As the transcript says, “it’s a lazy form of grief,” which I take to mean: anger just happens. It doesn’t take any effort or intent on my part. It’s necessary, normal, and if left alone it often just gets stuck in my body as vengeance.
- This idea of mourning for one year: ARE YOU KIDDING ME? I don’t have that kind of time; I don’t want to be sad for an hour, let alone 8,760 hours! But mourning takes time, the way through grief is made by patient tending. This all takes much more time than I want it to.
- The transcript references saving the drowning person as “admitting that life isn’t always just.” I think this is part of letting go and moving on, but I want to add to it for our purpose as Christ followers: there is a forgiveness here too. It’s not just a nihilistic “everything is unjust so what are you going to do?” But I think part of our story as Jesus followers – and part of this narration – is an element of release: releasing this person from paying a life for a life. Forgiveness without temporal justice is difficult because it feels like we will be undone by the forfeit of vengeance. But forgiveness sets us – and those who’ve wronged us – free.
How are you with mourning, grief, and forgiveness? What have you learned that’s helped you?
As we move through this season I invite you to tend to those spaces in your life that are left ungrieved, the spaces where you are invited to save a drowning person to release your soul – and theirs – from death.
Praying for faith, hope, and love to remain with us, friends.
In Christ,
Fr. Matt
