Rediscovering Lament: Making Space for Grief : Terra McDaniel

Full-Text Transcript

As pastors and ministry leaders, how can we tend to our own grieving in healthy ways and help others do the same?

Jason Daye
In this episode, I’m joined by Terra McDaniel. Terra serves as a spiritual director for both adults and children. She spent two decades as a pastor and ministry leader, earning her M.Div from Portland Seminary. Her latest book is entitled Hopeful Lament. Together, Terra and I explore some of the ways that we, as pastors and ministry leaders, inadvertently make grieving more difficult, both for ourselves and for those we serve. Terra also provides some helpful insights around patience, courage, and hope, as it relates to lamenting. Are you ready? Let’s go.

Jason Daye
Hello, friends, and welcome to yet another insightful episode of FrontStage BackStage. I’m your host, Jason Daye. And I have the privilege each and every week of sitting down with a trusted ministry leader and diving into a conversation, all in an effort to help you and pastors and ministry leaders just like you embrace a healthy, sustainable rhythm for both your life and ministry. And we are proud to be a part of the Pastor Serve Network. And not only do we dive into a particular conversation, but also, our team creates an entire toolkit for you and for your team at your local church to dig even more deeply into the topic at hand. And within that toolkit, you’ll find a lot of resources, including our Ministry Leaders Growth Guide, which, again, you can work through personally and invite your key volunteer ministry leaders or your staff to work through as well and discuss the questions there and the topic that we’re highlighting today. And so you can find all of that at PastorServe.org/network. So be sure to avail yourself of that resource. It’s a great tool. And then at Pastor Serve, we love walking alongside pastors and ministry leaders, and our team of coaches is offering a complimentary coaching session. And you can find more details about that at PastorServe.org/freesession. So please check that out as well. If you’re joining us on YouTube, please give us a thumbs up and take a moment to drop your name and the name of your church in the comments below. We absolutely love getting to know our audience better, and our team will be praying for you and for your ministry. Whether you’re joining us on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform, please be sure to subscribe, to follow, and to hit that notification bell. You do not want to miss out on any of these great conversations. And as I said, I’m excited about today’s conversation. At this time, I’d like to welcome Terra McDaniel to the show. Terra, welcome.

Terra McDaniel
Glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Jason Daye
Yeah, thank you for making the time to hang out with us today. We’re going to dive into a topic that most people will be like, oh, you know, that doesn’t sound super exciting, right? However, Terra, you’ve done a lot of work as a spiritual director and as a pastor yourself over the years. And just through your own experience, which you share in the book, we get to kind of get a peek into your life, about grief, about lamenting and tending to our grief in healthy ways. And as I’ve been reading through your book, which I absolutely love. And I’m just going to do a quick plug because, and I mentioned this to you before, Hopeful Lament is the title of your book. And this is more than a book, it’s a resource. Because you include within the book different spiritual exercises to help people as they tend to their grief and as they navigate and process through the grief, which I think is an absolutely cool resource and tool that I think helps us as pastors and ministry leaders, but also that we can pass on and use in ministering and serving others. So thank you for that. But to kick it all off, Terra, what might be a little controversial, I don’t know, but it might be. And I think that you will be able to resonate with me on this to some degree. As pastors, as ministry leaders, as the church, oftentimes, I think inadvertently, we can make grieving more difficult than it needs to be for people and less healthy than it should be in many ways. And, Terra, I know you’ve you’ve touched on this. And of course, as a pastor yourself, as a spiritual director, you’ve experienced this. But can you help us think through some of those ways because a lot of people would hear that and say, No, we don’t do that? But help us to think about some of these ways that we may not realize we are making grieving more difficult for others.

Terra McDaniel
Yeah, thank you. What a great question. And it’s so true, isn’t it? We tend to be as pastors, we want to help people who are who are asking hard questions, who are in places of pain, who are saying, Where is God? Why isn’t God intervening in this or that situation in this illness? Why isn’t God immediately comforting me as I grieve the loss of this beloved person? And so, as pastors, we want to help, we want to say, oh, there is an answer to that. And I believe there is. And if we come in too quickly with the answer, right? We inadvertently short-circuit healthy, faithful grief, which God actually has all the room in the world for. We see again and again, in the stories of the Bible, that there are answers to where is God. Sometimes, not always. You know, sometimes they take a long time coming. Not weeks and months, but years, decades, and even millennia, right? And I think one of the key stories that I returned to again and again, where there’s just a wellspring of goodness, and truth, and hope, is in the story of Lazarus and the sisters. And of course, you know, we know that Jesus already planned to raise him from the dead and waited until that raising was necessary. And there was no question of, Is he really dead? Or is he in some sort of coma? No, it’s been three days, he’s in there. He’s really dead. And so he went in to do this, one of his most significant signs. And before he got to that sign, he listened to the questions of the sisters and their friends. And he did not chastise them for being weak in faith. He did not say, you know, how dare you ask these questions. He engaged them, he was in conversation. And then, again, not solving their grief, but bearing witness to it and joining them in it. He cried with them. So he knew the answer, in this case, which is the restoration of the life of this beloved brother was right around the corner. And even so, he paused. And you know, these weren’t kind of crocodile tears, he cried with them. He felt the wrongness of the reality of death and joined them in it. Not fast-forwarding to the healing, to the restoration. And so all of that to say, our invitation as spiritual companions, as pastors, is to be with people in their grief in ways like that. And to sometimes offer them tools to process their grief, in kind of embodied ways that, again, there’s a rich treasure trove of examples in the Bible of how to do that. Tearing, sprinkling dust, smearing ashes, those kinds of things. And so there’s hope, and I think the last thing I might say about this layer is the unhealthiness is often very specifically about timing. It’s about leaving room for grief. And then over time, in healing and healthy ways, looking for silver linings, finding gifts in the midst, finding the where is God, even in the midst of loss. Those are important, and they need to come at their proper sort of means, and methods, and timing, and pacing.

Jason Daye
Yeah, I think that’s helpful, Terra. And one of the things is that the idea of finding God in the midst of our suffering, it’s different than finding God in spite of our suffering. Yeah, and I think those nuances sometimes we gloss over. But they’re very important in our work as people of the gospel, right? So oftentimes, people meaning well, again, might say something like, Hey, everything happens for a reason, or there’s a bigger purpose in this, those types of things. Talk to us a little bit, Terra, about those types of cliches, those phrases where we’re trying to really encourage someone, but how those can sometimes not leave space for what God is really doing in the midst of these struggles, these heartbreaks, these pains?

Terra McDaniel
Yeah, absolutely. And there are even passages that fall into the like, so this is scripture: God works everything for good. That’s something that people will hear often. You have faith in God so you know God’s got you, those kinds of things. And they are, they’re spoken with the intention of encouraging and providing solace. And I think the misapprehension or the way that they can be unintentionally misused is, it can often be about our discomfort as pastors, with kind of the messiness of grief, the unresolved aspects of it, rather than being present to the questions as they are. And again, this doesn’t mean that we suppress the possibility of hope, not at all. But, you know, to stay with the grief rather than sort of putting some neat and tidy answer that feels better. And what I imagine you are acquainted with, as I am as a pastor, is coming alongside people who are grieving after they’ve heard those kinds of cliches, especially from ministry leaders, and the fallout, the real suffering, the real spiritual harm, and even the harm to theology that can happen when those kind of easy answers are too quickly applied or misapplied. It leaves people with questions and with pain that doesn’t have to be.

Jason Daye
Yeah, definitely. No, I see that, Terra. And one of the things that you’ve touched on here, but in your book, this is kind of a running theme through your book, is the idea of patience. That really, in our world, in our society, we tend to rush to solutions, we tend to rush to try to fix things, everything needs to be up and to the right. I mean, that’s the kind of world we live in. And yet, that’s not the journey that God takes with us, right? The journey God takes with us is much deeper, much more meaningful than just kind of these quick, rushing to sprucing everything up, making sure everything’s looking shiny. So this idea of patience, Terra, let’s dig a little deeper into that. And I’d like for you to help us consider this in our own lives as pastors and ministry leaders, the pain that we’re experiencing, right? The grief that we might be experiencing that oftentimes we gloss over. Because we are pastors, we are ministry leaders, we’re pointing people to the hope of Jesus. And so sometimes we do not take the time, we do not have the patience with our own grief. So, can you talk us through that reality of it?

Terra McDaniel
Yeah, absolutely. And I’ll briefly, and I talk about this at length in the book, this is a lesson that was a hard one for me. When in a time of suffering that hit from many sides, I was frantically rushing around, meeting with pastors, meeting with mentors, meeting with anyone who would talk to me, trying to figure out, okay, where’s God? How do I solve this now, not just for me, but for my family? And it came from a place of wanting to help, of wanting to be okay. Let’s start there, in place of wanting to be okay. It came from a place of wanting to help those around me. And it came from a place of wanting to model well, this is what faith looks like, everything’s going to you know, God is moving, etc. And what I found through, again, hard experience is that the slow and steady and regular work of patiently asking our questions, and when there aren’t easy answers, letting that be. And letting that be an open conversation with God and with trusted others, other helpers in our lives, and here’s a place to just pause. And let me put a pin in this and simply say, we as pastors must have peers. We can’t only be the leader, the teacher, the counselor. We need our own therapists, we need our own spiritual directors we need colleagues that we can share the real us and the behind-the-scenes things in faithful ways. So there’s that piece, but yeah, this idea of patience and being willing to do our own work of being honest about the things that are hard about our own losses, about our grief at hearing the stories of those to whom we minister, and we’re hurting for them. There’s so much and there’s this dispraise now more than ever, and maybe that’s true, maybe it’s not. There is certainly a sense of the volume being turned up in recent years. And there’s no question that a pandemic, that’s new, you know, once in a century. So there are so many layers of complex suffering and grief, and we’re not immune to it as pastors. And so the more that we can give ourselves permission, and invite God into it, and trust God actually wants to meet us there, the more we create capacity for staying with it, and for resilience within pain, which makes room, again, patiently over time for healing and wholeness. And that’s what God wants for each of us, I’m convinced, as God’s beloveds, each of us. And full stop there. And we can also say that the more that we can model that for our communities, there’s so much goodness to be had in all of that. But, again, if I may underline this, that you as pastors, keep doing the good work and keep caring for your communities, but know that you matter, you are God’s beloved. Full stop. And that’s enough. And that work matters for you. And that receiving that goodness matters simply for you.

Jason Daye
Yeah, I love that and appreciate that, Terra. Because that’s something we often get caught up in, serving others, and forget that God wants to just minister to us as well. And that we need to stop and make time for that. And again, that leads back into that patience conversation. One of the others, we have patience, one of the other things that I picked up throughout the book is this idea of courage when it comes to grieving. And that concept I think is fascinating. And, again, as I was reading through I was thinking back to this idea that oftentimes, we gloss over our grief. And sometimes we think that’s like strength, like, okay, just be strong and power through it. But the reality is, you bring up a point that, really the courage comes through grieving. That’s kind of the courageous act whenever you’re wrestling with this. So talk to us a bit about that relationship between courage and our grief.

Terra McDaniel
Yeah, yeah, I do believe that. It can look like courage, but it’s actually a false kind of strength to just sort of muscle through and power through and tie things up with a shiny bow and, oh, I’m a person of faith, I don’t need to grieve. I’ve got God, that kind of thing. But no, I think grief and engaging lament is courageous in that it’s heavy lifting, it’s hard work. It is costly honesty about what is. And it’s not easy. Like, let’s be really honest about that. Lament is heavy lifting. It’s not simple. It’s not easy work. But it is work that trusts that God actually cares about the hard as well as the praise, and thanksgiving, and honor that we give Him. It trusts that we can actually have the capacity to not suppress our hard questions, not suppress our pain, but let it move through us. And there’s this great idea that a number of therapists talk about of metabolizing pain. And I think lament allows us to metabolize pain. So it’s that idea that if we suppress pain, it’s still in there, still in there under the surface. But when we process it, and again, this is hard work. And there’s goodness in it and there’s goodness on the other side of it. And so all of that to say, lament requires the willingness to not turn away, the willingness to live through, the willingness to be honest, and the willingness to really have this trust that God wants to walk every step of that with us. And that is something that I can’t think of any other way to describe that than courageous.

Jason Daye
Right. Yeah, exactly. Love that. As we look at this lamenting in our lives, what that looks like, the title of your book is Hopeful Lament. Two words that most people would not necessarily stick together, right? We looked at the patience, we looked at the courage. How is our lamenting hopeful?

Terra McDaniel
So that is a very hard and good question that I wrestled through to that title. And hope and lament have to be kind of held in tension. And I think one voice is usually speaking louder sometimes. And it may vary by hour, and it may vary by day, and it may vary by week. You know, sometimes the sense and experience of hope is more ascendant. And sometimes the experience of grief and pain, and the need to lament is kind of having the center stage a little bit more. And I’ll say that the whole idea of lament, so lament is not simply pain, lament is giving voice to pain, it’s articulating it. And the end of that sentence is, it’s not articulating it out into the void, but it’s articulating it with the hope, and with the trust, and with the heart in your throat. Boy, I trust this is gonna happen, that God is actually listening to that cry, that cry for help. And so in that sense, lament is overflowing with hope, because it’s saying, God, as the psalmist so often says, How long, oh Lord? Or where are you? Or why? You know, all of those kinds of questions, and not filling the space after the end of that question, with quick, shiny answers. And that’s the space where hope is.

Jason Daye
Yeah, that’s beautiful. I love that. And just that concept of, to think through that, again, like you say, it’s articulating our pain, but not just off into the deep, dark, nothingness. It’s crying out to the God who loves us and cares for us. And that’s where that hope pulls through. And I love how you share that. Now, Terra, I would love to get real practical here. We’ve talked about you know, the patience, and the courage, and the hope of grief and lamenting and processing through this and navigating this in our lives, tending to this in our own lives. Which is all incredibly helpful. But practically speaking, what does that even look like for us? How do we take the theoretical, and make it very, very practical in how we’re tending to our own grief, and then how we can transfer that and help others tend to the grief in their lives?

Terra McDaniel
Yeah, so lament in Scripture is very holistic, it’s very embodied. So it’s things like you know, David crying aloud. It’s sprinkling ashes like Job did, it’s tearing cloth, as Tamar, David, Job, and so many did. So all of the practices that I talk about in the book are sort of inspired by, and in many cases, directly drawn from those practices. And what I have found personally, what I’ve found as I’ve led groups and communities in lament work, as I’ve worked one on one with all kinds of people in spiritual direction is that when we get the body involved, we get the senses involved, there’s something important, something sacred that happens. Simply said, it’s a way of letting our hands, and our feet, and our mouths, and our eyes, and even our senses, all our senses, smell, to our sense of hearing, all of it, to begin to tell the story of our grief. And to be, in their own way, sometimes with words, and sometimes beyond words, prayers. And so, the practices that I talk about are simply the tip of the iceberg, and my hope is to take them and make them your own and add to them and let that come to another idea. So I’ll name a few that I offer. Lots of tearing practices, either tearing cloth or paper. This can be really powerful when it’s happening in community, perhaps like in a Lenten service, before Easter. Because there’s this visceral experience of tearing, and there’s the sound, and the feel of the frayed edges of the paper or cloth that, again, is telling the story of loss, or telling the story of brokenness. Other practices that I offer, there’s something called a worry tree. And this is really great for families to engage or church communities. And the leaves of the tree are griefs, or worries, or questions that you want to ask God. And those can kind of just be there. And what’s lovely about that is that’s a way to have a conversation over time where people can read the vulnerable sharing of another person’s worry and recognize themselves in it. Oh, yeah, I can see that. Or, Oh, I wouldn’t have thought of it that way. But yeah, but this is something that someone else is. And so it’s a way to engage grief, and normalize it, normalize processing it together. I’ll mention one more. But again, there are many possibilities. Another practice that I really found helpful in recent days is something called a tear jar. And it’s that idea from Psalm 56 of God saving each of our tears as if they were precious treasures. And so, you know, alongside actual tears, or in place of when, as we know, sometimes grief doesn’t come out in that way all the time. So it’s just having a jar of water, and a salt shaker or a little bowl of salt. And anytime throughout the day that a thought or a memory of a loss, or a pain of suffering happens you drop some grains of salt in there. And then, several days later, you pause and recognize there’s almost no way you’ll remember every emotion, every thought that accompanied those grains of salt. But it’s a moment to recognize there they all are as a physical manifestation of your own grief for that or on behalf of others and a memorial that God holds every one of them. God hasn’t forgotten. And how is it to notice, how is it to fathom the idea that God knows every single grain and what that was connected to? So practices like these help lament stay in this kind of headspace and move into really embodied prayers that are so faithful to the biblical model that we see.

Jason Daye
Yeah, I love that. Now, Terra, we talked about the patience of tending to our grief and those pieces. And yet we move and navigate through a season of grief. It doesn’t mean that the pain is forgotten, but we don’t live and we don’t sit in that for forever. So talk to us a little bit about that balance between, we don’t want to rush ahead of our pain, but we don’t want to just kind of dwell in our pain as well. So talk to us a little bit about that idea of slowing down enough to grieve in a healthy way, to experience that hopeful lament right? But then that hopeful side, that hopeful piece on the other side. Where do we get to that? And how do we ensure that we’re not just kind of dwelling in a dark place?

Terra McDaniel
Oh, yeah. Yes, thank you for asking that. So I talk a lot when I’m talking to groups about lament, I talk a lot in the book, about pacing and safety. And so it’s this idea that lament often happens best, happens most safely, when it happens in sips. Like you don’t dive into the cave and stay covered up in there interminably. That’s not sustainable. It’s not safe. Because grief can feel like it’s going to swallow us whole when you kind of enter into it in that way. And so it’s about finding a way, again, without rushing and without suppressing, but finding an interplay of things that give life and that remind us of all that is worth giving thanks for. That the things that do refill us and sustain us while also faithfully re-engaging in lament. And there’s not a simple formula for what that looks like. But I do think it’s something that the more we talk about it as kind of a rhythm or an interplay rather than it has to be all one or all the other. I think we can cultivate and we can discern together within our own souls, like, is this suppressing? Or is this no, this is stepping into faithful hope and life? And, okay, now it’s time to Oh, the grief is sort of coming up to the surface again, okay, here we go, God. Let’s have a conversation. Let’s process this piece together. And it’s about, I emphasize that word, pacing. And I emphasize that word, that idea of kind of moving through, and almost like riding a wave perhaps is an image that comes to mind. And the last thing I might emphasize in this moment, is I say there’s no easy formula. But one thing that is perhaps unusual for us to tune into, in many cases among us, and important for us to cultivate, is listening to our physical bodies. So they are a huge part of communicating what needs to come to the surface where emotions kind of live. And when we have moved outside of healthy, faithful, safe limit into something that’s not safe, that is too big, that will kind of overwhelm. And so thinking about when, if you are having severe anxiety, if you are having physical pain, headaches, stomach aches, things like that, pay attention to those things. And that is a sign to pull back and to move into things that give life and that restore. Right, some of those restorative practices. So yeah, it’s about pacing.

Jason Daye
Yeah, yeah, that’s good. And that idea of rhythm I think is so vitally important. And we missed that so often because we get so busy. I mean, it’s the idea of rhythm. Like the Spirit works in rhythm and invites us into a rhythm and so I think that’s important. I love that. Terra, this has been an absolutely wonderful conversation with some great insights. I think that is helpful for us personally and then also helpful for us as we’re ministering to others. Which is so helpful, I think. If people want to connect with you, with your ministry, learn more about you, the book, all those things. What’s the best way they could do that, Terra?

Terra McDaniel
Yeah, so you can find me on my website. And that’s simply TerraMcdaniel.com. And Terra is spelled like Earth in Latin T-E-R-R-A. I’m on Instagram, also Terra McDaniel. Those are probably the two easiest, quickest ways to find your way. On my website you can sign up for my newsletter that goes out usually about once a month with just some of what I’m ruminating on, usually, there’s a practice or two, some good stuff just to keep up with what’s happening. So those are the best ways to find me.

Jason Daye
Excellent. Thank you, Terra. And for those of you watching or listening along, we’ll have links to Terra’s website, links to the book, Hopeful Lament, as well, and to her social and all that fun stuff in the toolkit for this episode. And again, we’ll have tons of other resources, including that Ministry Leaders Growth Guide, you can find that at PastorServe.org/network. So you can check that out and find Terra’s information, her ministry, and her book by checking that out there. So we make that simple and easy for you. Terra, it has been an absolute pleasure, as I said, to have you with us on FrontStage BackStage. Thank you for making the time to be with us today.

Terra McDaniel
It’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Jason Daye
All right, thank you, God bless.

Jason Daye
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