Grief, Anger, Prayer

Here's one that's been mulling a while as well.  Another big one, like the forgiveness thing.  It comes from places very personal to people close to me.  
My mom is going through a very painful (and biblically sanctioned) divorce right now - after 20 years of marriage.  It's a difficult process anyway, but made all the more difficult by an unsupportive pastor, a soon-to-be-ex-husband who continues to disrespect her, and a community of fellow Christians who judge her for being angry.   
At the same time, I have friends who recently found out that they can't have children.  Perhaps they'll adopt or take some other option, but for now, I imagine it hits like a betrayal.  A betrayal of one's own body, and even a betrayal by the One who made those bodies.  A strong Christian couple, who I have no doubt would be awesome parents - how can He do this to them?  Here again, there are people - fellow Christians - who want to say, "You shouldn't be angry."
Now honestly, I have no real clue what the people in either of my stories is going through.  I haven't had to go through anything like that myself.  But I know grief, and that's what this is.  People talk about grief in situations of death, but it can (obviously, I would think) be relevant to other situations as well.  It's still death, of a sort - death of a marriage, of a dream, whathaveyou.  The Bible certainly takes such things seriously - barrenness and adultery are used frequently as illustrations and examples of bad things in the Bible.
Now, I've got 3 things all tangled together in my mind as a result of this - Grief, Prayer, and and Anger.  What is grief?  Is grief different for a Christian?  How do grief and anger affect prayer?  Is it ok to be angry?  Is it ok to be angry at God?




Hmm...
So.
Let's start at the beginning: 

What is grief?

We all have heard of the 5 stages of grief.  As a refresher, they are: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Despair, and Acceptance.  There's flux between them - you can be at bargaining one day, then go back to anger for a week, then back to bargaining again - that's how humans work.  Nothing's ever a straight line.
I've sort of watched my mom go through these over the last 8 months or so.  More than that, I guess, because the denial part existed for a while before everything went up in smoke, if you know what I mean.  Being aware of these stages is actually pretty comforting to me, because when my mom gets really down into despair and wonders if God has abandoned her, I think - "Despair is the last stage!  This is really awful, but you're almost there!"  We do what we can to keep sane.  Anyway, these are the stages as the psychologists tell us, and having sort of watched them unfold, I feel like yeah, it's pretty spot-on.

Is grief different for a Christian?

 

I did some digging around the internet and found a website trying to re-work the 5 stages of grief to be more Christian-y.
5 Stages revised: 
Stage                 Typical Grief Response                                Biblical Grief Response

Stage One          Denial                                                        Candor: Honesty with Myself
Stage Two          Anger                                                        Complaint: Honesty with God
Stage Three        Bargaining                                                   Cry: Asking God for Help
Stage Four          Despair                                                   Comfort: Receiving God’s Help

I kind of get it.  But it feels to me that one has to experience denial before one can have candor, to experience anger before one can complain about it.  It feels like these are more in-between phases than replacements.  Beyond that, trying to force grief into a box seems weird to me.  The 5-stage model is descriptive, not prescriptive.  This "Biblical revision" seems like a way of dealing with the 5 stages that already exist - a prescription for the description, if you will.

I like the perspective of this sermon, based on 1 Thess 4:13 ("do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope") better. "Scripture doesn’t say don’t grieve, it says don’t grieve as those who have no hope. In other words grieve but grieve with hope." (He has a different breakdown of the stages of grief, but I won't get into it, you can see it yourself.) So, it's ok to grieve. And we do grieve differently - because we have ultimate hope. It's a point similar to the one I was trying to make in an earlier post: being happy is different than being joyful. We're not required to be happy, but we are required to have joy - the joy that comes from knowing that we have a loving God in heaven, and the joy that comes from the knowledge of our salvation. We have a different endgame than an unbeliever, and that changes our perspective. Grief with hope is different than grief without hope. Grief with hope is joyful grief.
(He also acknowledges that grief takes a long time, often longer than other people think it should. That's certainly very true. I recall my grandmother feeling abandoned about 3 months after her husband died. Everyone else was moving on with their lives, and she was suddenly dealing with her grief alone, because she was the one closest to it, the one most strongly grieving. More on that later.)

 

How do grief and anger affect prayer? Is it ok to be angry?  Is it ok to be angry at God?

These 3 are getting chunked together, because I cant' figure out how to separate them in my mind.  I've got tons of examples of angry or grieving prayer in the Bible.  There are occasions where godly men called God out and took him to task for perceived injustices.  Are we allowed to do that?
One example I'm always reminded of is Abraham bargaining with God for Lot's life: "Far be it from you to do such a thing—to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you! Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?"  Ohmygoodnessshutup!  You can't just say things like that!
Then Moses does the same thing:After the Golden Calf Incident, God is angry.  Moses gets angry right back, and lets God know.  He essentially says, "Look, if you kill us all now, you're going to make yourself look pretty bad!  Besides, you promised you would take care of us!"  Seriously?  Shame tactics?  Scandal!
There's an especially hilarious moment in Numbers 11 where Moses, completely exhausted and sick of Israel's shit, cries out to God.  “Why have you brought this trouble on your servant? ...If this is how you are going to treat me, please go ahead and kill me."
Yet in all instances, God relents.  He brings help and healing for those who need it, while maintaining justice in his own way.

Psalm 44 is especially harsh and angry.  It's a psalm of "what the heck is wrong with you, God?"  HOW did this end up in the Bible?

"In God we make our boast all day long, and we will praise your name forever.  But now you have rejected and humbled us...All this came upon us, though we had not forgotten you; we had not been false to your covenant.  Our hearts had not turned back; our feet had not strayed from your path.  But you crushed us and made us a haunt for jackals; you covered us over with deep darkness...Awake, Lord! Why do you sleep?"

There's no handy response from God to tell us how this was received.  But it is in the Bible, in the prayer book that makes up its center. 

1 John 5:14-15, Hebrews 4:16, and others tell us to be bold and confident in prayer.  Yet...

One of my favorite passages in the Bible is God's response at the end of Job.  After the suffering and humiliation, after the discourses on the nature of suffering, Job gets tired:

Job 30:20-22

²⁰ “I cry out to you, God, but you do not answer;
    I stand up, but you merely look at me.
²¹ You turn on me ruthlessly;
    with the might of your hand you attack me.
²² You snatch me up and drive me before the wind;
    you toss me about in the storm...

31:35

³⁵ (“Oh, that I had someone to hear me!
    I sign now my defense—let the Almighty answer me;
    let my accuser put his indictment in writing.)

This is the same sort of prayer as those above - Job is clearly angry at God, and from a human perspective, he has every right to be.  But in this instance, God doesn't relent.  He's not shamed into changing his actions.  Instead of helping Job with his problems or comforting him, or even telling him what the heck is going on, he says, "When's the last time YOU invented the universe, Job?  Oh right - never.  I actually know what I'm doing here, so SHUT IT."  (He takes 4 chapters to say this, but that's the gist of it.)  Harsh!  He does eventually solve Job's problems, but he doesn't do that until after Job repents of his arrogance and apologizes for being so angry.  
I say this is one of my favorite Bible sections, and it is.  Not only is it a great bit of sarcasm (from the God that brought you "meat coming out of your nostrils" and "schooled by your own donkey"), but also, I find it oddly comforting.  God never explains himself to Job, he merely reminds him of who is in ultimate power.  Likewise, I may never know why the bad things in my life are happening, but I know that God has ultimate power.
Still, what does this say about anger toward God?  Here, God clearly says, "You have no right."  
In the New Testament, James says:  "My dear brothers and sisters, take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry, because human anger does not produce the righteousness that God desires."

So what's the difference?
I've got no real clue, but here's a theory:
Job lived around the general time of Abraham, and could well pre-date the first covenant.  So he belongs to a slightly different group of believers than Abraham and Moses.  The God isn't different, but until he makes his covenant with Abraham, he does not condescend to be yakked at by humans.  The covenant was a bargain, a contract where both sides had obligations to uphold.  Prior to it, there wasn't a way to approach God.  After it, there was, and Abraham and Moses used that covenantal relationship to make sure God held up his end of the bargain.
However, we humans weren't able to hold up our end of the bargain.  So God made a new covenant.
The old covenant (Abraham's) was based on works (the Law) and had a focus more keyed to this life.  The new covenant is based on faith (Grace) and is focused and keyed on the next life.  So Israel (in theory) upheld the law and received good things on earth.  Christians (in theory) believe in Christ's redemption and receive our reward in heaven.
So now that we have this new covenant, it's less appropriate to get mad at God, since he came down and eternally saved all our asses.
I don't know if that's right.

What I do know is that even if anger at God is a sin, so is hypocrisy or lying to God.  We are humans.  Humans grieve, and humans get angry.  It's pointless to pretend to an omniscient God that we're not mad at him.  God wants honesty, and sometimes that means anger.
However, it's important to remember to "not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope."  Even in the psalms, this comes up.  Psalms 94 and 109 are both angry, grieving psalms.  Yet they both end in hope: "But the Lord has become my fortress, and my God the rock in whom I take refuge."  "With my mouth I will greatly extol the Lord; in the great throng of worshipers I will praise him. For he stands at the right hand of the needy, to save their lives from those who would condemn them."
We must remember that we are all subject to God's will.  
This reminds me of a brief scene in Matthew:

"A man with leprosy came and knelt before him and said, 'Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean.'  Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man. 'I am willing,' he said. 'Be clean!' Immediately he was cleansed of his leprosy."

It's short and subtle, but quite powerful nonetheless.  It's powerful because of the man's prayer: "Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean."  The man has a reason to be angry at God.  He has a horrible, painful disease.  He has a reason to feel abandoned by God, because his disease makes him ceremonially unclean (so he can't even worship properly), and there is no cure.  But he doesn't reach out in anger at all.  He first acknowledges Christ's power and lays himself in God's hands.  Then he asks to be made clean.  I think the wording here is important.  He doesn't ask to be cured, so that he can be comfortable, so that he can work, so that he be a part of society (although that would be the same thing).  He asks to be made clean so that he can worship.  His first priority is not his own pain, but his faith.  That is truly astonishing.

So, on the whole, I would say that no, we shouldn't be angry at God.  He is, after all, God.  But I would also say that we will be angry at God.  We are, after all, human.  It's important that we are honest with God and with ourselves about these truths.  We shouldn't fall into hypocrisy or denial about our emotions, because that's both sinful and unhealthy.  We have to acknowledge our emotions before we can deal with them.  So that's the next step: to deal with them.  Hopefully, even when we are angry at God, we can bring it back around to the ultimate faith that we have in the creator and perfecter of not only our faith, but the whole universe. 

So, with all this, comes a bonus section,

 

How do we respond to others' grief and anger?

This is important too - not just how do we deal with our own emotions, but how do we deal with others' emotions?
That, luckily, has an easy answer:
"Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn."
Even Jesus practiced this. 

Everyone handles grief differently, and it's not for us to judge their reasons, their method, or their timeline, except in cases where it clearly goes against scripture.  We are called on to have empathy (not judgement).  We should be building people up with encouragement (not judgement).  When extreme grief causes people to lose sight of God's promise, and of the faith they have in heaven, we should be there to help guide them (not judge them) and show them God's joy (not judgement). 

And if someone's grief makes you uncomfortable, well, TOO FREAKING BAD.  Seriously.  You think it makes you uncomfortable?  Well it's sure as hell making them uncomfortable.  Suck it up.  This is not about you.  When someone is grieving, even if they're angry, even if they're maybe more open about it than you would be, it is never appropriate to shame them for their process or silence them for your own comfort.  Empathy.  Encouragement.  Enrichment (through scripture).
I hate to get mad about this, but it's something that I've experienced over and over and it has got to stop.  As always: Don't be a dick.