Somehow, my students had the opinion that poems and stories don’t really belong to all of us. But what my grandfather tells this grieving couple is that this story is all of ours. Here's what he says: "Though you agreed with it then [meaning, that suffering is in the order of things in this life], you will be more convinced of this truth now better than you ever were before."
"Such is life," Grandpa says, the fellow sufferer. This is our lot. I believe what Grandpa is thinking is that now--in the deep hurt of grief--his thoughts have real meaning. That I understand.
And I'm thinking that his use of you here is an editorial you. For a moment at least, he may have lost focus on the grieving couple and marched directly into the pulpit, addressing more than the parents in that quarantined house. He's even talking to me: Truth feels relative until truth is lived. Sermons feel like exercises until they aren't.
"But what should comfort you now, is the comforting fact that God is a covenant God (Verbonds God), who has said that He would be your God and the God of your children."
Comfort twice in the same sentence. An editor would have called it redundant, but I’ll have more to say on that.
But now things get even more delicate. Sitting there at the table, the Reverend Schaap has written a page and a half of empathy wrung from their shared sadness. Both the letter writer and recipient lost a child.
But my grandpa was, after all, the pastor, and as such his words carried authority second only to scripture itself. Reverend Schaap could not simply say, "I feel your pain." The grieving family would have expected the preacher to point the way out of their profound grief, and he does, by the way of what people used to call "covenant theology."
The remedy for their painful grief is, he tells them, is God's promises--that's what my grandfather is saying, even though those were the very promises the boy's parents must have been holding onto tenaciously during that child's last hours. They must have pleaded with God for their son's life, on the basis of those very promises.
So we've arrived at the most difficult question believers ever face: If God both loves us and rules this world, how is it that we suffer? Explain the Holocaust. Answer why our friends had to die. To such profound questions, there are no simple answers.
I don't think Grandpa would have asked for our pity or sympathy, but we've come to the moment in this letter when he knows he must offer a means for them to put this pain behind them; and I do feel sorry for Grandpa because I believe there are no good answers.
What did Grandpa believe? How did he square the loss of a child--of his own daughter--with the sovereign love of a faithful God? I may be reading too much into it, but I think his answer is here, in the letter, for better or for worse.
But now things get even more delicate. Sitting there at the table, the Reverend Schaap has written a page and a half of empathy wrung from their shared sadness. Both the letter writer and recipient lost a child.
But my grandpa was, after all, the pastor, and as such his words carried authority second only to scripture itself. Reverend Schaap could not simply say, "I feel your pain." The grieving family would have expected the preacher to point the way out of their profound grief, and he does, by the way of what people used to call "covenant theology."
The remedy for their painful grief is, he tells them, is God's promises--that's what my grandfather is saying, even though those were the very promises the boy's parents must have been holding onto tenaciously during that child's last hours. They must have pleaded with God for their son's life, on the basis of those very promises.
So we've arrived at the most difficult question believers ever face: If God both loves us and rules this world, how is it that we suffer? Explain the Holocaust. Answer why our friends had to die. To such profound questions, there are no simple answers.
I don't think Grandpa would have asked for our pity or sympathy, but we've come to the moment in this letter when he knows he must offer a means for them to put this pain behind them; and I do feel sorry for Grandpa because I believe there are no good answers.
What did Grandpa believe? How did he square the loss of a child--of his own daughter--with the sovereign love of a faithful God? I may be reading too much into it, but I think his answer is here, in the letter, for better or for worse.
_________________
Tomorrow: More of the grief note.
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