‘Our Gladys’, as my little brother disrespectfully called her, was a woman of God. She’d been for many years a pillar of Silver Street Baptist Church in Godmanchester and had been one of the big formative influences on my life as a young Christian. And I loved her dearly.

So when one Saturday we went to visit her in hospital, we arrived to find that she had died an hour or so before: as you can imagine, it came as a bit of a shock. I remember sitting in the patients' waiting room with my parents and younger brother feeling numb and not knowing what to say. The relief came when I realised that she wasn’t suffering any more but was ‘with the Lord’. As I said this out loud the atmosphere which had been tense and painful seemed to be shattered with a sense of calm.

The previous summer to this I had spent two months in Uganda working with a good Anglican project helping to build rainwater collection tanks and do other maintenance work on a Christian school. During that time I had nearly lost my life four times and I had faced my own death and walked away from it. That had been a life changing experience. Now as I faced my grandmother’s death, the sense of fear had gone and all I wanted to do was rejoice that she had gone to heaven and that this wasn’t the final farewell. I grinned all the way through the funeral. Looking back on it, it was for me a positive experience. But I wonder what effect my triumphalism had on others around me.

Just recently, while talking about the bereavement related work that I have been doing, someone mentioned one of these ‘unwritten rules’ that we have that I hadn’t really heard put so clearly in focus before. The rule goes something like this: ‘Christians shouldn’t be sad when someone dies because we know that death isn’t the end’.

On first thought I wondered about this rule. Is it something that deep down we believe and yet is it something that doesn’t ring true?

Certainly in British society there is a real taboo about grieving. We are given a couple of days ‘compassionate leave’ - if we are lucky and if the relative is particularly close - and are then expected to be back at work and coping again. But is it even worse for Christians?

May I suggest a few more (and I don’t pretend for a minute to believe most of these - how about you?):

• Christians are immune from the usual emotional processes that ‘normal’ people go through.
• You shouldn’t be sad and depressed following a death because Christians are victorious people.
• Feelings of sadness and anger are sinful and are signs that you aren’t spiritual.
• You aren’t allowed to be angry because anger is wrong, especially if it is directed against God.
• Christians should be able to cope as they have lots of social support through the church.

Perhaps we should unpack some of these ideas and look to see what the Bible has to say about them.

Firstly, is it OK to be sad? Jesus certainly showed his grief when he arrived in Lazarus’ home town and was faced with the grieving relatives (John 11:17 ff). He is recorded as weeping. I’m sure this wasn’t just some show of empathy for his bereaved friends - I think he too felt the pain of the loss.

Luckily for him he was able to do something about it. Most of us don’t have that option. So if Jesus showed emotion then it must be OK for us to do so, too - however un-British it might be. And we need to bear in mind that the pain of losing a loved one through death never really goes away. It might get less - but often after it has got worse; the second year is often the time when it hits people hardest - when everyone else has forgotten or expected you to have dealt with it.

Is it unspiritual to feel depressed or sad? Do we have to live a permanently happy victorious Christian life? I don’t think so. There were times in the story of Jesus when he is reported to feel tired and worn out. He had low points just like the rest of us. And as human beings we should expect the same. We don’t become some sort of ‘superhuman’ beings when we become Christians. We merely cease to walk alone (though when we are fed up God can feel very far away). We might, however, take comfort from the fact that He has ‘been there’ and understands what it is like.

Is it wrong to be angry? Again, Jesus’ life story doesn’t bear this out. When he entered the Temple and found the Court of the Gentiles was so full of traders that Gentiles couldn’t use it for prayer, he was very angry and drove the traders out (Matthew 21:12).

The question that maybe we need to ask ourselves is whether emotions are ever wrong in themselves? Is it the emotions that we feel that are sinful? Or is it the decisions and actions that we make as a result of these? I would argue that it is the latter and that emotions are merely a response to the world around us that often we can’t control. So anger is OK as long as we don’t allow it to develop into uncontrolled verbal of physical violence. And if we feel angry against God for allowing a loved one to die and leave us bereft then I’m sure God is big enough to handle that. We probably won’t find any answers to the ‘Why’ questions. But, even if we did, we probably wouldn’t understand anyway (as was pointed out to Job when he asked the angry questions of God).

So, when Christians are bereaved, they need to grieve just as everyone else. We are not immune from the pain that others feel, else we would be useless to those around us, never able to offer any comfort or empathy. Like God had to experience the pain of the human condition when he came to live amongst us, so we need to as well, in order to help others. But we also need to be realistic and understand that some of the ‘unwritten rules’ that are around are ones that need rejecting or rewriting because they are just not helpful.

Eric Beach