{"id":3719,"date":"2019-10-22T08:12:50","date_gmt":"2019-10-22T12:12:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.theprodigalpig.com\/?p=3719"},"modified":"2019-10-15T12:20:29","modified_gmt":"2019-10-15T16:20:29","slug":"acquainted-with-grief","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.theprodigalpig.com\/?p=3719","title":{"rendered":"Acquainted with Grief"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Prodigal:\u00a0 VOOM, VOOM<\/p>\n

Me:\u00a0 You and Brady are having a lot of fun!<\/p>\n

Prodigal:\u00a0 Yes, we are!<\/p>\n

Me:\u00a0 Well, now hush!\u00a0 You’re makin’ such a ruckus, you’ll wake up the possums.<\/p>\n

Prodigal:\u00a0 Yes mam..we will try to be quieter.<\/p>\n

This is from the book Reaching for the Invisible God by Philip Yancey<\/p>\n

John Donne, the seventeenth-century poet and dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London was a man acquainted with grief.\u00a0 During his term at London’s largest church, three waves of the bubonic plague swept through the city, the last epidemic alone killing 40,000 people.\u00a0 Londoners flocked to Dean Donne for an explanation, or at least a word of comfort.\u00a0 Meanwhile Donne himself came down with an illness the doctors initially diagnosed as plague (it turned out to be a spotted fever, like typhus).\u00a0 For six weeks he lay tremulous at the threshold of death, listening to the church bells toll each new fatality, wondering if he would be next (“Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee”).\u00a0 During this dark time Donne, forbidden to read or study but permitted to write, composed the book Devotions, a meditation on suffering.\u00a0 He was tuning his instrument at the door, he said–door of death.<\/p>\n

In Devotions, John Donne calls God to task.\u00a0 Sometimes he taunts God, sometimes he grovels and pleads for forgiveness, sometimes he argues fiercely.\u00a0 But not once does Donne leave God out of the process.\u00a0 The presence of God shadows every thought, every sentence.<\/p>\n

Donne asked the “Why me?” question over and over.\u00a0 Calvinism was relatively new, and Donne pondered the notion of plagues and wars as “God’s angels.”\u00a0 He soon recoiled from that idea: “Surely it is not thou, it is not thy hand.\u00a0 The devouring sword, the consuming fire, the winds from the wilderness, the disease of the body, all that afflicted Job, were from the hands of Satan; it is not thou.”\u00a0 Still, he never felt certain, and the not-knowing caused him inner torment.\u00a0 Donne’s book never answers the “Why me?”\u00a0 questions, as none of us can answer those questions that lie beyond the reach of humanity.<\/p>\n

But even though Devotions does not resolve the intellectual doubts, it does record Donne’s emotional resolution.\u00a0 At first–confined to bed, churning out prayers without answers, contemplating death, regurgitating guilt-he can find no relief from ever-present fear.\u00a0 Obsessed, he reviews every biblical occurrence of the word fear.\u00a0 As he does so, it dawns on him that life will always include circumstances that incite fear:\u00a0 if not illness, financial hardship, if not poverty, rejection, if not loneliness, failure.\u00a0 In such a world.\u00a0 Donne has a clear choice: to fear God or to fear everything else, to trust God or to trust nothing.<\/p>\n

In his wrestling with God, Donne changes questions.\u00a0 He began with the question of origin–“Who caused this illness? And why?”–for which he found no answer.\u00a0 His meditations shift ever so gradually toward the question of response.\u00a0 The crucial issue, the one that faces every person who endures a great trial, is that same question of response:\u00a0 Will I trust God with my pain, my weakness, even my fear?\u00a0 Or will I turn away from him in bitterness and anger?\u00a0 Donne determines that it does not really matter whether his sickness is a chastening from God or merely a natural occurrence.\u00a0 In either case he will trust God, for in the end trust represents the proper fear of the Lord.<\/p>\n

Deuteronomy 6:18<\/p>\n

And thou shalt do that which is right and good in the sight of the LORD:\u00a0 that it may be well with thee, and that thou mayest go in and possess the good land which the Lord sware unto thy fathers.<\/p>\n

Jennifer Van Allen<\/p>\n

www.theprodigalpig.com<\/p>\n

www.faithincounseling.org<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Prodigal:\u00a0 VOOM, VOOM Me:\u00a0 You and Brady are having a lot of fun! Prodigal:\u00a0 Yes, we are! Me:\u00a0 Well, now hush!\u00a0 You’re makin’ such a ruckus, you’ll wake up the possums. Prodigal:\u00a0 Yes mam..we will try to be quieter. This is from the book Reaching for the Invisible God by Philip Yancey John Donne, the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3719","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nAcquainted with Grief - The Prodigal Pig<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.theprodigalpig.com\/?p=3719\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Acquainted with Grief - The Prodigal Pig\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Prodigal:\u00a0 VOOM, VOOM Me:\u00a0 You and Brady are having a lot of fun! 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