Why Grieving Is an Essential Christian Spiritual Practice

We are exploring the second key element of spiritual formation: habits. The other four are time, community, intimacy, and instruction.

One of the habits we have already considered is courageous curiosity about God, others, and ourselves. A life with Jesus invites and expects us to ask questions, but we must approach both our questions and any answers with authenticity. Courageous curiosity leaves little room for pretense, shadow selves, niceties, or patronizing. Perhaps that is why Jesus expressed His admiration for Nathanael.

The journey toward becoming a person of depth—and therefore someone who loves well—requires us to deal with God, life, people, ourselves, and our circumstances as they are, not as we would prefer them to be. Courageous curiosity compels us to investigate reality and confront what we find, whether our discoveries are light or dark.

To become courageously curious is also to become humble because, as Pogo so aptly put it, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” Though sometimes curiosity leads us to the equally truthful conclusion that there are enemies among our friends, family members, coworkers, and church communities. That realization may invite us to practice relational shrewdness rather than remain trapped in denial.

Jessica and I have a good friend who jokingly—though accurately—refers to herself as a “toxic optimist.” Her optimism often serves her well in business, but it has also caused her to gloss over, ignore, and defend away substantial relational and spiritual abuse in her past and present.

Her heart understandably finds it easier to force the injustice and pain into hidden crevices than to ask authentic questions of her story. Doing so would compel her to assign truthful labels to how she has been treated: exploitation, betrayal, abandonment, and willful destruction. These are difficult words to assign to former friends or current family members—people she has legitimately loved.

Courageous curiosity can hurt, but it is a good hurt. It brings us into contact with reality, and reality is the place where healing begins.

Let’s Go See Toy Story Instead

I try not to spend too much time in Ecclesiastes. I feel about that book roughly the way I feel about war movies. I go to the movies to laugh and be entertained, not to be reminded of the very real and awful ways human beings inflict harm on one another. I go to movies to escape, not to re-experience the news.

Similarly, I sometimes avoid sections of the Bible that portray the raw, authentic reality of life. Obviously, I remain a work in progress when it comes to courageous curiosity.

Yet the Beatles found much to ponder in Ecclesiastes, so perhaps I should, too.

The writer tells us:

“It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, because that is the end of every man, and the living takes it to heart.”

Ecclesiastes is sometimes characterized as the work of a middle-aged, wizened cynic. In some places, the writer seems to look at the generally cheerier book of Proverbs and respond dryly, “Yeah, right. That’s not really the way life works.”

Yet something about developing the habit of mourning resonates with me as I seek to become a deeper person. Apparently, grieving losses is not something we should practice only when a loved one dies or a job disappears.

Perhaps grieving is an essential Christian spiritual practice because loss touches far more of life than we usually acknowledge.

Is It Okay Not to Be Okay?

Henri Nouwen wrote:

“Mourn, my people, mourn. Let your pain rise up in your heart and burst forth in you with sobs and cries. Mourn for the silence that exists between you and your spouse. Mourn the way you were robbed of your innocence. Mourn for the absence of soft embrace, an intimate friendship, a life-giving sexuality. Mourn for the abuse of your body, your mind, your heart. Mourn for the bitterness of your children, the indifference of your friends and your colleagues’ hardness of heart.”

Commenting on Nouwen, Ronald Rolheiser writes:

“These words are indeed prophetic because perhaps the greatest spiritual and psychological challenge for us once we reach mid-life is to mourn our deaths and losses. Unless we mourn properly our hurts, our losses, life’s unfairness, our shattered dreams, our radical consummation, and all the life that we once had but that now passed us by, we will live either in an unhealthy fantasy or an ever-intensifying bitterness.”

I am quite reluctantly but firmly entrenched in midlife and find myself thinking more often about how things have turned out so far.

In some ways, life has been filled with wonderful and extraordinary blessings. My thirty-year marriage to Jessica has had its ups and downs, but the depth of our intimate friendship reaches further down than I would once have thought possible. Our twenty-something sons did not follow the paths I imagined for them, but things appear to be working out well. They are successfully adulting and have left our roost, yet they remain nearby and still seem genuinely to enjoy being around us, and we enjoy them.

They love God, one another, and their friends. I am not sure it gets much better than that.

For the most part, I have had the pleasure of working in meaningful efforts and roles for which I was generally well suited. Unlike many friends, I have not spent years working in jobs I hated. I have taken a few business and ministry leaps, and one or two even turned out well.

Yet I have always longed for a mentor—an older, wiser sage who could guide me through life’s unpredictable currents. I had two when I was younger, but the relationships became more exploitative than helpful. I stopped looking for another in my forties.

Peer-to-peer, long-term friendships have also been elusive. The “I’m with you until the end” male bonds portrayed in movies and sitcoms have remained largely that—fantasy. I am amazed and even slightly jealous of middle-aged men who are still close to their high-school friends.

There is also the miscarriage, the friends who walked away, the financial losses, the business and ministry failures, the consequences of my own dumb decisions, the betrayals, the miscommunications, the misunderstandings, and the misrepresentations.

Are we allowed to mourn these losses? Is it good that we do so?

I believe the answer is yes.

Loss Is Larger Than Death

We generally associate grief with death, but much of life involves smaller deaths that receive no funeral.

A friendship ends. A dream becomes impossible. A marriage remains intact but loses tenderness. A child makes choices we never expected. Our bodies stop cooperating. A ministry fails. A career ends badly. A parent is physically present but emotionally unavailable. A church community becomes unsafe. A version of ourselves we expected to become never materializes.

These experiences may not be publicly recognized as grief, but the heart often experiences them as loss.

When these losses remain unnamed, they do not disappear. They settle into us. They may become resentment, striving, numbness, suspicion, chronic anger, depression, or the determination never to need anyone again.

This is one reason sharing our stories in safe relationships matters. We sometimes need another person to help us recognize that what happened was genuinely painful and that our grief is not an indulgence or a sign of spiritual weakness.

Naming the loss does not make us victims. It allows us to stop pretending that nothing happened.

We Have No Other Options

Rolheiser continues:

“We have no other options because life, in fact, for all of us, is unfair. We have been cheated, dropped too often, and never valued or loved properly. What we have dreamed for our lives can never be. Thus we have a choice: We can spend the rest of our lives angry, trying to protect ourselves against something that has already happened to us, death and unfairness, or we can grieve our losses, abuses, and deaths and, through that, eventually attain the joy and delights that are in fact possible for us.”

I suppose the key word is eventually.

Perhaps this is why we should consider mourning a habit rather than an event we “get through” so we can move on. Grief is not a box to check. Some losses require revisiting because the meaning of what happened changes as we grow older.

A loss experienced at twenty may take on a different meaning at forty or sixty. A child may understand a family rupture one way, while the adult that child becomes recognizes additional layers of betrayal, abandonment, or confusion.

The heart does not always process loss according to our preferred timetable.

Christian grieving allows us to return to what remains unresolved—not to live there forever, but to allow Jesus to meet us there more truthfully.

Mourning to Morning

Lament appears to have gone out of style. It sounds odd to describe grieving as a habit we intentionally practice rather than something inflicted on us by circumstance.

There is always the risk of becoming a perpetual mourner, a person whose identity becomes organized around injury or victimhood. But there is an equal and perhaps more common danger: refusing to grieve at all.

We are encouraged to move forward, stay positive, count our blessings, forgive quickly, look for the lesson, and trust that God has a plan. Those responses can contain truth, but they can also become forms of spiritual avoidance.

The first four stages of the familiar grief model are denial, anger, bargaining, and depression. The final stage is acceptance. Acceptance has much in common with the life of a deep disciple because acceptance and peace are intertwined.

Is not peacefulness, at least in part, the acceptance of life as it is rather than as we think it should be—or as we believe we deserve?

The Western response to not getting what we want is usually to work harder, try something new, better ourselves, or manipulate circumstances and people until they satisfy our desires. We are, after all, entitled to the American dream.

Yet a person who longs to become more like Jesus may discover a deeper and more lasting respite through mourning rather than striving.

Grief Is Not the Same as Giving Up

There is nothing inherently wrong with working hard, creating a healthier life, seeking justice, repairing relationships, or attempting to improve ourselves.

Grieving does not require passivity. It does not mean remaining in harmful circumstances, refusing treatment, abandoning hope, or assuming nothing can change.

It means acknowledging the heart’s response to a life that is sometimes unfair.

Instead of simply bucking up, we take time to consider our broken dreams, shattered relationships, unmet expectations, and experienced injustices. We allow our hearts to express appropriate sorrow because these things hurt, and it is all right that they hurt.

If we do not permit our hearts to grieve, we live falsely. We keep trying to regain what has been lost instead of slowly accepting that some losses cannot be undone.

As Rolheiser suggests, we either live in fantasy or become quietly but inevitably embittered. Neither describes the kind of person Jesus is forming us to become.

Grieving in the Presence of God

Some of us avoid mourning because grief seems like a lack of faith. We assume that trust in God should make us less sad, less angry, or less affected by loss.

Scripture suggests otherwise.

The Psalms are filled with lament. Job protested. Jeremiah grieved. Jesus wept at Lazarus’s tomb even though He knew resurrection was coming. In Gethsemane, He did not pretend that the approaching cross was easy or desirable.

Biblical faith does not require emotional dishonesty.

The inward journey with God gives us permission to bring our grief into relationship rather than manage it alone. We can tell God that something was unfair, that we are angry, that we wanted a different life, and that we do not understand why He did not intervene.

These prayers may feel irreverent, but God already knows what lies within us. We do not protect Him by hiding our disappointment.

Mourning with Jesus allows us to experience Him not merely as the One who explains loss or eventually fixes everything, but as the One who remains with us in it.

Grief Exposes What We Love

Grief reveals attachment. We mourn because something or someone mattered.

That does not mean every attachment was healthy or every desire should have been fulfilled. But grief can help us understand what we valued, what we hoped for, and what we believed would make life good.

A lost promotion may reveal more than disappointment about work. It may expose how deeply identity became connected to recognition. The end of a friendship may uncover a longing to be chosen and secure. A child’s unexpected path may reveal how much of our own story became tied to theirs.

Grief makes the heart visible.

This is not cause for condemnation. It is an invitation to become curious about what we loved, feared, expected, and lost. The patterns that surface through grief can help us understand the hidden ideas and desires shaping our inner lives.

Sometimes mourning helps reorder those attachments. We release what can no longer be recovered and begin receiving what remains possible.

Why Community Matters in Grief

Grieving is deeply personal, but it should not always be private.

Some losses require solitude, and no community has the right to demand access to another person’s pain. Yet prolonged isolation can make grief heavier. Sorrow turns inward and may become shame, bitterness, or despair.

We need people who can remain present without forcing progress. They do not tell us how long grief should last, rush toward a lesson, compare our suffering with someone else’s, or insist that everything happens for a reason.

They listen. They remember. They allow the same story to be told again.

This kind of presence is part of the Christian community our hearts actually need. The goal is not to fix grief but to help another person carry it.

Sometimes the most healing sentence is not an explanation. It is simply, “That should not have happened to you.”

The Danger of Getting Stuck

Must we guard against becoming stuck in denial, anger, bargaining, or depression? Yes.

But I am not sure that is the greater danger in the modern age. The greater danger may be that we do not grieve at all and therefore lock our hearts into constant motion—moving on, getting ahead, pressing forward, and reinventing ourselves before we are ready.

We can remain busy for years while grief quietly determines the direction of our lives.

A person may work compulsively because stopping would bring a loss into view. Another may move rapidly from relationship to relationship because solitude awakens abandonment. Someone else may remain permanently angry because anger feels more powerful than sorrow.

This is where wise companions and professional care may matter. Grief can become complicated, and some losses overwhelm our current capacity to process them. Counselors, spiritual directors, physicians, and trusted friends may help us distinguish between grief that needs room and patterns that require additional support.

The goal is not to become efficient at mourning. It is to become honest enough to move through it rather than around it.

Acceptance Is Not Approval

Acceptance does not mean declaring that what happened was good.

It does not mean excusing abuse, blessing betrayal, pretending injustice was insignificant, or agreeing that every loss was somehow necessary.

Acceptance means acknowledging that it happened and that we cannot build a healthy life around the demand that the past become different.

We can seek justice while accepting reality. We can establish boundaries while mourning a relationship. We can forgive without restoring unsafe access. We can hope for healing without insisting that life return to what it was.

The Wall in spiritual formation often confronts us with realities that cannot be solved through effort, information, or control. We must eventually decide whether to remain trapped in resistance or allow grief to lead us toward a more surrendered form of hope.

Acceptance does not erase pain. It changes our relationship to it.

The Habit of Mourning

A habit of grieving does not require us to remain sad or to search constantly for reasons to mourn.

It means making room for honest lament when loss becomes visible.

We might sit quietly with God and name what happened. We may write about the life we wanted but did not receive. We can tell a trusted person what still hurts. We may read a lament Psalm slowly, attend to what happens in our body, or allow tears without immediately interpreting them.

Some griefs may need ritual. We might mark an anniversary, visit a meaningful place, write a letter we never send, or create something beautiful that acknowledges what was lost.

The particular practice matters less than our willingness to stop pretending.

Christian grieving becomes formative when it occurs within time, habit, community, intimacy, and instruction—the five elements that help truth reach the deeper places of the heart.

Mourning requires time because acceptance rarely arrives quickly. It requires habits because grief resurfaces. It needs community and intimacy because pain carried alone can become distorted. It also needs wise instruction so we can distinguish lament from hopelessness and acceptance from resignation.

What May Be Waiting Beyond Grief

Grief does not return us to the life we once had.

Some dreams remain broken. Some people do not return. Some injuries leave scars. Some questions remain unanswered.

But mourning may make room for the joy and delight still available to us.

That joy is not denial. It is not the forced optimism of pretending everything worked out for the best. It is the quieter joy of no longer spending all our energy resisting what has already happened.

We become more capable of receiving the life that remains.

Perhaps Jesus is even now inviting us to mourn with Him—our lost hopes, broken friendships, miscarriages, failures, betrayals, disappointments, missed opportunities, and all the lives we imagined but did not receive.

He does not invite us to remain in the house of mourning forever.

But perhaps we cannot fully enter the morning until we have permitted ourselves to mourn.

Duc in altum.

Explore Further

How to Begin the Inward Journey with God Safely

Sharing Our Stories: How Storytelling Helps Us Heal

The Wall in Spiritual Formation: When Faith Falls Apart

The Kind of Christian Community Our Hearts Actually Need