After the service, my mind went back to a conversation ten years earlier. \u201cHow about you, Sam? What would you like written on your tombstone?\u201d It was the kind of conversation you imagine having with your fellow hostage when an insurgent group has kidnapped you and left you in an attic for years on end. In fact, it was with a roomful of people I\u2019d only just met. In such conversations, I tend to remember either the things that I put into words instantaneously that I previously didn\u2019t know I thought or the things I only realized later, hours or years after the conversation, that I wish I\u2019d said.<\/p>\n
This time it was the first kind. \u201cIf it can\u2019t be happy, make it beautiful.\u201d I didn\u2019t know where it came from. It landed, fully formed.<\/p>\n
All these years later, I haven\u2019t changed my mind. (Except I doubt I\u2019ll have a tombstone at all: when you\u2019re in eternity, trying to shape what people think of you for the first few decades after you\u2019ve gone seems the wrong place to put your energy.) In fact that expression has become my template for almost every occasion when friends or congregation members face profound grief, their own mortality, or terrible distress. As a widower plans a funeral, or as a person faces another kind of loss, I invariably return to those simple words: \u201cI hope that, in the midst of your sorrow and the bleakness of what you\u2019re facing, you can yet find a way to make it beautiful.\u201d<\/p>\n
Notice those words don\u2019t say, \u201cIf it can\u2019t be good.\u201d Beauty isn\u2019t an alternative to goodness; it isn\u2019t a distraction from depth, seriousness, honesty, or integrity. Nor do they say, \u201cMake it pretty.\u201d Making it beautiful is about realizing we\u2019re usually operating on a mundane level, where things will seldom make sense and where most things are fragile and contingent. In the face of dismay, the best approach is to go up a level, to a realm of fittingness, recalibrated priorities, and God\u2019s kingdom. But making it beautiful also addresses the powerlessness at the heart of grief. There is, it turns out, something you can do, and that is to take the wisdom, grace, or soul of what\u2019s been lost and portray its transcendent quality in word, deed, or collective gesture.<\/p>\n
Read it all<\/a>.<\/p>\n Samuel Wells in @ChristianCent<\/a> 'If you have a choice between giving someone false hope and giving them the truth, always give them the truth. Once they realize the hope is false, they\u2019ll be worse off than before' https:\/\/t.co\/PeqRsiIXY0<\/a> (CC BY-SA 3.0 Duke Chapel) #parishministry<\/a> pic.twitter.com\/W7zFXmoYtU<\/a><\/p>\n — Kendall Harmon (@KendallHarmon6) April 19, 2018<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n \n