Where Loss Leads: Why Grieving People Need a Theology of Giving

“Where do they go?” the young woman asked as she stared at the coal-black eyes of a dead horse lying in a stable. That “threshold question,” uttered by actress Claire Danes as she portrayed Temple Grandin in the 2010 biopic film, still haunts me. When the spirit of life leaves the living, we have a visceral sense things couldn’t merely have halted or evaporated. They must continue—somehow, somewhere. There’s more telling in the tale, more story in a distant setting. And we long to know where.

In the same scenario, most of us would say the horse “lost its life.” But the question Danes’s character posed in the film is better. Where do they go?

Christians, of course, have clear biblical responses to that question, at least when it applies to people (we’ll let horses be for now). There’s still evocative mystery, of course, enough to make God smile and man sigh—the gathering of persons passed (Gen. 25:8, 17; 35:29; 49:29), rooms in a heavenly house (John 14:2), rivers running through a God-saturated city (Rev. 22:1–2). The Bible has a poetic way of telling us where we go after death if we believe in the God of grace.

But our lips are strangely still when we ask a similar question about what happens on this side of death’s door. What happens for those of us caught up in grief in the land of the living? Where are we going? Put differently, where do our losses lead us? Temple Grandin asked where a dead horse went after the light of life had left it. So why don’t we ask where a live human is headed while the heart still beats and the blood still runs? Where is our soul being led tomorrow by the losses we face today?

Cavernous Cancer

I didn’t ask these questions when I was young. But when cancer begins drawing away those you love, it loosens your tongue. First it was my father when I was 18, after a 12-year battle with a brain tumor. Then my grandmother two years later. A childhood friend not long after that, from spinal cancer. He was 31. I could keep going, but you have your own list, don’t you? It’s a solemn list, with names written in water. And the ripples keep coming.

But cancer, thank God, never has the last word. Early in my grief, I stumbled across a line from Kahlil Gibran (1883–1931), a Syriac Christian Maronite whose mystical writings became popular in the 1960s. In his book The Prophet, Gibran wrote, “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.”

Sorrow is cavernous to joy; grief makes way for gladness. And maybe cancer is the rough metal gouge that scrapes out the softer wood from our pith, removing whatever isn’t worthy of making it through the fire of faith (Zech. 13:9). After the gouge has gone, we’ve become deepened, with more space to prize the passions and beauties we were blind to before, be it in the places still around us or the ghosts of those we’ve lost.

But having a deeper cavern in your soul, like having an empty stomach, means echoing calls for satisfaction ring louder and longer. So we start searching for something to fill the new void.

The world offers us a plethora of options to numb the sharp pangs of loss—ranging from the physical to the material, the psychological to the relational. We chase after dopamine hits and oxytocin boosts from sex—the flights of feeling. We buy fine leather and woven cotton—adornments for our fading frames. We drown our tastebuds with sugar and spice and everything nice—delightful distractions to daze the soul. We chase what we can touch and feel and taste. Or we find passing satisfaction in secret ruminations inside our head, burying our hearts in memories like children under the autumn leaves. Maybe we cling to other people, hoping we might lean on them for some sense of stability, resting ourselves on a relational rock.

But all these things only quiet the echoes, don’t they? They don’t snuff out all the sound waves. They can’t. What we really want after being carved out by our losses isn’t something to fill the hollow shape inside us; it’s someone to invite us in. But the way we enter might surprise us.

A Way In

In his essay “The Weight of Glory,” C. S. Lewis answers both the questions I’ve posed so far: Where do they go? And where do our losses lead us? See, when we lose someone precious, we know we’ve lost someone beautiful. It’s not just a beauty of aesthetics; it’s a beauty of presence. It’s the glory of being fully there with us. That’s what I longed for after my father died. I wanted his presence back with me so I could share mine with him.

Lewis points out that this happens with all the beautiful things we encounter in life, not just the beautiful people we’ve lost:

We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. . . . At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in.

What Lewis says of the beauties around us applies uniquely to the people who have gone before us—the losses that linger in grief. Later in the essay, he speaks of the glory of Christ hidden within those who believe in him. We feel the absence of that glory, don’t we? We long for its presence. It’s the glory of personal presence we want most. When it’s gone, we feel it. We want to get back, to get inside what we’ve lost relationally.

We spend so much time thinking about satisfaction instead of presence. But it’s presence that pricks us in grief. And it’s presence that pulls us with losses. In grief, we’re pulled not to a vague sense of peace or euphoria but to people. That’s why the greatest news of Scripture isn’t merely that we receive every spiritual blessing in Christ (Eph. 1:3), that we’ll one day have our earthly absences filled up, that our soul caverns will stop echoing.

Rather, the greatest news the Bible has to offer is that there’s a divine Insider, one from the inner life of God himself, who has come for people on the outside, people who want to get in, people who grieve because they keep seeing others go in where they cannot go.

From the eternally hallowed company of the Father and the Spirit, the Son became incarnate; he went outside so we could go inside. It’s not that we would become divine or be taken up into God, like a drop of water in the ocean, but that we would finally be with the God we love and the people we’ve lost. Being an insider means enjoying the full presence of others. And the most beautiful person this world has ever seen or will ever see, the hearth and home of holy presence and pulsing glory, has invited us in to do just that. Because of him, and through him alone, “we shall get in.”

We long to inhabit the beauty we see, and we long for the personal presence of those we have lost. In Jesus Christ, we get both.

Entrance of Giving

But I said the way of entrance might surprise us. That’s because when we lose someone, we assume the remedy comes through gaining. The poetic power of God’s Word reveals, however, that the remedy comes not through getting but through giving: “It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35). Even in our losses. Even in our cavernous soul with all its clanging echoes. We attempt to take to fill the absence cancer leaves in our lives, but Jesus says giving is the better blessing.

Isn’t that the glorious beauty of the cross? We think loss is the most terrifying thing, that losing shreds us to pieces we must then patch back together. But on the cross, Jesus loses his life for our gain (Phil. 2:8). And he calls us to a life of cross-carrying (Matt. 16:24), a life of losing. Why? Because in that losing is the gaining. Resurrection life comes after the seed of death is sown (John 12:24). Without the loss, there’s no gain. Without the seed, there’s no sowing. And without the sowing, there’s no growing.

We fear darkness and death, but in God’s grace they serve as our threshold questions, opening into the light of God’s ever-pulsing promises. Resurrection life begins where losses lead. The seed that falls to the ground doesn’t lie fallow; it brings a harvest. New life lies beneath the loss—eternal life (v. 25). But this isn’t just in the life to come; it’s right now.

While the blinding door of hope ahead of us houses the not yet, today houses the already. What does that look like? Like what life always looks like: giving. The life God first breathed into humanity was a gift (Gen. 2:7). The new life he breathes into us by his life-giving Spirit is also a gift (1 Cor. 15:45). All life is a gift (4:7) and leads to more giving.

So resurrection life today means we give ourselves to others because of Christ and by his Spirit. God’s giving of himself for us on the cross leads to our grace-empowered giving of ourselves to others. It’s giving, through that new resurrection life, that opens us. Opening ourselves up to give our time and attention, our listening ears, our gratitude, our prayers, our hard-won sympathy from losing beloved people in Christ—these are what drive us deeper through the threshold of the crucified and risen Christ. These are what lead us further in.

Further Up and Further In

I don’t know where these words will find you. But they’ll likely find you amid losses. Where are those losses leading you? Through Christ, the Insider come for outsiders, our losses can lead us in, tilting our chins up so we stare at the promise of his presence and the presence of those who have hidden their own weighted glory inside him. Until we arrive there, we move closer by opening our palms, using the losses to give ourselves to others, just as the Lord of the lost gave himself for us.

Lewis writes in the final book of The Chronicles of Narnia, “Further up and further in!” Such was the call of the characters as they sprinted and climbed their way deeper into Aslan’s country. That’s the answer, in a sense, to our visceral questions when we lose someone in Christ. Where did she go? Further up and further in. Where are your losses leading you right now? Further up and further in.

You and I are invited in by the holy Insider. Amid our losses, giving ourselves to others reminds us that the ultimate beauty we seek—being fully present with the God of weighted glory who knows and loves us most—comes through letting go, not through holding on. God gave his Son to get us. That loss led to our gain. In his image, we give ourselves in our losses, and that giving doesn’t just bring us further up and further in. How we meet and respond to our losses can become a path for others to enter in as well. Our losses are leading us to the grand Insider. It’s in his beautiful, personal, self-giving presence that all his people will be found. He is our way in. He is where our losses lead.

Editors’ note:?“Difficult but Beautiful Doctrines” is a long-form series that draws readers’ attention to the glory and necessity of theological truths people in the post-Christian West often find hard to accept.

Pierce Taylor Hibbs (MAR, ThM, Westminster Theological Seminary) serves as senior writer and communication specialist at Westminster Theological Seminary. He’s the author of more than 20 books, including The Christ-Light and the Illumination Award–winning title One with God. He also writes regularly for Westminster Media. He and his wife, Christina, live in Pennsylvania with their three kids (Isaac, Nora, and Heidi).