Bereavement – The Lloyd C Douglas Page

A page from Lloyd C. Douglas, “Saving the Minister’s Soul,” The Christian Century, 4/14/1921.

[The following is from the article, “Saving the Minister’s Soul,” which Lloyd Douglas published in The Christian Century in the April 14, 1921, issue. He is speaking to his fellow ministers about how they can find inspiration even in their busy lives. He writes:]

“In every congregation, there are a few elderly folk who are living on the income of spiritual capital amassed in days before we became too busy to take counsel of our hearts. I used to know a little old lady who was blind; that is, her physical organs of sight were not functioning. The eyes of her soul were very keen. I looked forward with keen delight to the next visit in her humble home. She always expressed gratitude that the minister called so frequently and stayed a while; but I never brought her anything to be compared with the treasures I carried away. Some of these fine old saints are prepared to do great things for us if we approach them properly. How often we rush in, pat them on the shoulder, tell them what a whale of a sermon we preached last Sunday, wish them well, and run away – tatting up another good deed done to ‘the sick and imprisoned’ – when, by sitting quietly at their feet and encouraging them to do the talking, we might have come away with a fresh sense of the glory of the human spirit and the desirableness of a life that is ‘hid with Christ in God.’

“If we only stopped long enough to think about it, the bereaved have rich treasures for us of an inspirational character. How little we make use of them, for our own good, in the moments when grief has fairly transfigured their lives! How we do imagine that we must, ourselves, do all the talking, apparently never dreaming that it is our business, at such times, to stand with bowed head and expectant heart, waiting for a message lifted up on the wings of pain.”

[Douglas will continue his essay in my next post…]

by Ronald R Johnson

An excerpt from Lloyd C. Douglas, “The Demotion of Death,” Christian Century, 1/27/1921.

The following is from Lloyd Douglas’s essay, “The Demotion of Death,” which appeared in the January 27, 1921 issue of The Christian Century. He is talking to an audience largely of ministers, reminiscing about how harrowing funerals used to be. He writes:

“Little by little that which is mortal has abated its erstwhile interest for him who has lost his dearest friend; and gradually the whole event is being invested with the spiritual and immortal.

“The home of bereavement is, more and more, emulating that high spiritual courage which Christianity teaches. No other person is so aware of this as the minister, to whom this fact is increasingly made manifest. Whatever may be the peculiar advantages of our profession, none is so fraught with great value as the opportunity we have to see how other people conduct themselves in time of trouble! Of course, the layman knows something about this. He stands by his best friend in an hour of trouble and sees, that day, a glimpse of the radiant glory of the human soul in one of its high moments – and the remembrance of it will outlast all the other observations of his life! This may happen to the layman once, twice – a few times, perhaps – in a lifetime. In our business, such revelations are so frequent that they come to be classed as ‘all in the day’s work.’ I do not mean that we ever get used to it, or that the frequency of such experiences dulls our consciousness of the absolute grandeur of the human soul when empowered by this high spiritual courage; but we see it so often that we understand it is not a rare gift bequeathed to an occasional rare spirit, but rather that it is a sort of built-in capacity of the normal soul!

“And – sometimes – when I see that men and women are able to go under fire; and accept the losses of the very dearest possessions of their lives; and how they face, with a sense of victory and mastery, bereavements that fairly tear up the intricately knotted affections of years – smiling through it all – I stand in a kind of reverential awe before this virtue that lifts men out of the category of terrestrials and shows them to be sons of God!”

[Douglas will conclude this essay in my next post.]

Tag: Bereavement

Accepting the Ministries of Others

The Demotion of Death, Part 3