ABSTRACT
Even though the religious issues might be at the heart of grief, religion may or may not be helpful to people as they try to come to terms with a significant death (Tedeschi and Calhoun, 2006). Grief tests the assumptions about how the universe works and our place and power in the universe (see Landsman, 2002). For some people, their prior religious life proves adequate to the task. They come out of their grief more secure in their faith than when they entered it. A man told me that as he stood in front of his mother’s body in the casket asking why, his father quoted scripture to him, “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” At that moment, he told me, he knew he was called to be a Christian minister. On the other hand, for some people, their prior religious life is not adequate to their grief. I remember sitting in a meeting of bereaved parents when the topic was Where was God when my child died? One woman said that after her child died she lost her faith. Then she added, “But I got a new one that’s better.” Testing, confirming, modifying, or abandoning prior religion or spirituality is not simply a matter of belief. “Coming to terms with the loss of our assumptive worlds is primarily about learning new ways of acting and being in the world” (Attig, 2002, p. 64; see Klass, 1999, chapter 5 for a fuller discussion of the vicissitudes of faith in individual grief).
