Grief, Jürgen Moltmann, and Why The Bear is Still Great
During Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) I admitted to my supervisor, Silvia, that a lot of the suffering and grief in my life seemed minimal—especially when compared to most people.
I saw the switch flip in her eyes.
“You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous of which is, ‘never get involved in a land war in Asia,’ but only slightly less well-known is this: ‘Never go up against a CPE supervisor when grief is on the line!”
That’s not a verbatim. (A little CPE joke for the Real Heads) But grief and suffering, for lack of a more pastoral description, will always be personal, right sized. It can be the loss of a high school crush, or a favorite band breaking up—all the way up to things like losing a child or a parent. And I knew this, I guess. Muscle memory from years of sitting with crying teenagers or parents. But it’s easy to say one thing and believe a completely different one, I suppose.
When we deflect our pain and suffering—our grief—most people don’t ask for more information. Why would you? We are terrible at grieving, thinking it something better to be done behind closed doors or, at the very least, a Kleenex. Silvia wanted us to be anti-social in this very specific way, people who would sit in the pit of grief (and despair) — people who would be courageous enough to stop and acknowledge the pain we see in the world.
Sometimes I wonder if it’s too easy to say “God is love” or even “God loves us.” It isn’t that I don’t believe it. I do. But I worry we’ve disconnected ourselves from the very real suffering of the world. I’m not alone in this. Some of my more theologically inclined friends have rejected the concept of hope in their theology.
Hope asks people—often marginalized people—to delay their sacred worth in ways that are often thinly masked harbingers of capitalism, racism, ableism, sexism, or various other systemic structures of injustice. So while I don’t want to lose “hope” as a valuable theological category, perhaps there’s a privilege in assuming it’s the starting place. Instead, maybe we’re grasping for joy.
***
I met the theologian Jürgen Moltmann in the hallway outside of a private dining room at Vanderbilt Divinity School. He was slightly aloof, but friendly. He shook my hand and I mumbled something about his work changing my life. It wasn’t hyperbole; I was star-struck. This was my first theological crush, a man who always seemed to dodge any sort of theological classification as his work built a systematic way of thinking about God that the world hasn’t seen since Barth.
It’s a theology rooted in hope, in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, but also never separated from real world suffering. It’s the theology of a man who Jesus “found” in a World War II prisoner of war camp, a theology that believed that because he took “upon himself the eternal death of the godless and the godforsaken, so that all the godless and the godforsaken can experience communion with him.”
Moltmann’s been a theological conversation partner of mine for the last 20 years, ever since the first time I picked up The Crucified God. I sent him a letter once and he responded. When I found out he died about a month ago, June 3rd, it reminded me of the likely apocryphal tale of one theologian finding out another had died and being asked for a comment. His response, real or not, is something I think about nearly every day.
“Now he knows.”
A few weeks later, the newest season of The Bear released. If you haven’t seen the show, here’s a description I found online:
A young chef from the fine dining world comes home to Chicago to run his family sandwich shop after a heartbreaking death in his family. A world away from what he's used to, Carmy must balance the soul-crushing realities of small business ownership, his strong-willed and recalcitrant kitchen staff and his strained familial relationships, all while grappling with the impact of his brother's suicide. As Carmy fights to transform both the shop and himself, he works alongside a rough-around-the-edges kitchen crew that ultimately reveals itself as his chosen family.
The first thing people generally say about the show is: “It stresses me out.” As somebody who worked in restaurants half his life and has a family that is not exactly quiet, I’m always surprised. I mean, I get it. The show is intense. It’s designed to elicit a particular feeling, something akin to nausea perhaps.
But even the most intense episodes (Hello, Fishes) never invokes that same gut-wrenching feeling. If anything, I understand it more than a show like Ted Lasso. Some of this, of course, is rooted in a blue collar bent that I will not let loose. And part of it is growing up in Chicago and knowing people like Richie, the Faks, and of course the guy who has some relative that may-or-may-not be connected to the Mafia.
I know these people, the complicated mess of family and friends and ambition.
Anyway, reactions have been mixed about this season. It’s become a navel-gazer. There’s no story. What happened to all the witty dialogue? Why hasn’t Carmy gotten together with Syd? (If this happens, I will lead a revolution.) And perhaps one that’s unspoken but seems rooted in most of the criticism: this isn’t the show I signed up for.
I think there are a lot of ways to answer these questions—it’s a story about the working class, which we often don’t see; it’s non-linear storytelling, which inconveniences the way our brains have been trained to accept information and wait for a particular payoff.
However, it’s this season’s refusal to pull any punches on the way we grieve that makes it truly special, perhaps troublesome for those who aren’t looking to take this particular trip. The Bear doesn’t look away from the messiness, the lingering hurt, the words that only seem to come out as daggers because our own woundedness is unresolved. We’re still hurt. And let’s face it, sometimes it is just easier to cut the people you know and love most.
The entire emotional arc arguably comes from this back-and-forth between Carmy and Richie at the end of season two. (I’d suggest not watching it if you haven’t seen the show…)
If we’re to believe Moltmann, the presence of pain and suffering does not mean there is no joy. For Moltmann, joy is the meaning of life. It’s the thing that connects us to the God, even when we cannot see God. It’s a hope—yes a hope—in what happens next, when the world is created anew in ways that we fundamentally do not understand or can imagine.
Or to put it in his words:
“Life in joy is already an anticipation of eternal life . . . . In joy over the hoped-for future, we live here and now, completely and wholly, weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice . . . . Life in hope is not half a life under a proviso; it is a whole life awakening in the daybreak colors of eternal life.”
Finally, Team Claire.