Sometimes religious people have this idea that religion allows you to shortcut the normal human processes of agony, misery, decay, and death.  I mean, if God is with you, why shouldn’t he enable you to be happy?  But that’s not how it works.  In fact, with respect to grief, St. Paul himself warned that we Christians do grieve, just not as others grieve—without hope.  So, in every other way, Christians are as crushed by grief as anyone else.  We differ only in the confidence that we will one day see our loved ones again, a confidence that does little to overcome the loss, loneliness, and crushing emptiness that we experience now.  “Filling your life with God” won’t help you here, because God himself became a man, and he too was “acquainted with grief” as “a man of sorrows.”  When God makes the saint, he does not unmake the man.  There is no way to shortcut normal human processes through some secret powers built into religion.  That’s not what religion is for.

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