A Grief Observed: WandaVision
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“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” – C.S. Lewis
As a pastor I am always challenged when I have to officiate a funeral. What can one say to someone in this time of grief? How does one offer hope when everything seems so hopeless? We live in a time when it feels like we are surrounded by death. The pandemic has claimed the lives of 2.73 million people worldwide. I don’t know anyone in my community who hasn’t lost someone due to COVID-19. Not only did the pandemic cause chaos and fear in our world, but it has also isolated us from one another. Many of those who died have died alone. Pastors are dealing with comforting congregations who have been cut off from one another. It all reminds me of John 11.
The Gospel of John is full of symbolism and metaphor, but here in chapter 11 the gospel becomes very personal and real. Lazarus is dying, so his sisters send word to Jesus, “Lord, the one you love is sick.” This is an urgent cry for help, and yet Jesus waits to go see them, and Lazarus dies before he arrives. When Jesus does finally show up at the house of Mary and Martha, Martha offers this pointed statement in verse 21: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
Within this statement lies a question that I get asked far more than any other in my ministry. Why? Why doesn’t God heal me? Why does God let people suffer? Why didn’t God save my loved one? Why do bad things happen to good people? Why did my loved one have to die? It is a question that is asked so often because it seems like the standard answers about God don’t quite answer the question of why.
In the Marvel television show WandaVision, this question seems to be swirling under the surface. WandaVision follows the story of Wanda Maximoff after the events of Avengers: Endgame. You don’t have to know much about the Marvel Universe to follow the show except for two important facts:
Two people Wanda loves greatly have died: Pietro, her twin brother, and Vision, her romantic interest. She is in an immense amount of grief.
Wanda’s powers are able to completely remake the world around her and alter reality. She has an immense amount of power.
In her grief, Wanda creates an alternative television reality where she is plunged into a world of sitcoms with a recreated Vision and their children. It is a world where everything seems perfectly normal. However, beneath the saccharin sweet sitcom emulation there is a hint of something darker and more sinister. When we peel back the layers it is more akin to horror. Vision is still dead. A town in New Jersey is held hostage in Wanda’s grief. All of us viewing from the outside of the sitcom see the pain that has encompassed everything. It is not funny; it is tragic.
The writer and showrunner, Jac Schaeffer, created this timely reflection on what we do with our grief in the midst of unimaginable circumstances. During a global pandemic, with people dying in isolation away from their family and friends, people are dealing with grief, pain and loneliness. Wanda has no support system to help her through her loss; she is struggling in her own fantasy world. She feels alone.
I worked in a funeral home for 10 years and encountered people from many different backgrounds. We had funerals for stillborn babies, wherein parents on the precipice of joy over the birth of their child instead had to face unspeakable loss. We had funerals for spouses of 65+ years who left behind widows and widowers now with empty space in their lives. I could tell you countless stories of people who endured terrible tragedies. Some mourners were sad; some were in denial. Some were angry. We had one funeral where the family tried to raise the deceased man from the dead. In other cases, descendants of the decedent fought with one another while their loved one laid in the casket. Grief can be crippling. Many of us struggle with the next steps after the death of a loved one. Where do we go next?
In my counseling practice I tell this to people who are struggling with grief: do not avoid it. In fact, avoidance allows grief to fester and grow inside of us. You cannot go around it. You can only go through it. C.S. Lewis writes,
“I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process. It needs not a map but a history, and if I don't stop writing that history at some quite arbitrary point, there's no reason why I should ever stop. There is something new to be chronicled every day. Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.”
To fully understand loss is to be engaged in the process of grieving. Grief is something that we must journey through.
In WandaVision we see two different responses to Wanda’s grief-stricken reality. The first response is to silence her. Capture her. Lock her away. This response seems to dismiss the grief that Wanda is feeling. This is a common response to grieving people. People don’t want to talk about death and dying because it upsets them. When I was growing up, I was taught an 18th century children’s bedtime prayer that many now find troubling. “If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” Many people hear this children’s prayer and think, “why are we saying that and teaching kids about death and dying?” So instead, we try to hide it, cover it up, change the subject, or ignore it. The problem is that eventually everyone experiences the pain of grief and loss. There is no way around it. Someday an event will happen that will cause us distress.
The second response we see from characters in the show is to walk with Wanda through her grief. We don’t shy away from it. We don’t ignore it. One of the characters in the show is told that if she goes back into Wanda’s grief it will change her on a molecular level. This is such a profound line from the show. Grief changes those around them at a molecular level. When you experience grief with someone, you are affected too.
This response is the response God chooses with us. In John 11, the very next words that Martha speaks to Jesus after her claim that her brother would still be alive if Jesus had been there, is a statement of belief! Martha exclaims, “But I know that even now God will give you whatever you ask.” Martha, though grieving the loss of her brother, is able to make a profound claim about her faith in God and what God does in the midst of our grief. Mary also encounters Jesus in John 11 with a similar statement in verse 32: “Now when Mary came to where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet, saying to him, ‘Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.’”
It is this raw unfiltered grief that affects Jesus. When Jesus saw Mary weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled. God knows our grief and pain because God experiences our grief and pain; he does not avoid it. Jesus goes through grief with us. God doesn’t avoid our pain and suffering. God enters into our pain and our suffering. He endures it with us. God is distressed by death as much as we are. In her newest book, Prayer in the Night, Tish Harrison Warren writes, “Mysteriously, God does not take away our vulnerability. He enters into it.”
The season of Lent should be a time when the church remembers exactly how precious and how fragile life is. The words that we are given, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return” or “Repent, and believe in the Gospel” are reminders that should wake us up from our lives of ignorance and confusion. Perhaps this is a good time for us all to abandon the empty platitudes of grief avoidance such as “God will never give you more than you can handle” or “God just needed another angel in heaven” and return to a faith that acknowledges pain. We don't need more empty words to help explain grief. We need the real presence of God and the church to enter into grief with us. Tish Harrison Warren continues,
“When we’re drowning, we need a lifeline, and our lifeline in grief cannot be mere optimism that maybe our circumstances will improve because we know that may not be true. We need practices that don’t simply palliate our fears or pain, but that teach us to walk with God in the crucible of our own fragility.”
The most powerful words that the church can speak to those who are going through grief is, “We are here for you. We will not leave you. We will go through this together.” Instead of offering pain avoidance, the church can offer incarnational presence. Instead of choosing to ignore the pain of one another, we need to find ways to embrace it and help one another through it.
A few years ago, tragedy hit the little community my church serves. Two teenage girls were killed in a car wreck on homecoming weekend. One of the students who died taught my kids how to dance. Our tight-knit community was devastated and the high school became a place of deep grief; a WandaVision-like wall surrounded it. The students there sank into a place of profound sadness. The principal, knowing he needed help, reached out to all the churches in the community. Pastors from many different denominations responded by entering into this place of grief. We listened, cried, and prayed with students for several weeks. We acknowledged the grief and shared in it ourselves. Many of the students were questioning their own reality and the goodness of God in the midst of their suffering. What we know and can embrace in these moments of grief is that Christ reminds us of the hope found in the gospel.
Towards the end of WandaVision we learn that Vision is just a memory of Wanda’s that she has made real. He offers one of the most quoted lines from the show, “But what is grief, if not love persevering?” This is the response of Jesus in John chapter 11, Jesus said to Martha, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die.” God’s love preserves us. This is the promise that so many of us cling to when the world seems broken around us. We are not just memories, but God’s own children.
Jesus comes to us in the midst of a pandemic. Jesus comes to us in the midst of our grief. Jesus comes to us no matter what we are going through. This is the response that WandaVision reminds us of, that the pandemic has stripped us of, and that we all really need right now. Through it all, Christ is with us.
Stepehn Fife is the pastor of First United Methodist Church and counselor at First West Counseling Center in Louisiana.