Sadness Beyond Comfort:
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Like Jesus to the Crows

Photo by Niklas Veenhuis on Unsplash

​Every counselor and pastor knows the experience. Someone is sad beyond comfort, and nothing you say or do can change their situation. All that you can do is be present to them in their disconsolate state. You are like a crow on the arms of Jesus as he lay dying. The key to being a good counselor or pastor is to accept this inability to comfort and to move past attempts to make them happier. It is to be loyal to them and their situation. The gift you offer, if it is any gift at all, is to be with them in their sadness beyond comfort.

Process theology adds that God is with them in this sadness, recognizing that, sometimes, God is sad beyond comfort, too. The image of an always-happy God, of a God beyond sadness, is blasphemous in its way. It makes a god of happiness. God, too, is like the crow on the arms of Jesus, unable to make him happy, but not leaving.

- Jay McDaniel, 10/4/2022

Like Jesus to the Crows

​BY VIEVEE FRANCIS

“that gathered there along his arms,
upon the invitation of a slender limb.
And not oblivious to human violence
perhaps needed rest or needed to offer
the succor of presence, despite the
stiff collar of their feathers, despite
each one being no less the children
of a father who claimed an upper realm.

It is not true they pecked his eyes. Nor
did they consider his wounds
their own. They were neither irreverent
nor quiet. They spoke in the tongues
they knew. They cawed full voiced
and would have released him from his
bindings had their beaks held the power
and had there been time in that place.

Like them, I have sought to comfort and
so be comforted. Like them
I have seen the failure of miracles when
they were most needed. Like Him, I
have called upon those so unlike myself
when my father failed to answer.”

​Vievee Francis, “Like Jesus to the Crows” from Forest Primeval.  Copyright © 2016 by Vievee Francis.  Reprinted by permission of TriQuarterly Books.

Reflection on the Poem
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Open and relational theologians spend a lot of time consoling. We offer images of God as an Eternal Companion who shares in the suffering of all living beings and who offers fresh possibilities for healing and wholeness relative to the situation at hand. We talk about how we humans are connected to one another and can share in each others sufferings. We talk about a world filled with beauty and intrinsic value, a source of delight and adventure.

But there is a side of life that is dark, difficult, and inconsolable. "Like Jesus to the Crows" presents this side of life: the side that is sad beyond comfort. 

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Is God like a crow on the arms of Jesus who has no hostility toward him but cannot console him? Is God like Jesus who cannot be comforted by the crows? Like Jesus to the Crows by Vievee Francis presents the inability to comfort when comfort is most needed.

Sometimes in our lives, we ourselves are like the crows that gathered on the arms of Jesus as he was dying. We, too, speak in tongues. We, too, are children of the holy one. We do not peck out the eyes of those who suffer. We would unbind the straps, if our beaks were strong enough. But sometimes we cannot comfort. We can only gather ourselves along the arms of those close to us. Their wounds are not our own.

And we are like Jesus, too. We may find ourselves losing all that we love and know, including our very lives, without the consolation of a companion to our suffering and with a sense of being abandoned by the Deep. "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me."

Like Jesus to the Crows is about the limits we face when we try to help others, or when we call out for help from the holy one, but receive no consoling answer. There is no need to add a silver lining to this experience. There is no need for a "but" or an "and yet." The finality of discomfort is part of the poem's truthfulness and part of life's truths. We must live with it.

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And yet I cannot help but add a small word of consolation. I cannot but hope that this experience of finitude, of limits, is shared by God. And, more specifically, by what Whitehead calls the consequent nature of God: that side of God which shares in the sufferings of all living beings, even as they (the sufferings) cannot be shared by the living beings themselves.

This side of God, the "fellow sufferer who understands" to use Whitehead's phrase, likewise knows what it is like to feel abandoned, like Jesus on the cross, and to be unable to comfort, like the crows on Jesus's arms. God is the abandoned savior and the crows on his arms.

I'm not sure there is any comfort in this. Feeling comfort in the face of others who suffer because we know "God suffers with them" can be an act of blasphemy in its own right. It is to abandon the suffering for the sake of a private peace, a personal consolation. God's aim, I believe, is for us to be loyal to the world, and this loyalty requires facing limits: including the limits of empathy to change things or to make everything OK. God wants us to be honest to the suffering, including sadness beyond comfort.

Does new life come from the honesty? I hope so. Perhaps the crows in their ways, and Jesus in his way, move past their vulnerability and limits into some kind of comfortable togetherness. Maybe. This is the hope of Easter.

But we cannot bypass the cross, and we must face the crosses without our fingers crossed. Like the crows, like Jesus, we must be honest to inconsolability.This honesty is a form of love.

Jay McDaniel, 10/4/2022