Abraham is known as the “father of faith.” The outlines of the life of Abraham are well known in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Abraham is the one who, late in life, leaves Canaan for the land of Ur because God told him to pick up his tent and his household and go. Abraham is the one who, late in life, bore a son of his elderly wife, Sarah. Isaac was his name, “he who laughs.” Abraham is the one who replies to God with an open heart, “here am I.”

In Genesis 22, Abraham is also the one who is told by God to take Isaac to the land of Moriah. There he must sacrifice the son that he loves with all of his soul. On the third day of traveling, Abraham sees the place, instructs his servants to wait, and takes Isaac with him, bringing only wood and fire. Isaac asks, “where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” Abraham replies, “God will provide.”

What grief must have been simmering in Abraham’s elderly heart!

Søren Kierkegaard proposes a way to think about grief and faith. The way that he proposes does not suggest that we can understand Abraham’s faith, but it does chart the contours of faith in a situation of profound loss. There are two vectors at work.

There is the first movement he calls “resignation.” The “knight of resignation” is the one who, by himself, must figure out what it means to live without the beloved. Abraham is the knight of resignation who must work out what it means to give his son to God, what it means to offer up Isaac by his own hand. That is his road alone. No-one can understand. No-one can join him. How Abraham walks this road is determined by the sort of man whom he has already chosen to become, the person he has already made of himself. The knight of resignation is the one who is in distress, yet who stoically persists in carrying his absolutely unique cross.

But Abraham “actually goes further and comes to faith.” This is the second movement, the counter-movement. The leap of faith is the passionate step at the precipice of resignation into the infinite unknowing of divine Mystery. “By faith, Abraham did not renounce Isaac, but by faith Abraham received Isaac.”[8] Abraham, having passed beyond resignation, has become the knight of faith.

In fear and trembling, Abraham makes the leap of faith, lifting the knife to plunge into his bound son, prepared to offer Isaac to God on an altar. God tells him not to lay a hand on Isaac. The faith of Abraham is the paradox that in giving his son, he will receive his son. It makes no sense but was the way of faith to which he was called. Abraham could not be Abraham without being prepared ritually to slay his son, but more deeply, without being prepared to receive him back again one hundred-fold. Such absurdity makes no sense in any ethical terms. In purely ethical terms, Abraham fully intends to murder his own son. But in terms that supersede the purely ethical, he stands above all ethical and legal categories. But beyond all ethical and legal categories, there is only God and the mystery of the God-relationship. Abraham most deeply becomes Abraham only because the counter-movement of faith is a leap into the arms of God. Abraham leaps because, in a sense, God is there to leap with him. Kierkegaard writes,

Grief belongs the tragic hero, the knight of resignation. In grief, we are on our way to God. Our beloved has passed into the silence, and our love follows her there. That is our road.

The leap of faith can take place along this road. It is a beckoning into what is more than silence, a fullness that is more than death. It is the divine Mystery in our midst that calls us to the movement of resignation, but does not leave us there. God calls us to the counter-movement too: faith holding fast to the absurdity that all will be well. And in the leap that is passion and faith, we hold to the hope that the eternal dimensions of our love are not in vain.

We shall meet again.

In Summary

Love drives grief, and love drives beyond grief. Grief becomes lamentation because it has direction. Lamentation cries out for meaning, and meaning lies in the direction of the divine Mystery of a cosmos grounded in God. The cosmos is what holds all life and death, mortality and immortality, good and evil.

In the face of suffering and death, we may have asked how there can be a God, and a good God at that. But our grieving heart teaches us that suffering and death are not meaningless, but pregnant with meaning. Our beloved is not extinguished in death. How then can there not be a God?

Even Ivan Ilych, in confronting the reality of his life and now his death in the cosmos, prays a very odd prayer. It was the first genuine prayer of his life. He condemns God for not existing. How dare God not exist! It simply cannot be that all of this suffering and horror is for nothing. Tolstoy narrates the profound moment thus:

In between an intellectual rejection of God’s existence and goodness, and a spiritual need for transcendence, Ivan Ilych grieves in the anger of a hopeless hope in the direction of the divine Mystery, offensive in its paradoxial presence in a mode of absence. That is, Ivan Ilych insists to himself that God does not exist, but how dare He not exist! “It is not right that you, God, do not exist! I suffer because of You, and You do not exist to give me a reason for my suffering.”

The absence of God is still the presence of some kind of meaning. It is the presence of divine, impenetrable unknowability. Ivan Ilych is acknowledging God as Mystery and Stranger. Careful to have constructed his adult life in willful blindness to suffering and death, he cries out in his mortal estrangement to the immortal Mystery that calls him now. It is a divine presence-as-absence that would hold all the answers to life, suffering, and death.

Anger and desperation have fueled what may be the first and last genuine prayer of Ivan Ilych’s entire life. Anger and desperation allow the candor of grief to utter the inconceivable notion that God is both presence and absence, an impenetrability that is all of horror and comfort.