He has watched the Church’s response to suffering up close for a long time, and his diagnosis is blunt. “We deny its reality, and in doing so evade the possibility that we might have to dive in to uncivilized grief, grief with tears that cannot be quenched.” What grief actually requires is witness — the willingness to sit with someone in their loss without rushing them toward a resolution. The debates about deconstruction will keep happening — whether it’s faithful or faithless, necessary or dangerous, a crisis or a correction. What those people need is simpler and harder: someone willing to sit with them in the grief, and to call it that.