What If Grief Could Grow Something New?

Grief has a way of rewriting us. We open our movie series with Hamnet and step into the raw space where Shakespeare and Agnes face the death of their child, a loss that ripples into Hamlet and reshapes how we think about art, faith, and the slow work of healing. Through a mother’s unguarded cry, the tangle of a strained marriage, and a father who can only speak his pain from the stage, we trace how sorrow becomes story—and how story can steady a soul.

We unpack the echoes between Hamnet and Hamlet, exploring why names matter and how creativity becomes a vessel for lament. Along the way, Psalm 13 anchors us with its fierce honesty: how long? That prayer lets us admit absence, envy, and exhaustion before we reach for trust. Then we hold John 12’s grain-of-wheat image up to the light and consider a different kind of hope—the kind that doesn’t rush past loss but plants it, tends it, and waits for fruit we cannot force. Shakespeare’s craft becomes a case study in grief-language, reminding us that partners, friends, and families process pain in different keys that all deserve respect.

If you’ve ever wondered how to carry what you cannot fix, this conversation offers handholds: naming the loss without varnish, choosing practices that hold weight—writing, walking, prayer, making—witnessing another’s way of mourning, and watching for small signs of return. Together, we look for the subtle places where resurrection takes root: softer eyes, braver speech, work that serves, art that helps strangers face their ghosts. Listen, reflect, and share with someone who needs a gentler map through the dark. If this moved you, subscribe, leave a review, and tell us: what practice has helped you turn pain into purpose?

Chapters

• 0:00 Kicking Off The Movie Series
• 0:45 Why Hamnet And Why Grief
• 2:42 Shakespeare, Agnes, And Names That Echo
• 4:46 Hamlet’s Plot In Brief
• 6:07 From Life To Play: Grief’s Influence
• 8:10 Theology Hidden In Cultural Stories
• 9:31 Agnes’s Cry And Shared Lament
• 10:46 Praying Psalm 13 In Dark Times
• 13:10 Shakespeare’s Distance And Unspoken Pain
• 15:02 Agnes Confronts The Stage
• 16:24 Story As Shakespeare’s Grief Language
• 17:41 The Gospel Seed And New Life
• 19:02 Bearing Fruit Amidst Loss
• 19:40 Hope As A Resurrection Practice

Transcript

Pastor Darren: 0:00

So we start our uh movie series here. I am uh grateful that uh being a guy who really enjoys movies and enjoys the cultural um, I guess I'll say relevance of movies and the stories that our our culture culture uh tells itself and describes itself with, defines itself with. I've always enjoyed that. And uh so we did something last summer where we did uh uh a movie series and people really enjoyed it then. In fact, do we still remember talking about Superman? We had a little fun with that one. It was interesting. I was learning things about Superman as well. Uh so I thought, well, this will be a kind of a neat change of pace uh uh as we move through the Christian year. Uh so we're dealing with Hamnet. Uh and uh we saw some of you had the chance to go see it. Uh in large part, it's a film about grieving. And it raises the question: is there a more provocative time in life spiritually than the time of grieving? That is a time where we're we're faced with our mortality, we're faced with the the limits of our power and our capacities, our uh ability to be able to change things. And thinking specifically of those times when we've lost a loved one, there's no opportunity to fix it, to make it better. Right? Our limitations in that time of grieving are so apparent to us at these times. And I use the word provocative here to say provocative time instead of challenging time because it's also the time where we tend to do the most growing, largely because we're we're left with these questions, right? We feel super vulnerable, we feel super powerless, but in the process of working through our grief and working through those questions, we reconfigure how we view our lives and our life and how we view ourselves, and then we emerged, hopefully, changed, having found a way to make sense of the world and how it works and our limitations in the world. So let me give you a quick summary of Hamnet. It's a story of two people who are making peace with the death of their young son. Now, I give you an official warning of spoilage right now. It is very difficult to talk about a film without having some spoilage in front of you. All right, and especially in this film, which I will attest, it really lands the ending. It really does a strong job on the ending. And so it's hard to not spoil it a little bit, but it is the story of William Shakespeare, and probably even more so about his wife, Agnes. Now, some of you who remember your sophomore English class, you probably uh remember that wait a minute, Shakespeare, he married Anne Hathaway. You should recognize that there's 500 years in between Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway. He couldn't possibly have married her. I guess that's a cultural joke. Some of you will get it. No, that her her she also uh went by another name. The woman that Shakespeare married, she also went by Agnes. And in this particular film, they use that name. I bring this up partly because the two-name thing is in play with Hamnet also. Right? Agnes and Shakespeare's son, his name is Hamnet, but he would also go by Hamlet. Right? So again, if you paid attention in sophomore English class, you're probably starting to do the math just a little bit, and you know that there's a connection between this film, Hamnet, and the play Hamlet, that Shakespeare wrote. So now I got to catch you up on Hamlet because I'm guessing you weren't listening all that much in sophomore English class. Am I right? Maybe I wasn't listening. You know, Taylor was, but she's smarter than the rest of us. So Hamlet is this uh young Danish ruler. His father is killed, but that father returns as a ghost to let uh that his son know that the person who killed him was his brother Claudius. And Claudius now has usurped the crown, even married Hamlet's mother. Right? So you can see the setup is pretty complex. So it's totally guilty of totally shortening the story, so much so to be really insulting. Hamlet develops a plan to expose this truth. And as with all Shakespearean tragedies, everybody dies in the end. That's kind of how it goes with Shakespeare. No, with all apologies, one of potentially our greatest play, our greatest drama. Uh, but I hear with I'm here with other priorities, so I want to jump in. But the fact that Hamlet was written so soon after Hamnet's death, it led this author, her name is Megan O'Farrell, to explore the potential influence of that death on the play itself. And then the director, Chloe Zhao, uh, she did the same thing and put that book to film. Right? So following the thinking and comparing real life, right, Shakespeare and Agnes' life, to uh the original play, uh, we can see some comparisons. These are the comparisons that she found or the lines that she drew. Uh, instead of the reality, which is that William Shakespeare and Agnes' son Hamlet dies, in Hamlet he has the father dying and then reappearing to his living son Hamlet. And instead of this difficult and vulnerable death of a young son, which is what they experience just in real life, now in Hamlet, we have this heroic son, the heroic son that's going to avenge the death, uh, the tragic death, the unjust death of his father. Maybe this is the son he was teaching him to be, the son he would have become, the son that Shakespeare would have thought he might be. So we also have a picture of this son Hamnet. Just to give you a sense of, you know, they set us up pretty good. Can you imagine this little guy passing away? They'll tug out the heartstrings just a little bit. So my uh my mantra for these sermons on these movies that we often uh they often deal with religious and theological concepts uh in our cultural stories. So these stories that are part of what we tell each other, what we go and see and pay $20 to see. Uh we often deal with religious and theological concepts in those movies, even when we don't always know that we are doing it. And in this case, I think it lay in the approach to a loss and to grieving. I think that is a lot of where some of the similar questions are happening between this movie and this book and stories of faith that we wrestle with as Christians. In the film, there's this really powerful scene with Agnes. She's just learned that her daughter has survived her illness, probably from the plague, we don't know for sure. But her son has not survived it. And she lets out this guttural cry. The cry for all parents, for all mothers who've lost their child. It's a super moving scene in the film, and it's bringing to light the grief, the pain that comes in this moment. Our scriptures do the same thing oftentimes. Psalm 13, which we're using today, is often attributed to King David, right? But in many ways, these are the words of the Jewish people, not just King David. They are the words of a people who have had times of abundance. And they are people who have been completely oppressed at other times. So they've known high times in life, and they've known really, really low times, times at which the bulk of their community was moved away or taken from them. What I want to do is read for you again Psalm 13, but I'm going to invite you at this time to think about your low time, your difficult time, and allow maybe these words from Psalm 13 to speak into that dark time in your life. How long? To hide your face from me. How long must I bear pain in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all day long? How long shall my enemy be exalted over me? Consider and answer me, O Lord my God, give light to my eyes, or I will sleep the sleep of death. And my enemy will say, I have prevailed. My foes will rejoice because I am shaken. But I trusted in your steadfast love. My heart shall rejoice in your salvation. I will sing to the Lord, because he has dealt bountifully with me. Can you hear yourself dealing with your pain in those words? Those times when you were looking for answers when there weren't any. Shakespeare himself, he had challenges in dealing with his grief, especially in the film. We learn early on that Shakespeare isn't comfortable with simply talking. It's in the courtship with Agnes. And he even says it, he doesn't know really how to just talk to people. But he likes to tell stories. This plays out just a little bit later as the couple has to deal with this tragic death of this son. Their marriage is really challenged in their grief. Shakespeare already has to live and work in London, in the city, whereas the family's in Stratford. So Shakespeare's not there with the family. He isn't there when Hamnet dies. And he isn't there when it comes time to grieve, to walk that journey. In a way, he's not talking about or even processing the grief. And for Agnes, this becomes too much. She finally goes to the city to confront him. She arrives and sees a poster for this play that her husband had put together, was directing. And believe it or not, it had the title of her young son Hamlet, which infuriates her. This man who doesn't seem to be processing his grief with her at all, but now he'll put their son's name on walls and doors so people might come. So she goes looking for him. She finds herself at the stage of the play itself. She crawls all the way to the front of where all the people are, and she begins to watch this play. And who comes out but Bill Shakespeare, William Shakespeare himself, as the father, the fallen father, the ghost, who was there to talk to his young son. It's a scene in which we can see him live out the relationship with the son he had hoped to have. And it's in this moment that she realizes, as we do as we watch the movie, that this is his way of grieving. This is his way of processing. He's going to deal with this grief, but it's going to be in story. We don't know a lot about the full true history of all of it, but in this film, in this story, Shakespeare's method for grieving is in his creativity, in his storytelling. I land us with uh a passage from a gospel, the gospel of John, chapter 12, verse 24. Because our Christian story, it's often grounded in our redemption and in new life, right? This is a cornerstone of the Christian understanding of how life works and how God works. We believe in new life, we believe in redemption. And it's a passage where Jesus is telling his disciples that he is soon to die. And he wants to convey the importance of this death, that it's actually even quite necessary. That importance probably varies for a lot of Christianity. There's a lot of different Christian understandings of why that death is important. Some would say he has to die in order to be resurrected. This is our evidence of Jesus' identity. Others would say that that sacrificial death actually adjusted, changed the way God deals with us. Now we're going to be grace-based, we're going to be forgiveness-based. Others would say God doesn't really change in that way. But the death was necessary because it's what gave the story, the message, the weight, the weight that it needed to be able to spread to the rest of the world, so that 2,000 years later you would all end up in the United Methodist Church of Westlake Village talking about it. Still, others, they might say his death conveyed the depth of Jesus' love for us, a depth that inspires us to respond with our own love for others, with our own sacrificial understanding for life and the beauty of life. Whatever the specific understanding is, Jesus wants us to understand the importance of his death. He has to die. In getting that message across, he says, Very truly I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain. But if it dies, it bears much fruit. The story of this film is that Shakespeare himself is able to find life amidst death. We wouldn't want to over-appreciate, to lionize death or pain, but we do want to recognize the possibility that amidst death with God we can find new life. We can find fruit. For Shakespeare, it was in the creation of possibly our greatest dramatic play of all time. For others, it might lay in some other creation, some other artistic Endeavour uh endeavor, some project that we work on, some change in our heart or in our spirit, some new life that is created in other lives, that fruit will look different for different people. But it is our invitation today, not only from Scripture, but I believe from this film, as a people of resurrection, the invitation is to work with God to find hope amidst difficulty, to find hope amidst pain, to find hope even amidst death. Amen.