Wondering Wednesdays – early grief

I mentioned a while back I was reading Mary-Frances O’Connor’s The Grieving Brain. I have now finished it and am recommending it in lots of places! The grief she writes about in the book is the loss of a parent but it describes well my early experiences of a different sort of loss that hurt me immensely… She writes:

In the early days of my panicky grief, I did not have the presence of mind to do much at all, let alone learn to change the focus of my awareness. In fact, I kept a note taped to my kitchen cupboard that read, “Cook. Clean. Work. Play.” It served two purposes. The note was an intention for what I thought I could actually accomplish during a day, minimal as it seemed. In the moment I found myself overwhelmed or dazed, I could return to this simple list to tell me what to do next. On the days that I did accomplish any aspect of all four goals, I was reminded that this was enough – it had been a good day. Just to be clear, this was normal, typical, average grief I was experiencing, not complicated grief. It took months to remake my life into something I lived fully, and in some ways, it is still a work in progress. In the long term, finding a way to spend more time in the present moment helped me to figure out what that life was like now, and when I knew what life in the present really felt like, I could choose how to spend it (p170-171).

I find this very helpful and life-giving as I think about loss and bereavement, very aware that there is more to come… My overwhelming takeaway is be kind to myself in such seasons and don’t expect too much. I can slip into imagining I can do all I used to be able to do when I was young and life was simple and COVID hadn’t happened. I can’t, my energy is different now and I am more mindful of how and where I use it.

Wondering Wednesdays – I hope you know

Morgan Harper Nichols writes

I hope you know it is okay to have moments when you do not know what to say. I hope you know in the arms of Love, you have nothing to be ashamed of, even when the questions you are asking have no easy answers. I hope you know you are heard, in the wildest, roaring waves.

I love the image of God as the Arms of love and when I go to Buckfast Abbey and see the image of Jesus in the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament (see Paul’s blog on Sunday), those are the arms of love too which I imagine holding me.

What I hope you know sentence might you write?

Wondering Wednesdays – going before

On Monday I was leading a retreat day, in a new venue, with a group where I only knew two of the people. I was exploring spiritual health, using that term to mean our relationship with God, self, others and creation. I drew on the work of Margaret Silf in Soul Journeys (along with two psalms and the work of Morgan Harper Nichols) and she writes this about the angel’s words to the women after the resurrection:

The angel’s promise assures us that wherever “Galilee” is for us, the risen Christ will go there ahead of us, and we will see that power of his transformative presence in ways that we had not recognised until now (p169).

That is such a reassuring thought for me. The post resurrection narratives bring me such comfort and even on Monday I had a sense that Jesus had gone before me, Chapel House, where the retreat was held is a prayed into space. I felt a sense of peace, I experienced the Holy Spirit leading me in different ways through the day as while I had a script for my three talks, there are always excursions from it!

We may not know what the future holds but we can trust that Jesus will be there with us and that we can experience his transformative power in ways we might not be able to imagine from where we are now.

Wondering Wednesdays – grief and grieving

There is a difference between grief and grieving, according to Mary-Frances O’Connell. I have found this distinction helpful as I reflect back on a very significant and unexpected loss in 2020. She writes:

Obviously, grief and grieving are related, which is why the two terms have been used interchangeably when describing our period of loss. But there are key differences. You see, grief never ends, and it is a natural response to loss. You will experience pangs of grief over this specific person [or situation for me] forever. You will have discrete moments that overwhelm you, even after the death when you have restored your life to a meaningful, fulfilling experience. But, whereas you will feel the universally human emotion of grief forever, your grieving, your aspiration, changes the experience over time. The first one hundred times you have a wave of grief, you may think “I will never get through this, I cannot bear this”. The one hundred and first time, you may think, “I hate this, I don’t want this – but it is familiar, and I know I will get through this moment”. Even if the feeling of grief is the same, your relationship to the feeling changes. Feeling grief years after your loss may make you doubt whether you have really adapted. If you think of the emotion and the process of adaptation as two different things, however, then there isn’t a problem that you experience grief, even when you have been grieving for a long time (2022:xvi-xvii).

I find this very helpful personally and pastorally. I think that there are times when we are expected to get over it – whatever type of loss it is. Partly it is that people are uncomfortable around loss and grief, partly because we are uncomfortable with our own I think. We don’t always want to ask because we don’t want to upset people and sometimes the environment isn’t private enough. Other times, people are very comfortable sharing their stories and acknowledging their grief which can be 60 years or more old. Grief and grieving are natural, and I find God meets me in them. I have lots of joy and blessing in my life but that doesn’t negate the grief or mean it’s not there, I am just learning to respond in a different way to it as time goes by.

Mary-Frances O’Connor (2022) The Grieving Brain. New York: HarperOne.

Wondering Wednesdays – discerning presence

This is a picture taken from the story of the Emmaus Road where people recognized the risen Jesus when he broke bread. It is a story we often read at this time of the year. The window is in Landaff Cathedral, where I have been this week.

Earle writes ‘Discernment is an essential aspect of the life of faith, part of the ongoing conversation in prayer with the God who desires for us better things than “we can ask or imagine” (Ephesians 3:20). When we live by practicing discernment, we begin to recognize God’s presence and God’s love in its many different disguises’ (Earle 2007:31). Just as Jesus followers eventually recognized him so it is helpful for us to be aware of God’s presence and love which often comes to us in different ways. Nature speaks to me so often of God and others mediate God’s love presence and words to me. Discernment is about recognizing when it is God and we often have a growing awareness of how God speaks to us – not that God cannot speak in new and fresh ways!

How is God moving in your life at the moment? What are you experiencing or realizing is God at work?

Wondering Wednesdays – grief is a country

“Grief is a country that has no definite borderlines and that recognises no single trajectory. It is a space that did not exist before your loss, and that will never disappear from your map, no matter how hard you rub at the charcoal lines. You are changed utterly, and your personal geography becomes yours and yours only”. Kerri Ni Dochartaigh Thin Places p97

I have been pondering some of my childhood losses recently, thinking about how they shaped me and how even now there are legacies of those losses in my life. I have big, significant losses that have changed me, that are part of my personal geography. And while I believe in a redemptive God who didn’t cause these things to happen, I am a different person than I would be if some of these losses had not have happened.

I increasingly see the importance of processing my grief, of taking time over it, of not rushing it, of not pressuring myself into what I had been taught was the proper Christian response. I have not experienced some of the absolute horrors that the author of the book went through, like being bombed out of her home, a close friend murdered when she was 16 and she does not write of faith. But she is, in part, exploring the healing nature of places, of nature, and I am realising increasingly how that is one way God has helped me to heal over years.

Wondering Wednesdays – empty tombs

Final insight from my Lent reading this year from Ronald Rolheiser:

We celebrate many things with Easter. The resurrection is not just the mystery of Christ rising from the dead and of our future rising from the dead. It’s life’s spring – the event and power that brings new life out of what’s been crucified by winter, from what’s died, from what lies frozen and lifeless. Like nature needs spring each year, so, too, do we need regular resurrections. Much in us lies frozen, crucified, lifeless. It is possible to be dead and not know it, to be asleep and still think we are awake…

To resurrect daily, to leave behind us a string of empty tombs, to let our crucified hopes and dreams be resurrected so that, like Christ, our lives will radiate the truth that, in the end, everything is good, reality can be trusted. Love does triumph over apathy and hatred, togetherness over loneliness, peace over chaos, and forgiveness over bitterness. We need regular resurrections.

The Passion and the Cross p114-116

Wondering Wednesdays – Gethsemane

Tomorrow is Maundy Thursday and we recall the story of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane among other things. Ronald Rolheiser (in the Lent book I am reading this year) writes this:

The agony in the garden is many things, but, first of all, it’s Jesus’s entry into the darkest black hole of human existence, the black hole of bitter misunderstanding, rejection, aloneness, loneliness, humiliation, and the helplessness to do anything about it. The agony in the garden is the black hole of sensitivity brutalized by misunderstanding, innocence brutalized by hatred, goodness brutalized by misunderstanding, innocence brutalized by wrong judgement, forgiveness brutalized by murder, and haven brutalized by hell. This is the deepest black hole of loneliness and it brings the lover inside us to the ground in agony, begging for release. But, whenever our mouths are pushed into the dust of misunderstanding, and loneliness inside that black hole, it’s helpful to know that Jesus was there before us, tasting just our kind of loneliness.

I don’t think I need to comment further – most of us will have tasted this at some time during our lives and hopefully are comforted by knowing that Jesus understands and was there with us.

The Passion and the Cross p7.

Wondering Wednesdays – beginning to end

We saw this Jesus carrying the cross on a trolley in a church in Spain. I imagine it is part of their Good Friday activities. As we near the end of Lent I have been spending a bit of time pondering the incarnation as without the birth, obviously there could be no death. I came across this, written by Cassie Biggin:

The mystery of the incarnation, the magic of conception as Spirit lit life in the womb of a girl, the manger-throne with rich and poor, shepherds and foreigners, all gathered around God-as-man. The magic that closed gaps, broke down walls, and joined inside and outside, heaven and earth. Reconciliation. Reunion. Redemption. One. Shalom.

Praying that we may see more of this reconciliation, reunion, redemption and shalom in our broken world.

Cassie Biggin A Good Knowing, p54.

Wondering Wednesdays – which decision?

This is a really tricky golf hole for me – water and bunkers to get to the green.

Do you take a risk and go for it or lay up for a hopefully simple chip on?

I have not actually played this hole but admired it as we walked along beside it.   The choice would depend on my first shot, how good that was.  In essence, my preparation for that moment.  Some things which may look risky are not necessarily so because we have laid foundations   and have done everything we can for a good outcome.  So our decision does not just depend on the momentary circumstances but on all that has gone beforehand.

Are there ways which are helpful for you to prepare for future decisions?