Good morning…
On Friday night I enjoyed quality time with a friend whose husband died eight weeks ago, then on Saturday morning I walked and talked with a friend whose husband died about eight years ago. Between these two soul-filling conversations, I crafted our early morning message When Our Nest Feels Empty. Our message concluded, “As we tenderly remember those who have shared their lives and left our sight, holding emptiness can be beautiful.”
When I got home from Saturday’s walk and talk, I opened an email from a friend in our Friday study group. God seamlessly continued our collective conversation. “Sue,” she wrote. “Along the lines of grief, I came across some profound passages to ponder. These are two separate blurbs from the Center for Action and Contemplation.”
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This one by Mirabai Starr—
Grief strips us. According to the mystics, this is good news. Because it is only when we are naked that we can have union with the Beloved. We can cultivate spiritual disciplines designed to dismantle our identity so that we have hope of merging with the Divine. Or someone we love very much may die, and we may find ourselves catapulted into the emptiness we had been striving for. Even as we cry out in the anguish of loss, the boundless love of the Holy One comes pouring into the shattered container of our hearts. This replenishing of our emptiness is a mystery, it is grace, and it is built into the human condition.
Few among us would ever opt for the narrow gate of grief, even if it were guaranteed to lead us to God. But if our most profound losses—the death of a loved one, the ending of a marriage or a career, catastrophic disease or alienation from community—bring us to our knees before that threshold, we might as well enter. The Beloved might be waiting in the next room.
The second one—Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh (1926–2022) wrote of experiencing a tender oneness with his mother in a dream and in nature:
The day my mother died, I wrote in my journal, “A serious misfortune of my life has arrived.” I suffered for more than one year after the passing away of my mother. But one night, in the highlands of Vietnam, I was sleeping in the hut of my hermitage. I dreamed of my mother. I saw myself sitting with her, and we were having a wonderful talk. She looked young and beautiful, her hair flowing down. It was so pleasant to sit there and talk to her as if she had never died. When I woke up it was about two in the morning, and I felt very strongly that I had never lost my mother. The impression that my mother was still with me was very clear. I understood then that the idea of having lost my mother was just an idea. It was obvious in that moment that my mother is always alive in me.
I opened the door and went outside. The entire hillside was bathed in moonlight. It was a hill covered with tea plants, and my hut was set behind the temple halfway up. Walking slowly in the moonlight through the rows of tea plants, I noticed my mother was still with me. She was the moonlight caressing me as she had done so often, very tender, very sweet . . . wonderful! Each time my feet touched the earth I knew my mother was there with me. I knew this body was not mine alone but a living continuation of my mother and my father and my grandparents and great-grandparents. Of all my ancestors. These feet that I saw as “my” feet were actually “our” feet. Together my mother and I were leaving footprints in the damp soil.
Father Richard Rohr continues:
The whole thing, all of life, is one, just at different stages, all of it loved corporately by God (and, one hopes, by us). Within this worldview, we are saved not by being privately perfect, but by being “part of the body,” humble links in the great chain of history. This view echoes the biblical concept of a covenant love that was granted to the Jewish people as a whole and never just to one individual like Abraham, Noah, or David.
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Grief strips us naked. Then mysteriously our emptiness is bathed with the unending presence of God and loved ones who have gone before us. Connected by this great chain of covenant love, how beautiful it is to envision leaving footprints in the damp soil together.
All these many people who have had faith in God are around us like a cloud. Let us put every thing out of our lives that keeps us from doing what we should. Let us keep running in the race that God has planned for us (Hebrews 12:1, NLV).
…Sue…
