Good morning…
Waking after a full night’s sleep, I cozy up on the couch and think, “Healing is happening.” God invites me forward from yesterday’s post, My Unexpected Grief. I return to the wise book sustaining me very personally during this season of Lent, Paula D’Arcy’s Winter of the Heart: Finding Your Way Through the Mystery of Grief. I open to page 37 to pick up where God left off.
- Molly Fumia writes that “grief instructs us in the healing art of profound acceptance…It is a well within us only we can tap.” (Following in your humble footsteps, Jesus, help us drink each day from the inner well of profound acceptance.)
- We begin to focus not so much on what we are letting go of but on what we are letting go into. Letting go into love is an act of great beauty. (We surrender our whole self to God’s greater love.)
- All healing journeys begin with one word: yes. (Yes, Lord, may your will be done in and through me, on earth as it is being done in heaven.)
- Henri Nouwen calls us to know the “first love, the Divine love. Until we do, we will mistake the second (temporary) loves of our lives for the first love, and ask them to be what they cannot be: perfect and lasting.” (Even the best human love is temporary. Perfect and lasting love begins and expands with the Creator of all living things.)
- At every step we are asked to open to a greater vision of life, to stop resisting what we cannot change and simply receive life as it’s being offered. Grief may tear us apart, but divine love pours through the opening. In the wake of this love comes the strength to go on. Love doesn’t remove our struggles, it penetrates them.
- In the midst of the tumult we find God as close as our breath. A journey guided by love is powerful; now the Spirit becomes our guide. We may see that light is moving through everything. This is a deep knowledge. No matter how great a wound we have, the divine light within us is greater. Everything we will ever encounter, every loss, can be an opening to what lies beyond.
- In the stripping process of grief we look past our roles, let go of our former certainties and demands of life, and see what is true; love is looking back at us through everything. But we must go deep enough into the grief to see that for ourselves.
- Know that no matter which path you walk, someone has walked before you. “He leads me beside still waters; he restores my soul” (Psalm 23:2-3). Every sorrow has already been borne somewhere else in the world. You are connected to every person who ever mourned.
All of us go through seasons of mourning. Betrayals. Addictions. Health challenges. Family feuds. The end of a beloved life phase. Loss of loved ones. Shattered dreams. The brutality of war. Amid each season of suffering we are invited to become more like Jesus, living in oneness with the Father, a human being with sorrows well acquainted with grief. And after going a little farther, He fell face down and prayed, saying, “My Father, if it is possible [that is, consistent with Your will], let this cup pass from Me; yet not as I will, but as You will” (Matthew 26:39, AMP).
Today as we also go a little farther, surrendering our own will to the higher will of our Father, we are empowered by God’s Spirit to walk each healing step set before our bare feet.
…Sue…
