Healing after loss daily meditations phần 51
Bạn đang xem bản rút gọn của tài liệu. Xem và tải ngay bản đầy đủ của tài liệu tại đây (137.48 KB, 5 trang )
AUGUST 28
If death my friend and me divide,
thou dost not, Lord, my sorrow chide,
or frown my tears to see;
restrained from passionate excess,
thou bidst me mourn in calm distress
for them that rest in thee.
—CHARLES WESLEY
Sometimes we have the mistaken notion that people of faith
do not grieve. Confident that the essence of their loved one
has survived and that they will know each other again, they
move calmly through this temporary separation without
tears or turmoil.
Not so. Let us not add to our already burdened hearts any
further burden of guilt that we so easily “give way” to our
grief. Wouldn’t we miss our loved one if he or she moved
halfway around the world? The imponderable mysteries of
death are far more impenetrable than having a loved one
move to a foreign land!
Fortunate are those whose faith remains strong in the face
of loss. They are also fortunate if they can mourn freely and
without recrimination from themselves or others. To be human is to feel the pain of loss. To be healed of that pain is
wonderful, but there are no shortcuts. There is only the way
through.
I will deal honestly with my pain; we know each other well.
AUGUST 29
I was in a garden at the Rodin Museum. For a few minutes
I was alone, sitting on a stone bench between two long
hedges of roses. Pink roses. Suddenly I felt the most powerful
feeling of peace, and I had the thought that death, if it means
an absorption into a reality like the one that was before me,
might be all right.
—IRVING HOWE
What are the sources of epiphanies like this moment described by the eminent literary critic Irving Howe?
The sociologist Peter Berger suggests that gods are not,
as some claim, human projections of our wishful thinking,
but that humanity and its works—angels, skyscrapers,
symphonies—are God’s projections into the world. He
speaks of an “otherness that lurks behind the fragile structures of everyday life.”
We read these statements and conjectures, and our hearts
rise. As we wend our way through the shadows and high
moments in the wake of loss, these statements and intuitions
are as food to the starving, as water to those all but overcome
with thirst.
I will watch for my own moments in the garden.
AUGUST 30
Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak
Whispers the oe’r fraught heart and bids it break.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
The pressure of unspoken grief is like that inside a pressure
cooker—it builds and builds until one feels as though another tiny increment of pain will drive one mad.
Speak. Tell a friend. Tell another friend, or the same friend
again. A wise friend will know one must tell this tale again
and again.
One way to begin—particularly if death has been unexpected and hard to believe—is to recount to this understanding friend, in as much detail as you can remember, the events
of the day on which death occurred. “I got up in the morning. I had my usual breakfast of cereal and juice and coffee.
I read the paper”—as mundane as that.
This kind of retelling of the day grounds the event in the
real world and helps us begin to believe the terrible truth
of that day. What happened is not a fantasy, or something
we can put in a bubble and hold away from the rest of our
life. It took place in real time, on a real day, and while it will
be terribly sad to recount, the recounting will help release
the pressure inside and activate the flow of healing—friend
to friend.
As often as I need to, I will tell my story.
AUGUST 31
I believe that God is in me as the sun is in the colour and
fragrance of a flower—the Light in my darkness, the Voice
in my silence.
—HELEN KELLER
Surely a woman who from birth could neither see nor hear
speaks out of a deprivation more profound than anything
we can imagine. And yet with the long, persistent—and insistent—care of her teacher and mentor, Anne Sullivan,
Helen Keller was able to break from this darkness, to liken
the presence of the God within her to wonders she could
know through her sense of smell, through warmth on her
skin and vibrations of her fingertips.
Though that is a vastly different darkness from the darkness of grief, there are perhaps elements in common—a
sense of isolation, discouragement, uncertainty about the
future.
What is to sustain us through the long periods of grief?
What enables us not to be totally crushed?
Along with all kinds of help from our friends and our
communities of faith, it is often a sense of the God within
that helps us break from our darkness. A presence as gentle
and insistent as the fragrance of flowers, as life-giving and
warming as light.
I have a strength within myself that sometimes surprises me.
SEPTEMBER 1
We can be a little more resistant to calls of duty, though responsibilities, too, can help us keep going. But if we tend to
be superconscientious, we can relax a little…When we do
go into social groups, we need not expect too much of
ourselves or feel we have to be scintillating or muster up the
small talk.
—MARTHA WHITMORE
HICKMAN
What we are suggesting is that we be kind to ourselves,
realizing we have sustained a major wound and need
time—maybe even a little self-indulgence—to recover.
If there is some level on which we feel responsible for
what has happened (even if it’s only the “guilt of the survivor”), we may feel a need to work extra hard to prove we
deserve our place in life again.
Wrong! As the lapel button popular a few years ago proclaimed, “I am a child of the universe. I have a right to be
here.”
Or to quote the dying priest in Diary of a Country Priest,
“All is grace.” Life is a gift none of us earns. We need to take
care of ourselves so we will be strong for another day. Let
someone else do the extra chores of life for a while. We’ll
have our turn again, when we’re feeling better.
I need make no excuses to anyone—not even to myself—in taking
time to let the depleted wells of my energy fill up again.
