Writing
I am a student of grief. It infuses my daily life as a hospice chaplain supporting people at end of life because death brings with it a physical, emotional and spiritual response to loss. This is what GRIEF is—our normal and natural response to loss.
What many are slowly waking up to is that grief is as much a part of our life process as love. It is part of the human condition and not just a moment in time brought on by the experience of death. It encompasses the acknowledgment of our frailty as conscious but mortal beings taking part in a world that is ever changing.
I feel one of the reasons grief is so acute in our time is that the world is changing so rapidly. Many are grieving that the present way we have viewed the world (the status quo of it all) is passing away. We can see and feel the newness colonizing old ways. And yes, there is health in acknowledging and giving space to recognize and grieve losses big and small, perhaps some of the culture war biz is about this? But just as I whisper to the dying to loosen, to let go, to trust I send the same wish on the wind to those white knuckling the past. It cannot hold. The body breaks, children grow, glaciers melt, civilizations fall. The force of change unstoppable; in your body, in culture, in the physical environment.
Theologian Catherine Keller has a beautiful line that stays with me as salve to my knock kneed fear and grief as I work to meet these times with clarity and grit “what is to end is a human construction of the world, not “the world” itself”. May that land somewhere in you that aches for the peace of knowing another world is possible.