I’ll never forget meeting with Bill Haley, my spiritual director, a few weeks after my wife’s funeral eleven years ago. My adult daughters stayed with me through the Christmas holiday and then I went on a personal retreat to a friend’s farm in Western Maryland. In the quiet of the January woods and fields I was able to walk and reflect and cry out for Jesus’s consoling protective presence. I experienced the deep anguish of the void Peggy left behind while at the same time experiencing profound gratitude for the deep intimacy we had shared walking together pressing into Jesus’s compassionate care for us during her ten-month journey with brain cancer. We had begun each day with the Eucharist and ended each day expressing our gratitude for the gifts we had received. Peggy invested the limited energy she had caring for her girls and scheduling meaningful conversations with her friends.
So when I came to my time with Bill I expressed my amazement that I could experience two such seemingly contradictory emotions simultaneously, intense pain and overwhelming gratitude. Bill gently smiled, tickled by my awakening to the paradoxical reality of life. I had lived most of my life in my head trying to protect myself from the very pain I was now feeling. But now the depth of the love Peggy and I shared coupled with her absence opened my awareness to the emotional depths of my heart.
In God’s grace He gently met me in my pain and opened whole new vistas of beauty and intimacy with Him and the world around me. I have discovered the depth of His companionship in the midst of the hardship and pain that is all around me and I have tasted of the hope that will not disappoint. I have grown in my capacity to be with others in their deep losses and pain. These have become sacred, holy moments for me.
Jerry Sittser compellingly describes the paradoxical reality of the beauty and the pain that we all encounter in A Grace Disguised. In 1991 he lost his mother, his wife, and his young daughter in the same automobile accident. His love for his three surviving children compelled him to confront his pain and to press into God with the help of empathetic companions coupled with soaking in beauty. Jerry Sittser sat down with Adam Young last year to discuss the long journey of grief and beauty he has experienced over 30 plus years since losing his loved ones. When asked when one gets over such loss he responded that one never does. God’s invitation is to allow ourselves to lean fully into the beauty and the loss that surround us and let them enrich us in secure loving communion with the One who shares the paradox with us.
Three years after my wife’s death I had the opportunity to spend over two weeks with my three adult daughters and my son-in-law immersed in the glorious landscapes of the Cotswolds, the Malvern Hills, the Lake District, and the Scottish Borders. I was keenly aware of Peggy’s absence as we had hoped to make this trip before she had become too ill to travel. And simultaneously I relished the gift of unhurried time in a beautiful setting with children. Eventually they would return to their separate homes and I made my way to the Isle of Iona as I lived into the inescapable reality of my life living as an unmarried man with Jesus. I experienced what Tolkien described as “joy that was like swords…and pain and delight flow(ing) together.. and tears as the very wine of blessedness.” (Return of the King).
On the flight home I discovered Collateral Beauty, a film in which a young girl is suffering from the same terminal diagnosis as my wife’s. As her mother is grieving outside her hospital room a stranger seated next to her turns to her and encourages her to keep her heart open for the collateral beauty that she will experience on her journey with loss. I wept tears of deep sorrow and joy flowing together as I bathed in the beauty of the story of love and consolation that unfolded before me.
St. John of the Cross poignantly depicts this depth of love between the Father and the Son in his Romances. As they dialogue with each other we get to experience the love that led them to create us as a bride for the Son and the extent of the pain that they were willing to endure to rescue us when their creation was wounded by evil. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit each are familiar with the pain we experience and share it with us. Our challenge is are we willing to lean into our pain and remain present to beauty and thus discover a new level of intimate union with Christ.
In 2017 I was able to return to the UK and join the Northumbria Community for a grief retreat led by Barbara Pymm. Barbara was well acquainted with loss, losing her mother as a young girl and then losing a young child of her own. Her grief journey has enabled her to come alongside children to help them express their inexpressible losses through embodied artistic expression. Her journey led her to recognize a pattern of movements beginning with the overwhelming initial onslaught of loss. This season bids us to move gently and patiently with ourselves taking time to rest and remember. Only with rest and gentle, slow processing are we ready to more actively engage our grief. She recommends creative expression through art, music, dance etc. to help us reflect, and with time, release our grief. As with the initial season of reeling and recollecting ourselves, there is no fixed timeline, and we cycle back and forth through these movements of grief. As we lean into our loss while at the same time leaning into the beauty in and around us, a season will come when we will be ready to rededicate ourselves to life and embrace our new identity as one marked by grief. Leaning into the journey in the loving presence of God and empathetic companions can enrich us and our capacity to care for others.
Our souls ache, longing for beauty…longing to be securely loved. Jerry Sittser encourages us from his place of longing that “The experience of loss does not have to be the defining moment of our lives. Instead, the defining moment can be our response to the loss. It is not what happens to us that matters so much as what happens in us.” We can let our losses enrich even as we long for the day when Christ will make all things as they should be in a world bathed in Trinitarian love.
For help in the journey I highly recommend Curt Thompson’s The Deepest Place and his accompanying podcast Season 9 of Being Known. Barbara Pymm’s Time To Say Goodbye and Henri Nouwen’s Turn My Mourning Into Dancing are also wonderful companions. Each of these guides are deeply acquainted with grief. Each of them grants us permission to walk slowly with our grief in the companionship of others noticing the collateral beauty that is all around us.