What Remains in the Wake of Loss

I recently listened as a colleague ticked off a long list of losses. Each loss felt, to me, like an autumn leaf, brown and shriveled, dropping from a tree, from his lips, one by one. I could see the leaves falling, piling at his feet. I could feel loss upon loss gathered there, at the feet of the three of us, gathered virtually to listen. 

In his poem, Fighting the Instrument, Mark Nepo speaks of the opening that often follows in the wake of loss. He is careful, however, to avoid minimizing the pain of loss. Two-thirds of the way through the poem, he makes it clear: choosing to value the openings created over the desire to fight or bemoan the often cruel agents of change, is never an easy choice.

"This is very difficult to accept," the poem says. The line is so brief and clear, it would be easy to overlook. But, I have stayed in that place of difficulty that precedes acceptance for weeks, months, and occasionally years at a time. Sometimes I think that staying, that willingness to breathe through each painful loss, is what leads to acceptance, is what creates the opening and the courage needed to live into it. 

My colleague listed his losses and they fell like leaves gathered into a growing pile. We listened and affirmed the losses. But, even still, as the leaves were falling, I remembered the way barren branches reveal so much more of a winter-blue sky. I glimpsed, for a moment, the opening being made, and it gave me hope that there would be revealed, again, a "jewel in the center of the stone." 

This post is a reflection on Mark Nepo's poem, "Fighting the Instrument." Visit Spirituality and Health to read the poem and the poet's own reflections on it. 

Gratitude and Our Most Painful Losses

Occasionally, it's possible to catch a glimpse of gratitude bubbling up on the periphery of life's most painful experiences. This gratitude is bashful, hovering just to the side of things, small and round, like a spot of light, refracted. This gratitude invites a turning in those who want to truly embrace it. 

This is not gratitude for the loss itself, but for the path it opened, for the spacious place in which you find yourself now - days or weeks or months later. It is a sliver of light, a glimmer in deep darkness. Such gratitude is best captured by peripheral vision - look too closely at it, slide it under the microscope of quantity, quality or necessary identification, and it dissolves like fog in the morning sun. But, abide with it, welcome it in passing; extend your hand, your heart, to it, as one might do with a skittish cat and maybe, perhaps, one day, when you least expect it, it will walk right over and curl up to sleep in your lap. 

This post is a reflection on Mark Nepo's poem, "Fighting the Instrument." Visit Spirituality and Health to read the poem and the poet's own reflections on it. 

What's A Pastor to Do?

But what’s a pastor to do when [she’s] got no people to pastor?*

 

I slipped an extra egg

under the broody hen

and marked the eggs

already gathered there

with a permanent marker’s

red x.

 

The hen settled down,

welcoming new eggs and old.

She puffed wide, her feather-bare

chest, radiating one hundred

and one degrees.

 

I picked five cucumbers

and weeded around the late-started

zinnias. I asked after zucchini

and green beans, peering between

large green leaves, but the answer was,

“not yet.”

 

I hung wet clothes on the line,

washed and dried over thirty-five

t-shirts. I went to the store for milk.

I cooked a chicken and helped

my son bake a two-layer chocolate

cake.

 

This is what I did

when I had no people to

pastor.

*This question, posed by a pastor in Winn Collier's novel, "Love Big, Be Well: Letters to a Small-Town Church," got caught in my soul and sits there still. It's a good question, because asking (and answering it) well raises all sorts of other questions. Sometimes a good question can shed more light than even the best of answers.

 

The Compost Heap: Both/And

A Purification by Wendell Berry

At the start of spring I open a trench

in the ground. I put into it

the winter’s accumulation of paper,

pages I do not want to read

again, useless words, fragments,

errors. And I put into it

the contents of the outhouse:

light of the sun, growth of the ground,

finished with one of their journeys.

To the sky, to the wind, then,

and to the faithful trees, I confess

my sins: that I have not been happy

enough, considering my good luck;

have listened to too much noise;

have been inattentive to wonders;

have lusted after praise.

And then upon the gathered refuse

of mind and body, I close the trench,

folding shut again the dark,

the deathless earth. Beneath that seal

the old escapes into the new.

//

We were nearing the end of our time together when my spiritual director posed a question, "Are you familiar with a Wendell Berry poem where he digs a compost heap?" 

"Yes," I said, "I am." I thought back to the poem I'd printed and posted in the church's prayer room one spring, laying it next to a print of a painting of blurred greens and browns. 

"Maybe that's an image you could work with, a kind of ritual to provide closure," she suggested. "What, from your time at the church would could you put into that pile?"

We had been discussing my complicated, raw feelings about the pastorate I left suddenly at the beginning of March. It was a complicated leaving shaped by trauma and followed closely by the trauma of Covid-19.  I thought about her question for a few minutes, picturing the brown soil of Berry's trench cut in the ground. 

"I don't know yet," I said, at last. "It's all still so co-mingled together." 

She nodded, offering simple acceptance of my appraisal, but the image of compost has stayed with me.

//

Maybe this is what we need to know in this time and space, not the clarity and comfort of the either/or, but the difficult acceptance of both/and. The truth that there are no easy answers and that much of our experience is co-mingled - joy and sorrow, laughter and tears, love and hate, hope and despair.

Without this truth, we'll wear ourselves thin in the endless need to part and parcel out every answer and, in declaring one side of any debate a winner, we will create countless unnecessary losers. 

Both/and invites us to dwell in a place of creative tension - irresolution, if you will. It requires effort of a different sort, a willingness to remain open, a commitment to do the work of turning over ideas, emotions and view points. What if our fear and uncertainty might be transformed by the kind of creative alchemy we find in the compost heap? And what if we were to wait together, unified in faith, hope, and love, to see what emerges?

I am writing, of course, about my own recent experiences, but also about the uneasily resolved tensions we find ourselves in as we grapple with the Covid-19 pandemic. The thing we ought to fear is not the tensions of our divergent viewpoints, but our inability to hold them well, our unwillingness to recognize the creative possibilities of our current situations. 

//

This past Sunday morning, I asked my kids how they felt about using the liturgy from the church where I recently pastored. Despite visiting a few other churches after my resignation, we'd returned to using aspects of this church's liturgy once lockdown began. It was familiar, it was easy, but I was beginning to be certain it was time to move on and I wanted to find out what my kids were feeling.

"What do you think about using this?" I asked. 

The younger boys, age 8, said, echoing each other, "We like it."

Then, one quickly added, with a sly grin, "But we're supposed to hate them now."

His brother chimed in in agreement. 

They were trying to show loyalty to me, for the hurt I experienced. They were reflecting their mixed emotions. They were voicing the creative tensions we all feel, the desire to stay with what's familiar but painful and the need to create distance that will facilitate healing. 

"Well," I said, "you don't need to hate anybody. But Dad and I feel it's time to try something new." 

We joined another local church service online. We didn't know the songs and I cried quietly through the first ten minutes or so. Sensing my sadness, our cat, Blackie, came and sat with his paws on my chest, massaging my heart with his comforting purr. 

I hate the pain we are experiencing, the pain of unresolved endings, the pain of moving into something new, but undesired. It's all so co-mingled right now. But we're holding the tension, believing in the power of creation that makes all things new, the old seeping into the new in unexpectedly beautiful and amazing ways.

What co-mingled thoughts and feelings are you experiencing in this season? How are you holding tension creatively within yourself and with others?

The Hidden Life and Its Questions

If I were to tell you one more thing, it would be this: Do not believe that the one who seeks to comfort you lives without difficulty the simple and humble words that sometimes help you. His life contains much grief and sadness and he remains far behind you. Were it not so, he would not have found these words. – Rainer Maria Rilke

I was thinking about these words from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet in the shower this morning as I pondered this online life of mine and the hiddenness of the life that lies behind it. Online, you see what I show you and I try to show you what edifies, but I also try to be truthful, as much as is possible without causing harm.

For example, I posted a picture on my personal fb page yesterday, a picture of my cat and dog taken after eating lunch on our front porch, surrounded by sun and sky. It was a good picture and a lucky day (mid 70s!) to be eating lunch at home. It was the best part of my day and I shared it with friends online.

But I didn’t share waking up at 5 am and being unable to get back to sleep. I didn’t share how I curled up in bed at 7 pm while the boys were out with John. My daughter came to find me, and I told her, half-joking, “Come get me in twenty minutes, I think I might have depression, or maybe it’s just PMS.”

//

I resigned from my job as Associate Pastor at a local church just over a week ago. It was not a decision I was planning and was not easily made. It’s a choice that comes at a great cost to my family and me. It’s a choice I was privileged to make.

I am grieving. I am free. I am wandering through days suddenly empty, unpacking the contents from my office at the church into my office at home. I’m grateful all over again for the shelter of this place we call home, for the animals and children to tend, for the office and work of my own.

I am grateful. I am grieving. I am wandering. I am free. All of these statements are true.

But I’ve been careful in what I share.

//

Looking through Rilke’s letters, I find another line that rings true for this time: “Do not draw conclusions too quickly from that which is happening to you. Just allow it to happen.”

I’ve been thinking about the space between a thing and its naming; how mystery and possibility dwell there. The space before naming invites a posture of curiosity, which is open and probing, rather than judgement, which is closed. When we name a thing – an experience or person – we lose access to all the other names that might have been. Labeling an experience ‘good’ we deny the bad. Naming a person ‘evil’ we sign an unspoken pact to overlook any glimmers of goodness.

Think of the way naming the humble dandelion a “weed” blinds our eyes from the glory of this roadside yellow friend. There’s one even now (in March!) in my front flower bed, but I won’t celebrate its golden head with anything near the welcome I offer to the purple crocus nodding just two feet away.

There’s a space between a thing and its naming and I’m living there these days. It’s a space of mystery and possibility. It’s a space of occasional fear and dread. For the most part, I’m trying to lean toward Gerald May’s summation in The Dark Night of the Soul: “To be immersed in mystery can be very distressing at first, but over time I have found immense relief in it. It takes the pressure off.”

Few of us are very comfortable once the pressure’s off. Sure, it’s good for a day, or maybe a leisurely week or two. But most of us want to be quickly back at it, whatever it may be, if only by naming experience, cordoning it off, somehow checking a virtual box marked “done.”

Which brings me, finally, to another piece of Rilke's advice: 

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

"Live everything," Rilke says. This is the point. 

Do you see what he does there? So often we live for the answers, as though they were the point, not the living itself.

Live everything: Live the grief. Live the freedom. Live the gratitude. Live, also, the fear, when it comes. Live it all.

Even if it never quite all makes it onto your newsfeed. 

The Night Will Hold You

(This picture was taken by my husband - the night sky over the corn field 
across the street from us - isn't he amazing?) 

When the grief you carry 
wears your face into a thousand 
heavy lines, when the sadness 
feels like a knife splitting 
your very body in two, 
night will come at last. 

With the children tucked safe 
in their beds, you will stand 
in the doorway of your own 
darkened room and the night 
will welcome you with its wide, 
and gentle embrace.  

How can I explain that this 
is what you need, what you 
have waited for, this knowing 
that the darkness is nothing 
to fear?  You will lie down 
on your bed, half curled 
around the old, old wound, 
with your face turned toward 
the windows.  Weeping, 
your eyes will search 
outlines of trees, the few 
bright stars captured in your 
window’s frame.  

Now that you are no longer afraid, 
the night will hold you with its velvet 
love, the emptiness of the darkness 
sidling up against you as the well 
of grief pours out. 

“There's something comforting 
about the darkness,” you will tell 
your husband when he finds you there. 
Instinctively, like the night, he will curl 
himself around you offering not words, 
but himself to hold you, his flesh 
echoing in physicality the sweet 
silent night that draws you close.   

This post is linked with Playdates with God and Unforced Rhythms.

To Mend a Broken Heart

Flowers help, cut or wild

blooms of vibrant hue,

also time rolled out in long

stretches like bolts of cloth.

Air is essential, as well as stories

that name in some way the sharp

corners of your pain.

You will want to lay down

on the floor, to feel something

solid beneath your brokenness,

like a hand holding the pieces

of a shattered vase. 

Be gentle: offer yourself 

a cup of tea, a book, a candle lit

in silence. Tuck small 

moments of beauty and joy

into your heart like a poultice 

to draw out the pain.

If you're able, wake up

before the sun rises.  Allow

your day to begin and end

in the quiet dark.  Then watch

for the way the light breaks

through differently each day; 

witness the miracle

of night’s passing until 

you believe it's true.  

(Photo Source: Here. ) Linking today with Playdates With God.