The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief

by Francis Weller

Weller calls the fifth gate ancestral grief. “This is the grief we carry in our bodies from sorrows experienced by our ancestors. . . . Tending this undigested grief of our ancestors not only frees us to live our own lives but also eases ancestral suffering in the other world.”

Grief dares us to love once more.

Grief and love are sisters, woven together from the beginning. Their kinship reminds us that there is no love that does not contain loss and no loss that is not a reminder of the love we carry for what we once held close. Alone and together, death and loss affect us all.

We live, however, in a grief-phobic and death-denying society. Consequently, grief and death have been relegated to what psychologist Carl Jung called the shadow. The shadow is the repository of all the repressed and denied aspects of our lives.

yup

Our refusal to acknowledge grief and death has twisted us into a culture riddled with death.

For the most part, grief is not a problem to be solved, not a condition to be medicated, but a deep encounter with an essential experience of being human.

Grief becomes problematic when the conditions needed to help us work with grief are absent. For example, when we are forced to carry our sorrow in isolation, or when the time needed to fully metabolize the nutrients of a particular loss is denied, and we are pressured to return to “normal” too soon.

The lack of courtesy and compassion surrounding grief is astonishing, reflecting an underlying fear and mistrust...

We will have times of being happy, which is cause for celebration. We will, however, also have times of sorrow and loneliness.

Happiness, then, becomes a reflection of our ability to hold complexity and contradiction, to stay fluid and accept whatever arises, even sorrow.

Modern technological society has forgotten what it feels like to be embedded in a living culture, one rich with stories and traditions, rituals and patterns of instruction that help us become true human beings. We live in a society with little regard for matters of soul. As a consequence, we need books and workshops on grief, on relationships and sexuality, on play and creativity. These are symptoms of a great loss. We have forgotten the commons of the soul—the primary satisfactions that sustained and nourished the community and the individual for tens of thousands of years.

We have sadly turned the ritual of life into the routine of existence.

Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, “What we cannot speak about, we pass over in silence.”

Grief dares us to love once more. —TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS

a line from the German poet Rilke, “I don’t have much knowledge yet in grief, so this massive darkness makes me small.”

When we come to our grief with reverence, we find ourselves in right relationship with sorrow, neither too far away nor too close. We have entered into an ongoing conversation with this difficult, holy visitor. Learning we can be with our grief, holding it softly and warmly, is the first task in our apprenticeship.

Attunement is a particular quality of attention, wedded with affection, offered by someone we love and trust. This deep attention is what enables us to make painful experiences tolerable. We feel held and comforted, reassured and safe.

“Hold your sorrow to a degree of eloquence, whereby everyone around you will be fed by your efforts to do so.”11 Becoming skillful at digesting our grief makes us a source of reassurance and stability for the wider community.

Grief work is soul work. It requires courage to face the world as it is and not turn away, to not burrow into a hole of comfort and anes-thetization.

Grief is subversive, undermining our society’s quiet agreement that we will behave and be in control of our emotions. It is an act of protest that declares our refusal to live numb and small.

The onset of grief following a significant loss initiates a shift in our daily rhythm. We enter into what some cultures refer to as a time of living in the ashes.

We are laid low by grief, taken down below the surface of the world, where shadows and strange images appear. We are no longer moving in our brightly lit, daytime existence. Grief punctures the solidity of our world, shatters the certainty of fixed stars, familiar landscapes, and known destinations.

we will keep in our hearts the love of those who depart this earth before us: our parents, or our spouse, or our children, or our friends, or, or, or—and yes, that is true. It is grief, however, that allows the heart to stay open to this love, to remember sweetly the ways these people touched our lives.

My grief says that I dared to love, that I allowed another to enter the very core of my being and find a home in my heart. Grief is akin to praise; it is how the soul recounts the depth to which someone has touched our lives. To love is to accept the rites of grief.

He told me he wanted his heart to stay open and to love big.

Every one of us has encountered times when the connection between us and the one we needed for attention and love was ruptured.

it is always up to the adult to restore the bridge with the child.

Shame closes the heart to self-compassion. We live with an internal state best characterized as self-hatred.

As Goethe said, “Tell a wise person, or else keep silent.”

Regrets are another part of the second gate, those choices we made that hindered or harmed others or ourselves: the unlived life of abandoned dreams, friendships that withered and died, or the decision to withdraw our hearts from the world and neither receive nor offer love.

Grieving, by its very nature, confirms worth. I am worth crying over; my losses matter.

She carries a scar, but her soul is intact. Her village could see her value and helped her to remember her essence.

placed his hand on a large rock lying on a table, and said, “This is my clock. I operate at geologic speed. And if you are going to work with the soul, you need to learn this rhythm, because this is how the soul moves.” Then he pointed to a small clock also sitting there and added, “It hates this.”

While this move is necessary in order for us to keep on living, it also carries a loss of our essential wholeness. Trauma always carries grief, though not every grief carries trauma.

It is easy to dismiss our grief when we compare it to circumstances we consider to be much worse than our own. But the grief is ours, and we must treat it as worthy of attention.

Ritual offers us the two things required to fully let go of the grief we carry: containment and release.

Grief has never been private; it has always been communal.

Ritual is a practice that seeks to make the repressed visible. This is, in part, why we fear it. On some instinctual level, we know the power of ritual; we recognize its potential to disrupt our ordered lives. And this is precisely why we need it.

“I think you are hiding in your grief. I have no right to say this to you. Your loss is real, and yet I have this feeling that you have found a place to hide.”

Silence and solitude invite us to pause, to slow down, and to stop. How rare this is in a culture that revels in continuous motion. We live in a highly extroverted culture in which everything is expressed and exposed at all times of day and night.

Mythologist and storyteller Martin Shaw says that “we are addicted to disclosure.”59 And yet this pseudo-contact leaves us feeling unseen in the most essential ways.

He said the boy was playing hide-and-seek, but no one had come to find him. He couldn’t remember if this was a memory of a real event, but the metaphor stopped him and brought him to tears. No one had come to look for him in his time of sorrow, and he had been hiding ever since.

Silence and solitude are painful reminders of loss. The house is silent in the wake of a partner’s death—his or her words no longer filling the air with conversation. Solitude becomes a prison sentence, an inescapable confinement that feels void of joy and warmth, filled with an absence where the shape of the beloved once moved and touched our lives. We, too, in the wake of this departure, feel absent and empty. Silence and solitude are imposed upon us, falling like ash around us, dulling the world and leaving all things we touch with the mark of our emptied hands.

We must couple grief and gratitude in a way that encourages us to stay open to life.

Another face of fear is self-consciousness. We live anxiously, wondering who will judge us for who we are, how we act, what we say. We often do not feel that we belong; we feel that we need to watch everything we do to remain within the parameters of acceptable behavior.

Even at funerals, we often avoid the intensity of sorrow needed to address the soul’s pain surrounding the loss of someone we love.

On my visit to Africa, I remarked to one woman that she had a lot of joy. Her response stunned me: “That’s because I cry a lot.” This was a very un-American sentiment. She didn’t say it was because she shopped a lot, worked a lot, or kept herself busy. Here was Blake in Burkina Faso—sorrow and joy, grief and gratitude, side by side. It is indeed the mark of the mature adult to be able to carry these two truths simultaneously.

your grief is your new relationship with your wife. It will be the ongoing reminder of your love and your life together. This sadness keeps her in your world.”

My daily practice is to wake and immediately bring my attention to this thought: “I am one day closer to my death. So how will I live this day? How will I greet those I meet? How will I bring soul to each moment? I do not want to waste this day.”

Bringing compassion to our suffering is an act of generosity. It helps us remember that we, too, are part of this breathing, pulsing world. We are reminded that, by the mere fact of our being here, we qualify for the soothing waters of compassion.