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

by Francis Weller

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. We are told to “get on with it” and “get over it.” The lack of courtesy and compassion surrounding grief is astonishing, reflecting an underlying fear and mistrust of this basic human experience. We must restore the healing ground of grief. We must find the courage, once again, to walk its wild edge.

Sorrow is a sustained note in the song of being alive. To be human is to know loss in its many forms. This should not be seen as a depressing truth. Acknowledging this reality enables us to find our way into the grace that lies hidden in sorrow. We are most alive at the threshold between loss and revelation; every loss ultimately opens the way for a new encounter.

This “psychological moralism” places enormous pressure on us to always be improving, feeling good, and rising above our problems.2 Happiness has become the new mecca, and anything short of that often leaves us feeling that we have done something wrong or failed to live up to the acknowledged standard. This forces sorrow, pain, fear, weakness, and vulnerability into the underworld, where they fester and mutate into contorted expressions of themselves, often coated in a mantle of shame.

Every one of us must undertake an apprenticeship with sorrow. We must learn the art and craft of grief, discover the profound ways it ripens and deepens us. While grief is an intense emotion, it is also a skill we develop through a prolonged walk with loss. Facing grief is hard work. It takes “the outrageous courage of the bodhi heart,” as Pema Chödrön calls it.6 It takes outrageous courage to face outrageous loss.

To honor our grief, to grant it space and time in our frantic world, is to fulfill a covenant with soul—to welcome all that is, thereby granting room for our most authentic life.

Through meaningful rituals, a community of friends, some time in benevolent solitude, and effective practices that help us stretch into our bigger selves, we are offered the opportunity to develop a living relationship with loss.

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

There is something familiar about the rising and falling of loss, how it takes us below the surface of our lives and works on us in some alchemical way. We are remade in times of grief, broken apart and reassembled. It is hard, painful, and unbidden work.

German poet Rilke, “I don’t have much knowledge yet in grief, so this massive darkness makes me small.”8 He wrote that line in 1904.

It is the broken heart, the part that knows sorrow, that is capable of genuine love. The heart familiar with loss is able to recognize “a still deeper grief . . . a sadness at the very heart of things”13 that binds us with the world. Without this awareness and willingness to be shaped by life, we remain caught in the adolescent strategies of avoidance and heroic striving.

Embrace your grief, for there your soul will grow. —CARL JUNG

In Bouncing Back, psychotherapist and neuroscience expert Linda Graham reveals how “bonding and belonging nourish resilience.” She relates how our sense of connection affects our ability to regulate our internal states during crisis and stress. She writes, “The process of being seen, understood, and accepted by an attuned, empathic other engenders a sense of genuine self-acceptance, a feeling that we are profoundly okay. We feel safe enough, strong enough, sure enough to venture courageously into the world and develop the competencies we need to deal with life’s challenges.”15 A sense of belonging offers us much-needed medicine in these times, which are marked by feelings of anonymity and isolation. In fact, belonging protects the heart from much of life’s unavoidable challenges.

We must honor the needs of the soul during times of grief.

Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground. —OSCAR WILDE

Ritual offers us the two things required to fully let go of the grief we carry: containment and release. Containment offers the holding space for the ones in grief. It provides the safe place to fall, to descend into the depths of both the known and unknown layers of sorrow.

In the absence of this depth of community, the safe container is difficult to find. By default, we become the container ourselves, and when this happens, we cannot drop into the well of grief in which we can fully let go of the sorrows we carry. We recycle our grief, moving into it and then pulling it back into our bodies unreleased.

Life is far too complex to rely solely on our intellect. We need the invisible hands of Spirit to shelter us, to support us, and to offer us the nourishing comfort that comes from that Other World. This concert between the human and the sacred is ancient; it is held in the bones. Trust this bond. It is our healing ground.

The truth is we need both the vital exhalation of community and the renewing inhalation of our interior lives for our grief to move and change over our long walk with sorrow. Our healing is in “every small contracting and expanding.”

The collective denial of our underlying emotional life has contributed to an array of troubles and symptoms. What is often diagnosed as depression is actually low-grade chronic grief locked into the psyche, complete with the ancillary ingredients of shame and despair.

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. Life is hard, filled with loss and suffering. Life is glorious, stunning, and incomparable. To deny either truth is to live in some fantasy of the ideal or to be crushed by the weight of pain.