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

by Francis Weller

Ancestral grief also speaks to the grief that remains in our collective soul for the abuses of millions of individuals. It carries the weight of our genocide of the indigenous cultures that were encountered when European settlers arrived in the New World. It speaks to the shameful legacy of slavery and to the killing fields of the Civil War. This grief carries the shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It carries the suffering of many cultures across the planet whose paths collided with the march of progress. All this weighs on our psyches. This grief is so immense it is hard to reconcile. We have much work to do here as a culture, and it may take many grief rituals and rituals of reconciliation with the Native Americans of this land, with the descendants of the Africans who were enslaved, and at places of death and destruction to begin to heal this lingering sorrow. The long shadow of this violence persists in our psyches, and we need to address it and work with it until there is some genuine atonement for these wrongs. This is clearly part of the “sequestered pain” that Stephen Levine spoke of that generates the persistent hum of sorrow in the background of our lives.