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July 19 - July 30, 2022
The only way to experience sorrow is to do so wholeheartedly. With death and upheaval now surrounding us, we must recover this competency both collectively and individually if we are to emerge from this season whole and intact.
In a world that sees the emotions of women as a liability, let us remember that God sees them as a holy asset.
When such love is lost, the deep in us cries out to the deep in God. To wail is holy, and wholly profound.
Pride makes a terrible companion on the road of grief.
You may not like who you are for a while, maybe a long while, after grief. It is wise, I think, to cover your mirrors after the death of someone or something you love. Suspend your expectations of yourself.
It takes a lot of courage to simply be sad, to relinquish control and call off the search for an explanation.
The feeling of His absence cultivated a beautiful longing in me and taught me not to take anything for granted.
Maybe that’s what the kingdom of heaven is like in its purest form: acute awareness of your need for God. Hunger. Thirst. Relentless longing.
There is no effort on anyone’s part to perform during shivah. The point is not to produce but to be present—present for the pain and present for one another.
To feel seen. To connect in simple solidarity. To be offered unconditional presence. To be given a word of wisdom. What each of these friends offered had one thing in common. Love.
“So many of us carry griefs that we don’t feel like we can speak. But there is something about grief that wants to be seen. There’s something about grief that wants to be known.”
Sin and sorrow are humiliating. They reveal how weak you are in your own flesh. Both require us to turn in a different direction, to abandon our own plans and move toward God.
Grief is learning to endure, to bear up under the beautiful burden of love.
I’ve come to believe that the best thing you can do in grief is tell yourself the truth. Every bit of it. Death is hard and ugly and unnatural. But if we tell ourselves the truth about the bad, we must also tell ourselves the truth about the good.
No virtue in the world seems as righteous and life-giving as the virtue of thankfulness. That, to me, is at the core of Christian hedonism, the awe-filled recognition of all the marvelous things God has given us.
Anxiety demands that we experience the pain of a loss before it even happens and then again if and when it actually does happen. To remember our mortality without worrying requires a mental and emotional dexterity only the truly wise acquire.
“We comfort a sufferer,” he writes, “when we give him courage to bear his pain or face his misfortune. Comfort is what sets him on his feet.”13
I will never say that my grief has been good. But I will say that it has not been wasted. Not one bit.
ritual creates a placeholder for emotion. I did not have to perform or make things up as I went along. A path had been carved for me by millions of saints and mourners in the past.
No one knows how to act or what to say when faced with the atrocity of death. Rituals tell us what to say. They tell us how to act. They give us another step.
The truth is, grief requires presence so much more than it requires perfection or performance. The same is true of faith. All
