A Hole in the World Quotes

“Our inclination to explain away suffering is an indication of how reticent we are to simply lament as a society, to admit our weakness. When our understandings of cause and effect, control, and reciprocity are all disrupted, it's humbling. Bewilderment is an experience we aren't accustomed to in our culture. But this humiliation and bewilderment are at the heart of the death wail. They are the ingredients of grief. Death is humiliating. It's mortifying. It's incomprehensible. So many of the psalms of lament begin with the question, 'Why?' And there isn't always an answer.”
― Amanda Held Opelt, A Hole in the World: Finding Hope in Rituals of Grief and Healing

“Sometimes we have to allow grief to have its way with us for a while. We need to get lost in the landscape of grief. It is a wild and rugged wilderness terrain to be sure, but it is here that we meet our truest selves. And we are met by God. The wilderness makes no space for pretense or facade. The language of platitudes and trite niceties are of no use to us in the wilderness. In the wilderness, we speak what is primitive and primary. We say what is true. We say what is hard and heartbreaking. We wail.”
― Amanda Held Opelt, A Hole in the World: Finding Hope in Rituals of Grief and Healing

“The death wail is unsophisticated. It is not curated. It cares not what others think of it, and it has no desire for an interpreter. It is a language meant not for communication but rather for expelling the darkness. When it breaks free, one loses all sense of propriety and performance. The wailer slips into a world of inconsequence, succumbing to the sorrow and finally expressing with unbridled veracity what is true and real about all that is being experienced: I am destroyed.”
― Amanda Held Opelt, A Hole in the World: Finding Hope in Rituals of Grief and Healing

“If Jesus wore the scars of His sorrow and sacrifice into the resurrection, perhaps we will too. In the life to come, I’m guessing we’ll all have moved past the desire to perform or pretend. If it’s attention we are seeking, it will be to a different end. I think we’ll be communally reveling in the shared joy of having overcome, of persevering. Maybe then we will all look death in the eye and point proudly to our battle marks. With the same triumph of Christ, we will say, “Hey, Death, look what you did! But guess what? You did not win.”
― Amanda Held Opelt, A Hole in the World: Finding Hope in Rituals of Grief and Healing

“To mourn well is to hold together in the space of your heart multiple complex emotions at once. Sadness, regret, anger, longing, nostalgia.”
― Amanda Held Opelt, A Hole in the World: Finding Hope in Rituals of Grief and Healing

“I think of the people I've lost. I loved them. I still love them. To say it was easy or that I was past it would be to diminish the love we shared. Because of my love for them, I will endure the long, slow, plodding toll of grief.”
― Amanda Held Opelt, A Hole in the World: Finding Hope in Rituals of Grief and Healing

“The soul is elastic, like a balloon. It can grow larger through suffering. Loss can enlarge its capacity for anger, depression, despair, and anguish, all natural and legitimate emotions whenever we experience loss. Once enlarged, the soul is also capable of experiencing greater joy, strength, peace, and love.”17 Grief uniquely outfits us to experience the joys of life.”
― Amanda Held Opelt, A Hole in the World: Finding Hope in Rituals of Grief and Healing

“I still believe that the ruler of this age prowls around like a lion looking for someone to devour. The mourner is the perfect prey, their faith upended, their sense of security shattered. When love is bereft of the object of its affection, it can easily wander off into the void. The Enemy’s tactic is total warfare. Nothing is off-limits or untouched.”
― Amanda Held Opelt, A Hole in the World: Finding Hope in Rituals of Grief and Healing

“both bereavement and contrition bring you to the end of yourself. 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.”
― Amanda Held Opelt, A Hole in the World: Finding Hope in Rituals of Grief and Healing

“It is an act of faith that abundance still exists, even as you recover from an encounter with sorrow.”
― Amanda Held Opelt, A Hole in the World: Finding Hope in Rituals of Grief and Healing

“Grief is like water. It follows gravity. It finds the lowest part of you and hollows it out even more. It exploits your weaknesses. Grief goes where it wants with or without an invitation. It seeps into the empty spaces. It cannot be harnessed or redirected, at least not easily. It branches out from the headwaters of the main event into hundreds of tributaries. Few areas of your life remain untouched. New losses are discovered almost daily. Life progresses without the one you love in it, and you miss them all over again with every new season and every turn in the road.”
― Amanda Held Opelt, A Hole in the World: Finding Hope in Rituals of Grief and Healing

“If comfort is a good feeling, then God failed. But if comfort is fortification, then God has more than made good on His promise.”
― Amanda Held Opelt, A Hole in the World: Finding Hope in Rituals of Grief and Healing

“In the old testament the rituals of grief mirror the rituals of repentance [....] In light of this, I've asked myself what repentance and grief have in common. If nothing else, both bereavement and contrition bring you to the end of yourself. 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.”
― Amanda Held Opelt, A Hole in the World: Finding Hope in Rituals of Grief and Healing

“In the old testament the rituals of grief mirror the rituals of repentance {....} In light of this, I've asked myself what repentance and grief have in common. If nothing else, both bereavement and contrition bring you to the end of yourself. 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.”
― Amanda Held Opelt, A Hole in the World: Finding Hope in Rituals of Grief and Healing

“I've come to believe that positive emotions or a sense of ease is not the best measuring stick for the quality of God's presence or the sanctity of our worship. Grief is fierce. God is fierce. And I never knew something could be fierce and good at the same time until I met God in my grief, until I worshipped Him in my grief. I never knew until now the peace that passes my understanding of privilege and prosperity. True peace, in the end, is a better way of being, not simply a better way of feeling.”
― Amanda held opelt, A Hole in the World: Finding Hope in Rituals of Grief and Healing

“I find it comforting to know that this simple act of eating bread and drinking wine has persisted through religious wars, cultural upheaval, and global catastrophes. It persists because the story of a God who chose to identify with us in death is simply too beautiful to ignore.”
― Amanda Held Opelt, A Hole in the World: Finding Hope in Rituals of Grief and Healing

“To this day, it is embarrassment that is the most perplexing emotion I've felt in response to death. I know this might sound strange and, frankly, I find it impossible to even describe. But I felt like a failure. I felt like I'd been caught unaware, like I'd been ambushed. I felt irresponsible somehow, like I'd let my guard down or been naive. I look at old pictures of my family—smiling, happy, and blissfully unaware of the catastrophe that would befall us. And I think, We were so stupid. We were such suckers. How did we not see it coming? Why weren't we prepared? Why didn't we build a bunker or something?

Tim likes to tease me because if ever I'm hosting a dinner party and the meal is a bit overdone, I like to announce garishly to the group: "I just want everyone to know that I know the food is burned!" The thought of serving a bad-tasting meal, or having broccoli in my teeth, or of having my pants zipper down without my knowledge is horrifying to me. I don't exactly mind failing, but I like to do it on my own terms, undergirded by my own self-awareness. The thought of being oblivious petrifies me.

But death plays by no rules and doesn't care how it might sully your reputation. No amount of self-awareness lessens its sting. It will come for you and the ones you love the most, whether you are oblivious or if you see it coming a million miles away.”
― Amanda Held Opelt, A Hole in the World: Finding Hope in Rituals of Grief and Healing

“I am glad that society no longer asks us to hide our emotions. Somewhere along the way in the last twenty years, culture has given us permission to be honest, at least in part. We can say when we are hurting, ask for help when we are lost. Most of my friends who are my age meet regularly with a therapist and we congratulate ourselves publicly for doing so.

But there are some rules of decorum that endure. Threads of toxic positivity weave their persistent way through our narratives. We can admit that we are struggling, but we'd better resolve the conversation with a clear articulation of our hope. We can state that we need help, but we'd better be careful not to scare people.”
― Amanda Held Opelt, A Hole in the World: Finding Hope in Rituals of Grief and Healing

“There were quite a few times in the weeks after my sister's death that I was cornered at the office, the grocery store, or at church by people who initially approached me to offer sympathy, but then went on to share in exhaustive detail their own grief story. By the end of the conversation, they were in tears and I was trying to comfort them. I don't always mind stepping into another person's pain with them, but in an attempt to show understanding, people often inadvertently ask the bereaved, still fresh off of a loss, to shoulder more than they are already carrying.”
― Amanda Held Opelt, A Hole in the World: Finding Hope in Rituals of Grief and Healing

“By default, I like to be left alone. It's important to me for people to think I'm managing the ups and downs of life with competence and tenacity, and it's easiest to maintain this persona by keeping people at arm's length. Simply listening to someone's offer of comfort means having to show up emotionally to hear it and accept it. It requires you to admit struggle.”
― Amanda Held Opelt, A Hole in the World: Finding Hope in Rituals of Grief and Healing

“Honoring the memory of the one you loved doesn't require you to idealize them. They don't need your patronization. To honor them means to love them because of, and sometimes in spite of, who they really were. And to honor your own sorrow, you must love and accept yourself no matter the mistakes you've made.”
― Amanda Held Opelt, A Hole in the World: Finding Hope in Rituals of Grief and Healing

“Miscarriage is perhaps the only death you mourn in which you have no past with the loved one you lost. You have only an imaginary future. You grieve someone whose face exists only in your mind and whose name exists only as a hope.”
― Amanda Held Opelt, A Hole in the World: Finding Hope in Rituals of Grief and Healing

“Our physical bodies tell the story of what we have experienced emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. We may believe we can overcome the physical impact of trauma and loss by maintaining a certain level of mental fortitude or spiritual tenacity. But we cannot forever outsmart the physicality of grief and trauma. Not even our numbed-out, well-fed, drugged-up twenty-first-century American bodies are invincible.”
― Amanda Held Opelt, A Hole in the World: Finding Hope in Rituals of Grief and Healing

“Sometimes, it just happens," my own toddler likes to earnestly say when she spills her milk or scrapes her knee. I usually try to piece together the events that led up to her accident and coach her on how to avoid such mishaps in the future. But maybe what she's asking of me is to just be with her, in her frustration, in her hurt.”
― Amanda Held Opelt, A Hole in the World: Finding Hope in Rituals of Grief and Healing

“Most of us probably feel like we don't have the luxury of succumbing to a complete and total breakdown. There's no time for it! Bills need to be paid and babies need to be cared for. People depend on us. That's a heavy burden, but also, perhaps, a grace. It keeps us tethered to the world.”
― Amanda Held Opelt, A Hole in the World: Finding Hope in Rituals of Grief and Healing

“Grief is an ancient sentiment, as old as time and as ubiquitous as breath. Whether you are wealthy or poor, godly or godless, foolish or wise, you will know the kneading pain of loss, catastrophe, or illness at some point in your life.”
― Amanda Held Opelt, A Hole in the World: Finding Hope in Rituals of Grief and Healing

“Grief is like water. It follows gravity. It finds the lowest part of you and hollows it out even more. It exploits your weaknesses. Grief goes where it wants with or without an invitation. It seeps into the empty spaces. It cannot be harnessed or redirected, at least not easily. It branches out from the headwaters of the main event into hundreds of tributaries. Few areas of your life remain untouched.”
― Amanda Held Opelt, A Hole in the World: Finding Hope in Rituals of Grief and Healing