Although spoken at a very specific service of lament and hope, these powerful remarks from Dr. Debra Murphy will speak to many persons and situations.
Don’t run away from grief . . .
Look for the remedy inside the pain.
This advice is from the 13th century Sufi poet Rumi.
Don’t run away from grief . . .
Look for the remedy inside the pain.
But this seems counter-intuitive, doesn’t it?
We think of grief as something to move beyond—
and as quickly as possible, please.
But why do we think that?
Because grief begins in the body and it exhausts our bodies.
We are stunned, spent, sleep-deprived, dazed, disoriented.
We didn’t know that such loss could spin us around so,
making us dizzy with a sorrow we feel in our limbs, our chest,
in eyes hot with tears.
Or a sorrow that has left us numb,
wondering why we can’t feel anything.
Don’t run away from grief . . .
Look for the remedy inside the pain.
Why would we do that?
Because the ground of grief, the root of sorrow, is love.
We grieve because we love.
And love, too, lives in the body.
In these days of grief following the death of Garret
many are grieving because they loved him.
Yet even those who didn’t know him or know him well
grieve for the sake of love:
Because we all know, we have felt in our grieving bodies,
that love is what we are made for.
Not the love of romantic comedies and Hallmark cards
but the love that seeks another’s well-being,
wills another’s good.
And we all know, we have felt in our grieving bodies,
the grievous truth that we cannot offer our love to Garret now. And we sense that perhaps we have not always loved others well.
This is painful.
But the remedy is inside the pain.
Don’t run away from grief.
It’s not the weight you carry [the poet Mary Oliver says]
but how you carry it–
books, bricks, grief–
it’s all in the way
you embrace it, balance it, carry it
when you cannot, and would not,
put it down. (Mary Oliver, from “Heavy”)
And the love we are made for?
This love that is perhaps best characterized as
kindness born of generosity:
I’m reminded of these lines by poet Naomi Shihab Nye:
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth . . .
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend. (Naomi Shihab Nye, “Kindness”)
+ + +
Inside the pain of grief is the remedy.
For as we remember our friend Garret,
whether we knew him well or not,
we know something of the lovingkindness
that holds him even now.
We have glimpsed in our grief the love we all are made for,
the lovingkindness we seek to embody
as our own way in the world.
We remember Garret to God. That is the prayer of our hearts:
that Garret be remembered, returned, restored
to the Source of all goodness, beauty, and truth.
Writer Anne Lamott says there are really only three prayers:
Wow.
Thanks.
Help.
The prayer of awe and wonder, of attention and mystery.
The prayer of gratitude for every gift that sustains our very lives.
The prayer that acknowledges need, lack, loss.
This third kind of prayer—help—is often a prayer of lament:
a crying out into what can seem like empty space,
a blank nothingness, the great void.
We might feel in our heads that prayer is futile, superstitious.
But our bodies—where grief lives, where love lives—
seem to sense that prayer, especially the prayer of lament,
is the “sigh too deep for words” that slips from our lips.
It is the groaning of our most inward being
that sometimes is nothing more than “Oh, God.”
And when we pray “help”—when we dare to lift our laments, bring them out into the open, into the Holy Light,
there will be no easy answers.
Sometimes the best we can ask for is “what songs can we make from our sorrows.” (Marilynne Robinson)
It’s an incredible act of courage and vulnerability
to pray such prayers: to trust that silence is not absence.
That the silence we sense in response to our heartfelt “help” might itself be a summons to rest in the unspeakable love that made us, that seeks our well-being, that wills our good.
Let us pray:
Oh, God.
Help.
Hear our sighs too deep for words.
Hear the groaning of our spirits.
Hold our maddening questions:
Why?
What could we have done?
What do we do now?
In our grief, show us the love we are made for.
From this aching sorrow, let kindness go with us always
like a shadow or a friend.
May our beloved Garret be held
in the safety of your gentle embrace.
And may we know
that there is nowhere in our own anguish or despair
that you have not already been,
clearing a path for our return to wholeness,
holding out arms of welcome and blessing,
Oh, God.
Thank you.
Debra Dean Murphy
18 October 2018
Dr. Murphy is a 1984 graduate of West Virginia Wesleyan College, and returned in 2009 to teach Religion. Read more about her here.