Experiencing Ancestors through Grief Rituals

On The Cosmic We podcast, hosts Barbara Holmes and Donny Bryant interviewed minister and scholar Dr. Walter Fluker, who shares a transformational experience he had during an ancestral grief ritual:

Walter Fluker: We hardly know the grief of our suffering. Certainly among Black people, but it’s true for all of us as you think of the Cosmic We and this universal moan [of suffering]. Even creation is moaning. Why shouldn’t we? . . .

I was involved in a grief ritual on Cortes Island off Vancouver, British Columbia. This island, all of these people from around the world were just going through these rituals. One evening . . . during what the Dagara people called the grief ritual, where we pay our debt to the ancestors through grief, through weeping and moaning that universal moan. . . . So [my friend Malidoma Somé] said just be free, so they started playing the drum and Sobonfu [his wife] was hitting some kind of shaking instrument. I just started getting down. . . . All at once, out of nowhere, my father is there. . . . I fell to my knees and I cried. I said, “Daddy, we miss you.” He had died in 1984.

I had performed a eulogy but never mourned him. I was too busy being me. I said, “Daddy, we miss you. Mama misses you, B. misses you.” I just went through the whole family. When I came to myself, all of the women had taken me to a corner in the room and they were rocking me. This Japanese woman whispers in my ears. She says, “You’re only five years old.” I didn’t know what that meant then. It was years later [that] I discovered, when daddy left Mississippi in a hurry, he sent for us, thanks be to God. I was five years old. I was still grieving my daddy’s departure.

That was one of the most healing moments in my life. He was more real than even in life real. So, I have no doubt that ancestors not only exist, but they are present for us. They come to us in moments of great need and trial, and they also celebrate life’s moments with us. They want to celebrate with us. . . .

Holmes and Bryant invite listeners to give space to their own need to grieve:

Donny Bryant: I guess the question is for our listeners . . . what trauma, what healing, what hurt, what pain that we need to be healed from could benefit from the practice of our own unique grief ritual?

Barbara Holmes: Yes, and how can the organized religious institutions, the churches, the places where we assemble to finally shed some of our arrogance, how can they help us to grieve, to lament, to begin to get free? . . . What are you grieving that you don’t know that you’re grieving? How will you process that grief?

Reference:

Adapted from Barbara Holmes and Donny Bryant, “Ritual Journeys through Grief and Joy with Dr. Walter Earl Fluker,” September 17, 2021, in The Cosmic We, season 1, episode 4 (Albuquerque, NM: Center for Action and Contemplation, 2021), podcast, MP3 audio.

Explore Further. . .

• Read Mirabai Starr on the abyss of grief.
• Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
• Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image credit: Jeremy Bezanger, Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut (detail), Egypt, photograph, Unsplash. Jon Tyson, Untitled (detail), 2018, photograph, Unsplash. Rasam, Takht-e-Jamshid (Persepolis) (detail), 2020, Iran, photograph, Unsplash. Jenna Keiper & Leslye Colvin, 2022, triptych art, United States. Click here to enlarge image.

Image inspiration: Human ancestors leave legacies in physical and cultural bones, while stones carry meaning and memory. How will you listen to the wisdom of your ancestors?