CAC friend Mirabai Starr founded the online grief community, Holy Lament: The Transformative Path of Loss and Longing. It is a space for people to experience grief together:
What I often say about my work with grieving and bereaved people is that it’s much more about transformation than about consolation. There are other places you can go to feel better, but to me grief is not a problem to be solved or a malady to be cured. It’s a sacred reality to be entered. For so many of us, there’s an opening to our soul’s innate birthright, I would even say, of our longing for God that often gets covered over by everyday life…. When we experience a profound loss, it strips us of those coverings … granting us special access to a profound loving intimacy with the divine….
Death is complicated and powerful. It’s that threshold space that we get to experience sometimes between this world and a larger reality that we’ve always intuited to be true…. It brings us into sacred space whether we like it or not. But there are many other losses besides the death of a loved one: that breakup of a relationship, … a serious health diagnosis that changes everything, an injury that reweaves the way life used to be. I guess any kind of loss that involves the death of who we used to be is a powerful catalyst for this kind of encounter with the sacred that I’m speaking of.…
We’re an extremely grief-phobic culture, and it doesn’t help to have the religions on top of it saying, “Go this way. There lies transcendence. You can meditate your way out of your pain. You can pray your way through to relief from suffering. In fact, you can bypass it all together if you buy into this set of beliefs or practices or faith claims.” The combination of grief illiteracy in the culture, and the emphasis of the patriarchal religious structures to get us to rise above the messy realities of our humanity, is a recipe for avoiding grief.
Starr experienced how individual loss allowed her to enter into collective belonging:
What I experienced when my daughter died was two things. One was that nobody could possibly know what I’m going through right now. But quickly on the heels of that was, “Oh, every person ever who has experienced the death of a child knows.” I was realizing in the bones of my own body … that there had been mothers throughout time whose children had died and mothers right now [whose children are dying]…. We all belong to each other. In some ways that was the first time I ever took my seat in the web of interbeing—when I realized that I belong here and we belong to each other. Even if right now it was my turn to be held by that web, I couldn’t imagine it yet, but I knew somehow, someday I would be able to do some of that holding of the other mothers to come. And I have and I do.
Reference:
Adapted from Mike Petrow, Paul Swanson, and Richard Rohr, “Necessary Suffering with Mirabai Starr,” Everything Belongs, season 1, ep. 6 (Albuquerque, NM: Center for Action and Contemplation, 2024), podcast. Available as MP3 audio and PDF transcript.
Image credit and inspiration: Siim Lukka, untitled (detail), 2017, photo, Estonia. Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. We make room for our personal and collective grief by letting the sorrow burn through.
Story from Our Community:
I am a hospice social worker. Each day, I dance with families who are doing their best under difficult circumstances. I have learned to be realistic about what I am actually able to offer in my job. Some families hope and expect that I might “fix” deeply rooted patterns in their family dynamic. But in reality, I can simply listen, speak hard truths, and when the time comes, I can open the door to lament. The rest is in God’s hands.
—Andriene S.
