Loss, any kind of loss - rejection, abandonment, divorce, death - is a shocking, numbing, gray thing that at the outset, at least, freezes the heart and slows the mind. Loss changes life at the root. Irrevocably. What was once the center of life - the person, the position, the plan, the lifestyle - is no more. What shaped our identities, what fashioned our days and filled our sleep, what gave us meaning and direction, comfort and support, has disappeared like sunset on a cloudless night.
And yet loss, once reckoned, once absorbed, is a precious gift. No, I cannot be what I was before but I can be - I must be - something new. There is more of God in me, I discover in emptiness, than I have ever known in what I once took to be fullness.
There are spiritual lessons to be learned from loss that can be barely divined by any other means and often despite ourselves. We learn, just when we think we have nothing, just when it feels that we have not one good thing left in the world, that what we do still have is ourselves. We have, deep down inside us what no one can take away, what can never be lost either to time or to chance: We have the self that brought us to this point—and more. We have gifts of God in abundance, never noticed, never touched, perhaps, but a breath in us nevertheless and waiting to be tapped. And more, whatever we have developed over the years in the center of ourselves - the grit; the hope; the calm; the bottomless, pulsating, irrepressible trust in the providence of God despite the turns of fortune—is here now to be mined like gold, scratched out and melted down, shaped and shined into a whole new life. We have within us the raw material of life. And we have it for the taking.
The truth of loss is a freeing one: It is the grave of something we loved - this person, this path, this place - that calls forth the resurrection of the self. Then the past has done its doing. Then the Word of God becomes new life to us. Then life becomes a series of possibilities which, when taken seriously, make us whole. Then, we take another road, not because we know what will happen at the end of it but because we cannot be whole without walking it.
from The Story of Ruth: Twelve Moments in Every Woman’s Life by Sr. Joan Chittister OSB, ill. John August Swanson (Eerdmans, 2000)
I can't claim always to have enjoyed the experience, but everything Sr. Joan says has proved to be true for me. She's absolutely right, the truth of loss is freedom, a strange, beautiful kind of freedom. Ultimately, it's the freedom to be what God is calling us to become.
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
(Matthew 5.3-4)
3 comments:
Thanks, Mike. I kept thinking how true and how eloquent, and then I learned that Joan Chittister was the author of all those words about loss. Wow--such truth. My biggest losses have been very difficult but in much later retrospect show me God helping me to change. . . .
Mike, I agree with you, and have to say that I find everything Sr. Joan says to be true. We may not like loss and grave change, and coming out the other side, into God's gift, may take a while, but it does come, and therein lies the hope.
Thank you,Jan and Kelly. I don't know how obvious a connection it is, but I think my next post grew out of thinking about what you both said...
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