Tag Archives: grief

What We Run From Pursues Us

Last month I attended a hospice event featuring David Kessler, a leading educator and author specializing in grief work.  He shared one of his guiding principles: “What we run from pursues us.  What we face transforms us.”  

It resonated with a comment I recently read in The Tears of Things by Fr. Richard Rohr: “Remember, if you do not transform your pain and egoic anger, you will always transmit it in another form.  This transformation is the supreme work of all true spirituality and spiritual communities.”[i]

Rohr gave an example of this in a recent YouTube interview with Oprah Winfrey. Over the years, he has done a great deal of work with men’s groups.  Early on, he learned many of them had fathers who were often angry.  Midway through the retreat and when a sense of mutual trust had been established, Rohr would tell the men that the source of such anger is often unexpressed sorrow.  If we don’t express the sorrow, it builds up and becomes anger.  When the men at his retreat heard this, their feelings towards their fathers often shifted from resentment to compassion.

Sometimes we need to be in the right environment – like a retreat center or in the presence of a caring person — to let the pain surface.

When I was at Hospice of Santa Barbara, we obtained funding to initiate a community spiritual care program.  Believing there is a great deal of hidden pain and grief in nursing homes and retirement communities, we offered weekly visits from our staff to several nearby facilities.  One of our counselors was asked by the social services director at one facility to visit a new resident who had become reclusive since moving in.  He went for the first visit and was politely received.  She told him her adult children had wanted her to make the move from the East Coast so she would be closer to them. She appreciated their intent, but moving cross-country meant she had to leave her long-time community and friends.  After an hour of cordial conversation, he offered to come back the next week for a second visit, which she accepted. 

During the next visit, she talked more openly about her sense of dislocation and loss. 

He came back the next week, and after some brief conversation, she began weeping, then sobbing. Then, he said, emotion came out so strongly that she was physically shaking; he had rarely seen someone break down so intensely.  Eventually she became calm and composed. Their time was up, and she thanked him for the visit. 

When he returned the next week, she suggested instead of staying in her apartment she show him the nearby rose gardens.

When we can face and bear the pain that pursues us, we find not only a sense of release and relief but also greater awareness of the blessings around us.

I’m reminded of the last verse of the 23rd Psalm.  After alluding to times when the writer needed rest and renewal, as well having passed through the “valley of the shadow of death,” the imagery shifts to a sense of gratitude: “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life…” Years ago I read a commentary on the Psalm by Rabbi Harold Kushner.  He posed the question: What does it mean that goodness and mercy follow me?  Aren’t they with me all the time?  They are, he says, but we are often too distracted and are running out ahead of them. But when we take time to stop and be present with our life, they can catch up with us and come sit in our lap.

[i] Rohr, The Tears of Things, pg.6

Lead Image: Outdoor labyrinth, La Casa de Maria          

Reflections on Grief, Gratitude, and Maturity

           (Dear Friends: I did not have the time this week to create a new piece, but went back a few yeas and found this, which I have edited.)

My dear friend Father Larry Gosselin recently posted a quote from Francis Ward Weller, a therapist and grief counselor. I want to share it and a few reflections.

            The work of the mature person

            Is to carry grief in one hand

            And gratitude in the other

            And to be stretched large by them.

            How much sorrow can I hold?

            That’s how much gratitude I can give.

            If I carry only grief, I’ll bend toward cynicism and despair.

            If I have only gratitude, I’ll become saccharine

            And won’t develop much compassion for other people’s suffering.

            Grief keeps the heart fluid and soft,

            Which makes compassion possible.

            At times in my life, I’ve been asked who my “spiritual heroes” are.  My response: the many older people I’ve known in my congregations.  They’ve lived through hard times and personal tragedies, but somehow have become calm, thoughtful, and caring.

            To this I’d add Hospice volunteers who’ve experienced the loss of people they loved, then followed a calling to simply be present with others living in times of fear and unknowing.

            Of course, maturity doesn’t always come with the accumulation of age; some young people have unusual wisdom and insight. We call them “old souls.”

            I’m wary of simplistic formulas for life. I distrust promises that we can be happy all the time if we just make the right effort. 

            I’ve known people who have lost loved ones in ways that will always haunt me, and I don’t know how they bear it.

            I do not believe there is a divine pain manager who sends suffering our way to improve our character. But something is here that can hold us.

____

Image: Close-up of “Return of the Prodigal” by Rembrandt

How Vin Scully Endured Personal Tragedies

            Many people are writing tributes to the sports announcer Vin Scully, who died this week at 94.  He was the “voice of God” for me and many kids with transistor radios when we were growing up — he was omnipresent, trustworthy, forgiving and always positive. His endless tales of players’ backgrounds were told with reverence and affection.  He was a constant in my life over six decades.  Beyond the famous baseball moments he was part of, I have several other enduring memories.

In 2010, I was in Phoenix for spring training.  After the game, I was exiting behind the stands and happened to see him walking alone as he headed toward his car. He was dressed in a well-worn suit, and I remember thinking he looked older in person than he did on television. 

In 2016, my youngest daughter, her fiancé and I made a pilgrimage to “Vin Scully Day” at Dodger Stadium where we heard him sing “Wind Beneath My Wings” to his wife and 54,000 reverent and faithful fans.

            We all knew he was a very private man.  I vaguely knew his first wife had died and he had remarried, but I never heard him discuss it.

            The one exception came in 2008, when he was interviewed on KCET along with UCLA Coach John Wooden.  At one point, the interviewer changed the topic from sports to personal challenges. He noted that Scully’s first wife had died suddenly at age 35, leaving him with three children.  He’d remarried Sandra, a woman with two children of her own, and together they had one more child.  Later his oldest son died in a helicopter crash at age 32.  Vin was asked how he had gotten through it all.

He said creating a new family after the death of his wife while working full-time was very hard – not the amusing experience of blended families being portrayed on the “Brady Bunch” TV show at the time.  He didn’t go into the loss of his son.  But he concluded by saying the only way he got through it all was to “stop asking why.”

Asking “Why?” is a perennial human question.

“Why did that person have to die when they did?” we ask.  The answers people find are varied. Some attribute it to the intentional act of an inscrutable God.  Others theorize it must be “karma,” a kind of moral accounting system in which we inherit debits and credits from past lives that shape our personal fate.  In modern times, we may look to causes that can be objectively verified, such as family history or the actions of viruses, bacteria, and natural forces.  We may find fault in the way a car is designed or blame a toxin in our food supply. 

We are curious, intelligent creatures, and we yearn to find answers for personal losses and tragedies.  Sometimes we find them. Such answers may bring some peace, and we are reassured that the universe isn’t chaotic after all.

But satisfying answers don’t always come.

Vin’s first wife died of an accidental medical overdose. That’s explainable on one level – simple chemistry. But that doesn’t take away the heartbreak, sorrow, and unfathomable reality that one day a young wife and mother of three is alive and well and the next day she is gone.

His son died working as a helicopter pilot, which may be attributable to a simple error in judgment of a person up in the air at the helm of a large and complex machine.  But the harsh reality that a remarkable young man whom you’ve loved since birth is here one day and absent the next – that will always be a shock.

Vin did, at times, talk about the importance of faith and prayer. He was raised a devout Irish Catholic and remained one his entire life.  His immersion in that faith made a difference in how he endured and how he lived. But he never claimed that any of his prayers helped him find an answer to the question that apparently haunted him in the early days of his grief — why did death come to these two beloved people in such an untimely way?  Vin — the gracious, wise, humane, and compassionate observer of so many human encounters — said the key for him to going on with his life was to “stop asking why.”  I will remember that.  And I will also remember what a joy it was to turn on a radio and hear him invite us all to pull up a chair “wherever we may be” and listen to a master storyteller at work.

Photo credit: “Dodgersway”

Reflections on Grief, Gratitude, and Maturity

            My dear friend Father Larry Gosselin recently posted a quote from Francis Ward Weller, a therapist and grief counselor. I want to share it and a few of my own reflections.

            The work of the mature person

            Is to carry grief in one hand

            And gratitude in the other

            And to be stretched large by them.

            How much sorrow can I hold?

            That’s how much gratitude I can give.

            If I carry only grief, I’ll bend toward cynicism and despair.

            If I have only gratitude, I’ll become saccharine

            And won’t develop much compassion for other people’s suffering.

            Grief keeps the heart fluid and soft,

            Which makes compassion possible.

            At times in my life, I’ve been asked who my “spiritual heroes” are.  My response: the many older people I’ve known in my congregations.  They’ve lived through hard times and personal tragedies, but somehow have become calm, thoughtful, and caring.

            To this I’d add Hospice volunteers who’ve experienced the loss of people they loved, then followed a calling to simply be present with others living in times of fear and unknowing.

            Of course, maturity doesn’t always come with the accumulation of age; some young people have unusual wisdom and insight. We call them “old souls.”

            I’m wary of simplistic formulas for life. I distrust promises that we can be happy all the time if we just make the right effort. 

            I’ve known people who have lost loved ones in ways that will always haunt me, and I don’t know how they bear it.

            I do not believe there is a divine pain manager who sends suffering our way to improve our character.

            Eleven years ago, I participated in a retreat at Esalen with the great mystic and global spirituality scholar, Huston Smith.  He was 91 and physically frail.  I remember him saying, “We are born in mystery, we live in mystery, we die in mystery.” He said those words with a full smile and clear light in his eyes.

            Something is here that holds us.

____

Image: Close-up of “Return of the Prodigal” by Rembrandt