Heartache and mercy.
"I am thinking now of grief...." -- Mary Oliver
There isn’t much I know for sure in this life - but I know for sure that grief, even the small experiences of it that build up over season of life and then one day, all together, seem more than we can possibly manage, it changes you.
It brings into a beautifully and brutally sharp focus what matters most. And, spoiler alert, what matters most isn’t traffic or the price of eggs or even that one meeting that we feel like must go well or all else will fail.
It pushes you to find a faith that makes sense or discard the one that raised you, because when you’ve fallen to your knees, unsure how you’ll survive a tremendous loss, what gets you to the next morning is a living and loving God and a risen Christ, and neither of those things are made manifest in hate or greed or violence or deciding who is and who isn’t worthy (or, it must be said, “America Reads the Bible” days).
It makes you feel vulnerable. Fragile bones. Willing to face the truth of these miraculous bodies we’ve been given, and how they are both amazingly strong and also fleeting.
It builds. One grief you thought long dealt with rising to the surface again at another grief, because at the end of the day, loss is loss and it always leaves a searing heartache in its wake.
And sometimes, grief just makes you angry. Because how dare the rest of the world go on acting as if nothing is wrong when your heart is lying on the floor, bruised and bleeding.
What I also know to be true is that if you live long enough and love hard enough in this life (both of which are things I try to do), you will know grief - and chances are it will be of the sort that changes how it is that you live and move and have being.
I have been reminded this week that there are also these two truths about grief - 1) There is no way around it, but through it, and 2) It’s okay to let your people catch you when grief knocks your legs out from under you and you aren’t quite sure how to stand on the strange new terrain that loss etches across the landscape of our hearts. I don’t know how we ever rise at all from the things that threaten to destroy us without the shelter of each other.
Everyone you know is grieving something, this I promise you. And it might be a fresh heartbreak, or one that you thought was scabbed over, only to discover that it still bleeds if brushed up against. It might also be a constant sort of thing, an ache that most days is dull and manageable but that rears up on others like it only happened yesterday. It might be white hot, and it might be what’s left of heat in campfire coals the next morning.
Everyone is grieving something.
And it seems to me that this is all the more reason to treat each other with real kindness. To practice actual compassion. To recognize that we are all formed by things good and awful. To reach out a hand to someone who needs theirs held for a few days or so. And to offer grace whenever possible.
Everyone is grieving something.
It seems to me that this is all the more reason to lean in to the hope that can only be found in relationship with one another, in recognizing that in your veins and mine run the very same blood created by the very same Love and that it is only when we forget this that life becomes harder than we know what to do with.
Everyone is grieving something.
And so maybe walk into this new week of life a little more softly, treading first with grace, and a willingness to see the broken places in all our lives, and maybe then step in with the sort of mercy that those broken places are longing for.