Seeing Love Beyond Death

We explore grief’s gray spaces, where love does not disappear but changes form, and we practice seeing God’s presence in simple, daily ways. Thich Nhat Hanh’s cloud-to-rain teaching helps us notice our beloved in new forms while faith widens the heart that holds them.

• grief as gray rather than black and white
• shock, aftershocks, and anniversaries as normal rhythms
• love as the other side of grief that endures
• energy of love dispersing and widening beyond one person
• Thich Nhat Hanh’s cloud and rain metaphor for transformation
• practices to look deeply for presence in new forms
• faith as companionship with God
• self-compassion as we heal and remember

Please support us by subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or Spotify.  If you have questions about spiritual direction while grieving, or grief support or grief groups in your community, my contact information is in the show notes.

SPIRITUAL DIRECTION WHILE GRIEVING IS AVAILABLE

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Music and sound effects today by:   via Pixabay

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Purpose
• 0:34 Grief Beyond Black And White
• 3:43 Love As The Other Side Of Grief
• 6:35 Aftershocks And Ongoing Love
• 7:31 Thich Nhat Hanh’s Cloud Teaching
• 9:54 God’s Ever-Widening Love
• 11:12 Closing And Support Resources

Transcript

Candee: 0:27

Welcome to Solace: Soul + Grief. I'm your host, Candee Lucas. We know that the loss of a loved one has a profound effect on our lives, and we would like to help you deepen your faith. Pay attention to where God is moving in your life as you grieve, and call upon the love of God to accompany you. Each week we take a different text or scripture or poem, or maybe an idea from the Holy Spirit, and we use that idea or poem or song to help us reflect more deeply on our grief and God's place in our life and God's place next to us as we grieve. Please remember you're always welcome in our circle of healing love and support.

Candee: 1:34

One of the reasons I think World War II movies used to be so popular is that there was a clear enemy and a clear good guy. No nuance. And it felt good to know. So it is with grief. We imagine, if we haven't suffered a great loss, that grief is this way, that grief is black and white, that there's a good way to grieve and a bad way to grieve, that there's a right way to grieve and a wrong way to grieve. But in fact, the older we get, we know, most of our life are lived in the gray areas. So it is with grief. And I think it would be not an understatement to say it lives in a very gray area. Very gray for many reasons. Sometimes it feels like the sun can't get in. Sometimes it feels we can't see our surviving loved ones through a cloud of gray. Sometimes it feels we can't even have access to our own feelings because of the pain. So my point here today is this there is no black and white. There is only gray. And how do we live with the ambivalence and the incohereness of grief? Some days it feels it surrounds us like a fog, like a blanket that we can't see through or get through or feel through. And other days it's a light fog. We can see the world, we can feel our feelings, but not quite as sharply as we used to. We should all be reassured that this is perfectly normal, and you should remember that the way people grieve is as different and varied as the way people love.

Candee: 3:58

Because indeed, grief is the other side of love. Grief is the dark side of the moon of life. We know it's there, we can imagine its contours, but until we travel there, we can't really imagine what it looks like, tastes like, smells like, feels like, or imagine its horizons. It's true that most of us get by that first shock. And I've heard stories that people tell long after the death that actually become healing, and people find a bit of humor even in their response. All again tied to the relationship that we had with that person. If we had a completely loving relationship, there is no reason we shouldn't even remember their death with some love. Your heart was breaking, but one of the reasons it was breaking was because it was overfilled with love and breaking because all of a sudden that love didn't have a place to go, didn't have another person to focus on. One of the things we learned coming through the other side of this initial shock is that the love remains. That's one of the things we try to focus on here at Solace. Because we see it remains. It changes certainly because it doesn't have a worldly cup to pour into. But just as if it was energy created from a warm fire, it doesn't go away. It just dissipates into a larger area. So let's think of our grief that way for a minute. In the instant of it, the sharpness of it, the shock of the death, it feels very disruptive. It feels like an earthquake in your heart. And of course, there'll be many aftershocks in the days to come, and even in the years to come, on certain holidays or anniversaries, on the birthday, on the death day. But one of the reasons it still hurts is because we still love. In the immediate aftermath of a loss, sometimes it's all we can do to keep breathing.

Candee: 7:31

With his signature clarity and compassion, beloved mindfulness teacher Thich Nhat Hanh guides you through the emotions surrounding the death of a loved one in a little book called How to Live When a Loved One Dies. And so I offer you a few lotus blossoms of wisdom from that book. First a poem called A Free White Cloud. Now you are free. The chains no longer confine your true body. You return to your life as a white cloud, just like before, a white cloud utterly free in the immense sky. Then he writes Look deeply to see your beloved in other forms. On a beautiful sunny day, you may look up into the sky and see a nice puffy cloud floating by. You admire its shape, the way the light falls upon its many folds, and the shadow it casts on the green field. You fall in love with this cloud. You want it to stay with you and keep you happy. But then its shape and color start to change. The sky becomes dark and it begins to rain. The cloud is no longer apparent to you. It has become rain. You begin to cry for the return of your beloved cloud. But when the cloud transforms itself into rain, you can look deeply into the rain and see that your cloud is still there, laughing and smiling at you. Our God has given us a heart so wide as to encompass the whole earth, the whole world, the whole universe. When we love a person on earth, we see but a flash, a sliver of God's love for us. The more we love, the more love we accumulate, the closer we get to God's love. And it never diminishes, it never goes away, it gets wider and bigger and more immersive the longer we live. And the closer we get to that final time when we embrace him as he embraces us.

Candee: 11:12

I'm Candee Lucas, your host, chaplain, and spiritual director. Please support us by subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or Spotify. You can contact us through the email on the show notes. We always welcome your comments and suggestions for future episodes. Spiritual direction is always available for those who are grieving. Be gentle with yourselves. Travel with God vaya con Dios.