Grief Is Proof Of Love

Grief can be loud, but it can also be quiet enough to hide in plain sight. Sometimes it settles into the corners of our lives like dust we promise we will deal with later, when we have more time, more strength, or fewer responsibilities.  What happens when we keep postponing mourning, and why the “later” we wait for rarely arrives on its own.

Start with a simple image that opens a big question: who and what lives at the corners of our lives? From there, we look at the corners where grief gathers, along with the complicated pieces that often come with loss like resentment, lingering harm, words we never said, and words we wish we could take back.  Grief has no clean endpoint, because love has no clean endpoint, and  avoiding grief can quietly intensify pain over years.

We also explore a faith-centered perspective through the story of Jesus and the woman at the well, where someone who might be treated as a “corner person” is fully seen. That becomes a guide for our own healing: the things we fear in our grief corners are not calamities waiting to destroy us. They are shards of living love, chipped from both hearts, and they deserve gentle attention. This is a simple, practical image to carry with you: hold a bright candle to the corner, and bring what you find into the sunshine.

If this speaks to you, listen, follow the show, and share it with someone who is grieving. 

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SPIRITUAL DIRECTION WHILE GRIEVING IS AVAILABLE :  candeelucas@soulplusgrace.com

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Music and sound effects today by:   via Pixabay

Transcript

People Who Live In Corners

Why Grief Gets Pushed Aside

A Personal Story Of Delayed Grief

Jesus And The Woman At The Well

Shards Of Love Not Calamities

Candlelight Practice And Closing

Speaker 1 0:28

Welcome to Solace: Soul + Grief. I'm glad you're here. My name is Candee Lucas. I'm a grief chaplain and a spiritual director. When we started this ministry, we hoped to create a catalogue of various topics related to mourning and grieving. That you could search at your convenience to find a subject that is meaningful to you. We hope to find where God is moving in your life as you grieve. You are always welcome in this circle of healing, love, and support. A student of mine recently shared a story about some of her own students and how they had affected her life, and she referred to the idea that these people were not prominent in her life, but rather resided in the corners. This prompted a discussion about the people who live at the corners of our lives and people who lived in the corner of Jesus' life. And as I gave some more thought to this analogy, I realized that lots of times we have grief in the corner of our lives. Because we know it never gets resolved or we never get through it to the end, and there is no end point of grief because there is no end point of love, that we often push it aside, push aside the harder emotions until the grief is lying at the corner of our own lives. Much like dust we put aside and will attend to later. So why don't we attend to it now? Why don't we look in our corners, those corners of our own lives and find out what's there? Is there leftover resentment? Is there leftover harm? Are there leftover things that were unsaid? Are there things lying in that corner of our lives that we wish we hadn't said? Mourning and grief as a way of bringing that to the fore. Every hurtful word we might have said seems like an affront to our love that we had for that person who's no longer with us. We have to remember and pull the cobwebs out of the corner and the dust out of the corner and face the future with our grief unmasked. Because as a person who left my own grief in the corner regarding my mother's death for more than thirty years, and regarding a miscarriage I had ten years before she died, I realized that I had only exacerbated the pain from both of those losses. I had never held them in my hands, held them in my lap, examined them carefully as if they were precious jewels, because they are the precious jewels of my love for both my mother and my unborn baby. Jesus spoke about one of these people in the corner of his life, when he told his followers about the woman at the well. He knew when he met her about all her and saw all the corners of her life when he met her at the well. But when he told this story and retold it to his followers, they were still a little taken aback by this woman's very forward approach to a single man in the square, in the village square. Because that incident in itself would have caused great commotion in the community they lived in. So we too look at all our corners, our grief corners, and think about the calamities that we think await us there. When in fact they aren't calamities, they are remnants of the love of the person that we lost. They are the pieces chipped out of both of our hearts, theirs and ours. They are the shards of living love and living with faith and loving that person and loving God. We hope that when we bring out those shards, dust of our grief from our own corners, that we are able to hold them with amazement, examine them carefully, and treasure them always. For our grief we know is as individual as our love for the person that we lost. It appeals to us on our very human level of sadness, of love, pulls at the depths of our heart strings, pulls us into that silent place where we have to experience that love all over again. No, it is forever available to us whenever we want. All we have to do is reach out, reach into those corners, hold a bright candle there, and bring them into the sunshine. That concludes another episode. A new one drops every Friday morning. I'm Candee Lucas, your host. You can reach us through the information in the show notes. You can find us on Amazon, Spotify, and Apple Music. Remember, be gentle to yourselves and to others this week. Travel always with God at your side.