Rumi's Stretcher from Grace

            Last night I was wandering around the house, which is something I do now and then to get my bearings, when a line from Rumi’s “Zero Circle” came to mind: “Then a stretcher will come from grace to gather us up.” I don’t think Rumi was addressing grief, but his words have useful insights. 

 

            The poem starts: “Be helpless, dumbfounded, / Unable to say yes or no.” This pretty much sums up our state of mind when grief begins. We no longer know what to think or feel, and find it hard to make even simple decisions.

 

            I trust Rumi’s assurance that grace will come into our pain, if we allow it. But first we have to acknowledge that we are not okay, and could use help from others. Much of the time we hide our grief so well that it’s invisible and people can’t tell if we’re grieving by looking at us. But inside we feel beaten up and battered down like we’ve been mugged. Which we have. We’ve been mugged by Death.

 

            Once we acknowledge our pain, then we have to allow grace in and let it work on us. Trusting something unknown like this is hard, because most of what we have trusted in the past has been shaken by the randomness of death. I also like the image of us being in such bad shape that a stretcher is needed. 

 

            As hard as this moment is, how yanked out of the ordinary it seems, and how lost in the wilderness we feel, we are probably seeing reality with more clarity than we ever have before. In the middle of grief, we also experience something of the purity of love because of the compassion of a few friends and strangers who come and help us without expecting anything in return.




            Here is where it gets tricky. The dark night that grief brings strips away pretense and many of our illusions. We see ourselves, others, and life with a clarity that can be stunning. It’s also freeing. We realize that we don’t have to stay with the old ways of dealing with death if they aren’t helpful, even if they helped our parents. We can do what nurtures us. Every moment in grief presents us with a door that we either open and find deeper understanding, or we close and turn away from the opportunity.




            When someone we love dies, if we say that we don’t need to grieve, then we shut the door on death and what this person’s loss means in our life, and we understand nothing more. However, if we aren’t sure what grief is doing, then there is hope for us, because we are still searching and slowly we are making our way across unknown terrain. This is how we live with grief, by gathering up our courage and stepping forward into what we don’t understand, and by paying attention to what grief is showing us.

 

            The last line of the poem holds another surprise, that if we surrender to grief, if we let grief guide us over its landscape, and if we are honest with others and let them help us, then we can become a great kindness to others because we will learn how to care for someone else who is grieving.

 

            But first we have to acknowledge that we need a stretcher.