Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of the Lenten journey for Christians. It’s when they look to see how far they have strayed from the path of faith, and if they need a refresher course in humility.
The title of this post struck me as fitting both the journey of faith and the journey of grief when we have to be brave and travel far beyond everything we’ve known, trusting that we will somehow make it through.
A year after my wife died, my friend Steve insisted that I go with him to Gethsemani’s Trappist Monastery in Kentucky where Thomas Merton had been a monk. I didn’t want to go anywhere but I gave in because Merton’s writings had guided me through my teenage years. I felt stuck and thought that a change of scenery might help. More than a year had gone by and I still didn’t care about anything or anyone. I was just drifting on the dead calm of a silver ocean.
It was a silent retreat, so for a week I didn’t talk to anyone and walked slowly around the monastery grounds, and sat on benches trying to have deep thoughts. I reflected on the religious icons, and listened to monks sing Gregorian chant. I attended most of the seven worship services throughout the day, and twice pulled myself from sleep at 3 a.m. to make it to the first one. Throughout the day, I watched the silent monks go about their work, dressed in their black and white robes and leather sandals. Every afternoon, I walked on paths through the woods that Merton walked when he was the monastery’s forester and first hermit.
If we can see the way ahead, then we’re not taking enough risks.
Although I wasn’t seeking Merton’s dark night of the soul, where he struggled to set aside his ego as he sought union with God, I was looking for help with my grief. Merton wrote about his intentions:
“My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.”
In Acedia and Me, Kathleen Norris wrote that she struggled with spiritual melancholy, the time when “we are haunted by betrayal and loneliness, and know the pain of the wee hours, when the dark of night matches the state of our souls.” She could not write and felt spiritually dry. Her husband was also struggling with a serious health matter at the time. What kept her going was reading The Psalms.
“Hope may seem a flimsy thing in the face of acedia’s cold assurance that nothing matters and that waiting is unmitigated hell…. Its very persistence in our hearts indicates that it is not a tonic for wishful thinkers but the ground on which realists stand. For thousands of years the psalmist and the prophets have been a source of strength for people facing plague, warfare, massacre, imprisonment, execution, and exile. This is the sort of hope that matters, for it can conquer not just acedia and despair, but death itself.”
I did not find any answers that week in the monastery, but I did sense that God was sitting with me in the ruins of my heart and helping me bear the weight of grief. You can read my full account of this week in “Tinkering with Grief in the Woods,” published by Literal Latte. (www.literal-latte.com/2012/09/tinkering-with-grief-in-the-woods/ )
At the heart of grief's Dark Night is love, even if we don’t understand how.
In the following months, as I faced all the ways that I had failed to do what I knew I should do, and failed to loved Evelyn as well as she deserved, I made peace with my reality.
Although I was grateful to be at Gethsemani, I realized that the place where I would work my way through grief was not in a place of denial, because I already did too much of that. It would be where I could affirm the beauty of creation and celebrate the gifts of each day.
I hiked alone on the wilderness trails of Yosemite and saw wonders that lifted me out of the doldrums, like when storm clouds moved lower and hid the tops of the mountains in mystery. I listened to the litany of the rain falling in the forest, and heard the meadows and rivers sing compline in the evening. Watching coyotes play in the meadows, and red-tailed hawks soar overhead, I felt the life force of creation and the renewal of hope. Perhaps most importantly, I came to understand how death was part of life.
No one yearns for the dark night experience of grief. No one wants a loved one to die, yet death takes us to a dark place where it feels like nothing is left and we have nowhere to go. In this silent place where we feel broken and empty, we realize how much we need the help of others. This is where community begins.
On Ash Wednesday, we do not forget what we’ve done or the people we’ve loved. But we set the past aside and begin again, hiking the wilderness trail before us, step by step.
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