Searching for the Divine Light
I struggled with how to approach this talk of grief. I’m a stoic Norwegian and German Lutheran, so I am notoriously uncomfortable talking about my own grief or life obstacles. I’m sure some of you can relate.
We find a myriad of ways to minimize our sadness.
For example, it is an ironic act of hubris (and folly) to diminish our own pain by comparing it to another’s, as if there’s a cosmic calculator that decides which of us has lost the most while the rest of us suffer in silence and have an incomplete compassion. First, it is folly because it doesn’t work! Grief keeps a-knocking. And it is hubris because diminishing our own grief holds us apart from one another, even above one another, rather than in the Profound Love of mutual vulnerability and shared humanness. To be human is to hurt.
So yes, I’ve had great personal losses: my father died when I was a young adult, my first marriage broke after 9 years, and 2 of my daughters suffered with mental illness. Though they are strong and well now, those were dark and scary days. I know what it is to ache and to be emptied.
Today, though because of ICE has been terrorizing and taking our neighbors, frightening our children, and killing Renee Good and Alex Pretti, I’d like to talk about collective grief, our communal grief – which is the sum of all our griefs. See, we need to know and even befriend our own griefs to be able to comingle them, we need to add them together, to create something more…
I own a laundromat in St. Paul’s predominantly Latino neighborhood called West Side where I’ve witnessed the power of collective grief that I’m sure you witness, too, in your own favorite local places. We come together to cry, hug, protest, march, chant, deliver food, do laundry for one another, to put signs in our windows, to be community observers and blow whistles, to do what we can. And we don’t all know each other, we are getting to know each other through this shared sadness, and that brings healing and light.
A specific light in the past week has been a call from an English Language teacher at Humboldt High School who has families that need laundry done, a conversation with the new Director of Neighborhood House. The director has offered institutional support, and volunteers sprouting up all over, to launch a project called LavAmos. A sheltering family is paired with a volunteer who washes, dries and delivers their laundry once a week.
Here’s another story of grief and light – On an October night 3 years ago, a friend of mine’s son was shot and killed while doing security for a club. I’ve known Katrina since the birth of Beautiful Laundrette. She helped set up the library and leads the monthly ARTuesdays and Legal Clinics and organizes the Festival of Rights. This will be our 5th Festival this year!
Katrina has always dreamed of starting a nonprofit called The Blue House. Her Mexican grandmother raised her in a blue house and opened her home to neighbors who came for whatever they needed – food, shelter or just to talk and have a tamale. So Katrina, in the deep grief of losing her son, was inspired to even stronger and more focused activism. She launched her Blue House nonprofit last month to help families impacted by violence and is the holder of the LavAmos Project. A Light.
How do we stay open to the flashes or sometimes, if we’re lucky, streams of Divine Light? We practice.
Some people call them ‘spiritual’ practices, the word spiritual being one of those words that means different things to different people. The founder of Shalem Institute writes (paraphrased), “The ancient mystics defined spirit as the basic energy of being, the fundamental propelling life force.” Spirit is not apart from our lives, it is our lives. And it’s not extraordinary – it’s the most ordinary and natural thing in the world.
Every religious tradition claims that the essence of spirituality is Love. Not the feeling of love, not the actions that spring from love, but the energy of Love itself. And one of the most pure and profound experience of this Love is called contemplation. I’ve heard it described as a moment of ‘sheer loving presence.’ It combines the Latin word cum which means with, and templum meaning temple. It connotes sacredness, and an earthy bodily experience, a rootedness in the present reality, using all your senses.
Again from Shalem, “The contemplative experience happens as a gift. You can’t ‘do contemplation’ like you can ‘do meditation’ or any other spiritual practice.” The practices aren’t the end in themselves. They are simply exercises that may help open us up to the Divine Light that breaks through our daily lives, even, and maybe especially, in times of grief.
There are many practices – drumming, dancing, tai chi, writing, lectio divina, centering prayer. I’m sure you can add to the list. My favorite is wandering in the wild, to connect with the natural world at my own pace. I still hike, but I sometimes saunter. It’s a cool word. Back in the middle ages, when the pilgrims passed through villages, when people would ask where they were going, they would respond a la sainte-terre, to the Holy Land, so they became known as sainte-terre-ers. So I saunter and observe with all my senses. If my mind is wandering, I’ll write haiku in my head about what I’m observing and that keeps me present.
Another cool word is the Hebrew word for wilderness- midbar meaning desert, derived from verb dabar which means to speak. Ba-midbar (wilderness) symbolizes a place of Divine encounter and revelation. Not an empty and desolate place, but a place to enter and listen. So please, find a wild-ish place to wander in these next weeks, and let it speak to you. Saunter, and stay warm! Your practices will help you see the Divine Light breaking through.
Annunciation
Even if I don’t see it again—nor ever feel it
I know it is—and that if once it hailed me
it ever does—
And so it is myself I want to turn in that direction
not as towards a place, but it was a tilting
within myself,
as one turns a mirror to flash the light to where
it isn’t—I was blinded like that—and swam
in what shone at me
only able to endure it by being no one and so
specifically myself I thought I’d die
from being loved like that.
-Marie Howe
💖💖💖💖💖
Thank you for the inspiration and for the work you’re doing.🙏
You reached the Heart of the matter and touched my “morning “ heart deeply Paz y Bien
What a beautiful reflection, Laurel. So much to relish in this piece. And thank you for ending with Marie Howe’s beautiful verses. I also love your linking of practicing the presence to social justice practices.
Doctor, thank you so much for your reflection. Guilt and grief hurt so many people in many cultures. As you know, the culture has believed in more than one governing law, force, that distorts the seeker trying to leave slavery. Dr. and Dr. May’s brothers, both in the field of psychiatry and spirituality, existentialists, had so much to say to assist the seeker. Still again, many don’t know Howard Thurman, an African-American minister, teacher, and spiritual director, and the dean of Howard University’s chapel. Quaker’s focus on spirituality in early years: plight of wanting to get on a train but not enough money; sitting crying; if an angel that day, this was yesteryears, a long time ago, hadn’t helped (a white man down south). Thurman would never have been introduced to Shalem, people, or others outside Howard University through his writings. I could have blog to you, thank you for your writing, and move to another task, but your comment in this writing of yours, stated” How do we stay open to the flashes or sometimes, if we’re lucky, streams of Divine Light? We practice.” I had to pause and listen to my spiritual internal team speak. In the writing of Evelyn Underhill, The Fruits of the Spirit, she report we in ourselves are fragile, fugitive things, faulty, clumsy earthen vessels which yet can be used as a hole in an unearthly treasure; shrines which are nothing in themselves but can become homes of the Holy Spirit, Lord and giver of life. The New Testament is full of this idea. Let us consider ourselves from this point of view. It will mean revisiting a good many of our ordinary ideas before we have done; more and more emphasis on God and his love; less and less upon ourselves. Still, however, Doctor, I am so glad that in your writing, you did not have a bloody Jesus or an open wound to discuss a state that every human being will go through. My hope is that there’s someone there with the other who will give a cup of water to the soul. Thanks again, keep writing, I am listening.
Beautiful, Laurel! So grateful for the gift of you in the world❤️
Laurel Gamm: Thank you so much for your divine Light which came about through your grief and the grief of others. It gives me hope andconsolation. Grief from a loved one’s death, break up of friendships and child semi-adult abuse need this kind of contemplation and action. Your story is powerful, thank you. I will pass it on to others. Linda