excerpts on grief

I found the following quotations via Neverperfect.Alwaysreal.  I can't resist sharing them here.

 

"Lament isn't an animal wail, an inarticulate howl.  Lament notices and attends, savors and delights--details, images, relationships.  Pain entered into, accepted, and owned can become poetry.  It's no less pain, but it's no longer ugly.  Poetry is our most personal use of words; it's our way of entering experience, not just watching it happen to us, and inhabiting it as our home."

~Eugene Peterson

"I am convinced that we should solve many things if we all went out into the streets and uncovered our griefs, which perhaps would prove to be but one sole common grief, and joined together in beweeping them and crying aloud to the heavens and calling upon God.  And this, even though God should hear us not; but He would hear us.  The chiefest sanctity of a temple is that it is a place to which men go to weep in common.... It is not enough to cure the plague: we must learn to weep for it."

~Miguel de Unamuno

"I have lately received such distressing news from the personal lives of almost all of my dearest friends that it would have shaken my whole being, if I did not know that we must all fail, be cheated, die.  You must fail some more, Harvey Bates, so that you can see the futility of all personal striving.  When I thought the other day of the real tragedies that have hit two other of my friends, I wondered how we could get any feeling of dignity, meaning, justification, out of our poor lives.  And I thought we could do it if we could all stand together somewhere in a cool glade, lowering one of those loved ones into a grave, and standing and weeping together like men over our miserable destiny.  And then we would experience the heaviness of it--and this would be the bond that ties us together and to the source of all things.  We would be justified in our weeping and our trembling.  This is true religion for me, and I think at the same time the surest testimony that it is absent in our world today: we cannot weep and tremble together but only pretend that everything is all right."

~Ernest Becker

 

 

That we cannot weep and tremble together but only pretend that everything is all right...while I am sure there are many millions of people who have not lost their ability to 'weep and tremble together', it is certainly something that is difficult for me.  Much of the time I just don't let myself tiptoe close enough to the edge of that vulnerable emotional precipice, so it seems easy to pretend that things are all right, or that they will be.  But that is one reason I love poetry - poetry can say what I cannot express.  Poetry can speak when I feel I cannot weep.  And weeping, itself - that is poetry.  Grief lived, experienced.  One of my favorite verses from the New Testament is from the Gospel according to John, chapter 11 verse 35:  "Jesus wept."  There's a lot of beautiful language in the Bible, and more than enough words to make a reasonable person cringe.  But that sentence is so simple, so human.  Jesus wept.   

If it was good enough for Jesus, then I suppose I can summon the courage to weep as well.