Dearest dancing monks, artists, and pilgrims,
Today we begin Holy Week and observe the transformative journey toward Easter and Resurrection. Before we jump to Resurrection it is important to sit with the landscape of grief and holy pause. On Friday, April 18th, Wisdom Council Member, psychospiritual therapist, and interfaith spiritual companion Melissa Layer will lead us in the mini-retreat Ripened (S)aging: A Good Friday Invitation for Exploration of Grief, Loss & Mortality in Our Wisdom Years. Good Friday’s potent themes of death and resurrection are compelling portals holding symbolic metaphors that offer an expanded opportunity for wisdom in our eldering years. Melissa offers us this reflection.
The spring peeper frog chorus in the pond is pulsing rhythmically in the chilly night, beneath a starry sky and winking slice of moon. I am walking to my car after co-facilitating a group conversation dedicated to exploring life review and the stories beneath our stories. The Spring Equinox and Ostara have just occurred; Lent is unfolding. I marvel at the miracle of the tiny frogs – how did they survive the cold winter beneath the decomposing muck of last season’s verdant greenery?
Inside the old grange, the discussion was rich and deep. Those present were in midlife and beyond. We gathered in a circle of candlelight, welcoming an intimate and contemplative spaciousness. Our threaded words wove a colorful tapestry, unfurling in vulnerable sharing – row upon row of grief and gratitude; regrets and joys; ruptures and forgiveness; fear and courageousness; holding on and letting go. “At my age I feel ashamed to admit that I don’t know who I am these days. I need you to help me hear and see myself,” a hesitant 82 year old had admitted.
I placed my father’s WWII brass Army compass in the communal centerpiece we created. Having survived both Normandy and Battle of the Bulge, Dad carried secrets never disclosed until the last month of his life. “I’ve always felt guilty that I lived while others around me died,” he told me, his voice husky with an admission I had never heard from him before. He shared a black and white photo of himself, barely 18 years old, that a Time Life photographer took of him as he walked off the battlefield. What pierced my heart were his dark eyes, so flat and vacant, as he looked directly into the photographer’s lens. “We called that the ‘Thousand Yard Stare’”, Dad explained. I told him we have a word for that now: PTSD. We spoke, then, of regrets and the impossibility of do-overs and how, perhaps, those regrets could be fertile offerings to inform the living we have left. “I wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t survived”, I told Dad, reaching for his calloused hand.
Dad’s compass reminds me of a true north within myself, what I call my “inner GPS” – Spirit’s unwavering guidance indicator. I keep the compass on my dresser altar, next to a small brass hour glass that mom kept on the kitchen windowsill of my childhood home. Sometimes I pause and tip the hourglass. How quickly the grains of sand stream to the bottom! As I enter my 7th decade, I pause these days in the forest and debate whether to explore the faint game trail disappearing into shadowed woods or the well-trod path with clear signage. I ponder risk, safety, exploration, adventure, fear, and how to stay curious.
My body’s aging landscape is a terrain of peaks and valleys where loss and grief have carved their own winding pathways; my limbs and trunk bearing evidence of where winds have been fierce and lightning has struck. I midwifed my parents and a beloved husband through death’s portal. I surrendered a breast to an early stage cancer. As a hospice grief counselor, I listened with the ear of my heart to hundreds of tear soaked voices. Aware of my own compassion fatigue and the importance of tenderly holding myself, I sometimes feel like one of those cracked Japanese bowls that are carefully mended with gold resin (the art of Kintsugi). And I remember Frances Weller’s words, “Grief is an act of protest that declares our refusal to live numb and small… Grief is necessary to the vitality of the soul…grief is suffused with life-force.” What a paradox!
I also remember Hildegard’s veriditas, describing the green and growing life force. I behold it in the up thrusting blades of new grass and spring’s fragrant white trillium blooming in shaded mossy pockets of the forest. On a dusk bike ride, I pause to watch newborn twin black calves hiding shyly beside their mother. I see the limping but determined steps of the elderly farmer pushing the wheelbarrow of last summer’s golden hay to the herd who waits expectantly for him. A pair of bald eagles have returned once again to their nest in the top of the old tree in the cows’ pasture, their call and response to one another mingling with the mooing of the cattle.
Tonight I sit for a few moments on the weathered bench at the edge of the pond and feel the primordial thrumming in my body as the peepers beckon me to cross the threshold of another season. The ancient wheel is turning around and within me. Christine Valters Painter writes in Midwinter God about the time between Good Friday and Easter with its Holy Saturday invitation: “… that liminal space between the death and the rising when we are called to sit in the space of unknowing… It is only when we come into full spiritual maturity that we can hold the truth of life’s devastation and suffering alongside the tremendous beauty and wonder of life as well.”
Join us this Friday, April 18th. Calling upon the gifts of poetry (including our own poem-making), journaling invitations, and visio divina reflections, we will break open death and resurrection as invitations to personal meaning-making and transformation in our eldering journeys.
With great and growing love,
Christine
Christine Valters Paintner, OblSB, PhD, REACE
Trillium Photo by Melissa Layer
