Ignatian Accompaniment Through Grief

I've had a lot of time in the past fifteen months to reflect on what it means to accompany someone through terrible loss ~ what it means in general, what it means for me as a devastated mother, what it means for me as a spiritual director, as a would-be pastor or hospital or hospice chaplain. What is good and helpful and considerate? What is not?

This post, I do believe, is going to turn into a paean to Ignatian spirituality and to those whose lives it shapes, whether Jesuits or others who do spiritual direction in the Ignatian tradition. In my case, it means two Jesuits in particular: my former director, who had the temerity to move away after helping me for two years, but has remained one of my great supporters through seminary and has been a source of wisdom and challenge via email and occasional visits during this past awful year, and my current director, who thought two-and-one-half years ago that he was signing on for a monthly hour of support and guidance for a seminary student, and had to turn into a consistent and faithful source of compassion, prayer, presence ~ and, yes, wisdom and challenge, too ~ during a year of such harsh and time-consuming need that I cannot even begin to describe it.

(And that description doesn't even take into account the many others in my life who have brought their Ignatian experience to bear upon our conversations and friendships. Maybe some other posts someday.)

What is so distinctive about this spirituality that makes it so pertinent to accompanying someone through the journey of grief?

In the Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius suggests a wide variety of types and forms of prayer. Some lend themselves more to certain situations or meditations than others, but I've never had a director suggest that I should limit my prayer in one way or another. Flexibility ("accomodation" is Ignatius' term) is key, and I have been graced by finding directors who are fearless in their willingness to venture into unfamilar territory.

Given the range of prayer in the Exercises, it is nontheless the case that imagination is a significant hallmark of the Ignatian understanding of encounter with God. When a person makes the formal Exercises, there are many opportunites to pray, or meditate (Ignatius usually uses the term contemplation here ~ not to be confused with the emptying form of prayer so popular in contemplative prayer practice today) imaginatively throught the life of Jesus. Imagine the place, imagine the sights and sounds, imagine yourself as a person among his followers or family, on the edge or in the midst of his circle. Imagine yourself watching, listening, speaking, participating. Who are you? Who might you be called to be? Imagine Jesus into the circustances of your own life. What does he say; how do you respond?

You might be able to guess where I am going here. If you're a regular reader, you know that I have often bemoaned the statement so frequently made to me after our son died: that "I can't imagine" sentence. In fact, its repetition by a few individuals has resulted in my consistent avoidance of them. (The Lovely Daughter tells me that people are trying, and that I could be more generous, but I have my own problems with imagination ~ I find it difficult to imagine either that they are or that I could.) As a statement of intended solace, "I can't imagine" is not as bad as "I know just how you feel" ~ but it's close.

This past week it suddenly dawned on me why my Jesuit and other Ignatian friends have been such a source of help to me. Steeped in the practice of imaginative prayer, it never occurs to them to say, "I can't imagine." They seem to slide into imaginative accompaniment effortlessly. They don't have to be parents or to have suffered this degree of loss or faced this kind of horror; they can imagine it, at least well enough.

It's not effortless, of course; even as a neophyte director, I know that it takes considerable intentionality and attentiveness to imagine yourself into someone else's life and concerns. It also takes great generosity of spirit: as you share the Scriptural and prayer lives of others, you begin to understand how differently we all respond to, understand, and encounter God. You seek, always, to reverence both the other person's experience and your own; to absorb the similarities and the differences, to recognize that God is reaching out to each of you, and and to know that you can listen contemplatively and imaginatively even if what you are hearing is nothing at all like what you yourself would have come up with. It's not effortless at all.

But there it is. Just as even I, with some considerable practice, can access the notes to a simple Bach composition on the piano and with them, an entire tradition of music, so someone practiced in imaginative interaction with Scripture can access a tradition of prayer that makes it possible to walk with someone through the universal and yet endlessly unique pathway through grief.

I don't think I've ever heard someone well versed in Ignatian practice say, "I can't imagine." I know that these are people whose imaginations are at work all day, who are accustomed to drawing on their interior resources in all circumstances, and to allowing them to expand whenever they seem inadequate to a particular situation. God's gift of imagination is how we find God in all things, even ~ somewhere, someday ~ in this wilderness of sorrow.

Mishbarim: Dismantling Your Life

Like most middle class Americans my age, I have invested most of my life in building. School, marriage, family, career, home. It all went pretty well for awhile. I was a reasonably generous person ~ nothing outrageous, no Mother-Theresa like complexes for me ~ but certainly I gave of my energy and my time and my money and my gifts to my family, my church, and my community. And why not? I had plenty to give; it hardly hurt me to spread a little of it around. Oh, every once in awhile I would find that I had over-committed myself in one realm or another and I'd have to invest some effort into stepping back, but that was about as difficult as it got. We are not talking Ms. Self~Sacrifice here. Except for a couple of times, when disaster hit and left our family confused and hurting ~ but we were capable of determined re-building efforts, and we were always surrounded by people who helped us. So re-build we did.

This is different. This is so different.

Everything has to go.

OK, not everything. Not much of anything exterior, really. The house is still (barely, per usual) standing , the Quiet Husband is still employed, I am still in school. The Gregarious Son and The Lovely Daughter are employed and moving forward, and working to heal a little. We are all trying to heal a little.

But the interior everything ~ it has to go. I have found virtually nothing in a traditional life of Christian faith and practice, at least as I once knew it ~ and I knew it pretty well ~ to sustain me. I remember that a year or so ago, a fellow blogger wrote frequently of feeling shielded under God's wing. No wing for me. One of my professors, when I visited him last spring to seek some academic advice, apparently felt obligated to offer some of what must have seemed to him to have been kindly words of pastoral assurance. It was all I could do to escape his office without throwing up. I have had a number of conversations with others who have experienced similar depths of trauma in recent years ~ and very few have found in church a place of respite or solace.

I have found nothing in my own efforts. I have been busily erecting walls of self-defense against the endless waves of sadness and anger but there is, in fact, no technology available for building walls thick enough to withstand them. I know that, of course. The primary emphasis of the program which I attended a few weeks ago on death and dying was on the need to go deep into and all the way through sorrow in order to make any sense at all of it and to absorb it into the rest of your life. That was not news. But the reality is that the dailiness of life requires a good deal of wall-building. The balance ~ between the barriers you need to secure in place to walk through the grocery or to withstand a basic class discussion on baptism (oh, right, actually I didn't make it through that one . . .) and the openness and honesty needed in order to confront and accommodate one's real life of struggle and sorrow ~ the balance is a tenuous one to maintain. It's no wonder that bereaved people tend to isolate themselves. I'm certainly much more content when I do.

I like that word, accommodate, at least for now. I've read several comments by parents of children who have died by suicide to the effect that acceptance of our loss will never be a possibility, but that accommodation is a realistic hope. I looked it up in the thesaurus and, while some of the synonyms make sense in this context and some do not, the one that resonates with me is attune. We do have to make room for and host this terrible reality, whether we want to or not, but it is perhaps an additional goal to attune ourselves to the nuances of loss and pain in this world, beyond ourselves.

To dismantle and to re-attune who we are, how we hear, what we see, how we know and how we understand. It seems to me an optimistic approach, given that our lives have been pretty well smashed into little bits of broken debris.

(And here's something interesting, for the academically inclined: For that mammoth paper I've finished on Psalm 88, I did a little research on the word mishbarim (breakers), because of the line in verse 8, "Every breaker of yours knocks me down." It seems that the word mishbarim is used in ancient Semitic writings in two fundamental ways: to mean either "waves" in the context of the sea, or "pangs," as in birth pangs (which of course, come in waves). In either case, it refers to powers that shatter or break. In one text in the Dead Sea Scrolls (no no no, of course I haven't read the DSS ~ but I can read about them), the images of birth pangs and the waves of a storm at sea are combined, and the mythologies of other Mediterranean cultures are filled with references to waters, waves, and floods of chaos.)

I am quite taken with that information; that for thousands of years people of a multitude of cultures have melded wave imagery for sorrow and brokenness with wave imagery for birth, and have woven both strands into their sacred texts.

Many (many!) years ago, before my children were born, I read some words of wisdom in some magazine article or other. In response to someone's Yuppie-oriented reluctance to have children for fear that they would change her life, the writer suggested that no one should have children until and unless she wanted to change her life ~ that that is the point, to want to change your life by bringing the abundance of love into it in a form that will change it in every possible dimension. To welcome mishbarim, both literally and figuratively.

Well. One does not want or welcome the mishbarim of the death of a beloved child. But here they are. Breakers and birth pangs, the complete dismantling of the old outlook and understanding.

Can it be reshaped, perhaps tentatively and gingerly, with something fragile and frail? That's what I'm going to imagine this Advent. I'm going to spend some time over in my Advent blog, and I'm going to take at least part of it to explore the Advent of the Heart words of Alfred Delp, S.J. Alfred Delp was a Jesuit caught up in the Holocaust. He shares a great deal in common with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose work we read a bit of in school last quarter; both were engaged in resistance work against the Nazis, both were imprisoned, both were executed shortly before the end of the war. (Interestingly, according to the introduction to this particular book, during his imprisonment Father Delp received assistance and care from a Lutheran pastor, and is probably quoting Martin Luther at one point. It would appeal greatly to my ecumenical leanings to know that Deitrich Bonhoeffer received care from a Cathoic priest as well. I have certainly heard him quoted in Catholic sermons. One never knows.)

At any rate, Advent of the Heart has popped up on my computer screen via various sources over the past couple of weeks, so I am taking that to mean something. There was nothing fragile or frail about Alfred Delp or his faith as he confronted evil and chaos during Advent. Nothing about Bonheoeffer or his, either. Mishbarim in both of its meanings, and neither of them ever forgot it, whereas I am much more inclined to let myself be shattered rather than reborn.

May this Advent be for the latter, even if in only the smallest of ways. For the tiniest flicker of candlelight in the midst of all this darkness.




(Cross-posting at Search the Sea.)

In All Things

I haven't read the book Heroic Living. It sounds intriguing but I've never had anything heroic in me on my good days, and I sure don't now.

I have heard about Walter Ciszek, though. In fact, I tried to find some material about him last spring, but was unsuccessful. And then, today, this. It applies, actually, and is consistent with other counsel I've been getting. From Jesuits, not surprisingly, about my own place of imprisonment. And from the other mothers whose blogs are linked on this one; perhaps they will recognize their own heroism in doing what they're doing.

By Chris Lowney

From Heroic Living

Healthy individuals…focus energy and effort where they can exert influence and control, and they don’t obsess over what lies beyond their control. That mind-set preserves mental health, but it’s also a graceful, and grace-filled, acceptance that the world is not about us. This is not our world, but God’s, and much of it—indeed, much that affects us—lies outside our control.

The Jesuit Walter Ciszek’s life (1904–1983) embodied this wisdom. When I was a Jesuit seminarian, Fr. Ciszek and I dined for a while in the same large Jesuit community. This quiet, self-effacing old man stood about as high as my chest and seemed unremarkable by any conventional measure. Many of us regularly bypassed his company at dinner for that of more entertaining, livelier colleagues.

Now I laugh to myself about it. Fr. Ciszek’s cause for sainthood is wending its way through the tortuous Vatican machinery. I may someday have to explain to friends that I lived with a saint and paid scant attention to him. I suspect that this says something encouraging about the self-effacing nature of true saints and something discouraging about me!

Even though we lavished little attention on Fr. Ciszek, we all knew his remarkable life story, chronicled in He Leadeth Me and With God in Russia. Sent to Russia as a young priest, Ciszek was accused during World War II of being a Vatican spy and was shuttled around Soviet gulags and remote work camps for two decades. Ciszek passed days in a tiny cell that was “about seven by twelve feet, with grimy stone walls and one little window high in the wall. The room was always dark.” But that wasn’t the bad part: that seven-by-twelve cell was home to as many as a dozen people: “At night, we all huddled together on the rough-hewn benches to sleep. If someone turned over in his sleep, he was liable to wake the whole crowd.”

Imagine days with nothing to look forward to beside the next interrogation or the next meager meal. Compounding the physical privations was the frustration that things weren’t working out according to Ciszek’s plans. He went to Russia to do things; how endlessly demoralizing to sit in a prison and chew over the bitter reality that he was doing nothing, day after day.

That is, Ciszek relates, until a personal epiphany dawned. “God’s will was not hidden somewhere ‘out there’ . . . the situations [in which I found myself] were his will for me. What he wanted was for me to accept these situations as from his hands, to let go of the reins and place myself entirely at his disposal.” Ciszek’s options were to lament endlessly what he couldn’t control or to fulfill his purpose in the small corner of the world he could control, his cell.

Fr. Ciszek in his jail cell or work camp, praying and occasionally interacting with jailers or fellow prisoners, is a poignant embodiment of a well-known phrase in Jesuit life: age quod agis—“do what you’re doing!” We tend to obsess over what we wish we were doing, or what we might be doing instead of our boring jobs, or what we would like to be doing that someone else is doing, or what we could have been doing if our luck had been better. Such preoccupations distract us from whatever real opportunity lies right in front of us. If we do what we are doing, we focus on the opportunity at hand, even (or perhaps especially) if all we can do is sit in a jail cell, pray, think good thoughts, and treat our captors with civility and kindness.

None of us finds peace or performs effectively without learning Fr. Ciszek’s hard-won lesson, because each successive phase of life brings new circumstances that change what is and isn’t within our control. While we are young, we may have energy, time, and freedom but modest financial resources. In middle age, we may have young families to raise and love but limited freedom to take on other obligations and opportunities. Retirement often bestows the talent of time once more. Our challenge, like Fr. Ciszek’s, is to accept peaceably what we cannot control and make the most of what lies within our control, never losing sight of our purpose and vision along the way.

Happiness in Any Circumstance

Like many of you, I receive a daily reading from Inward/Outward, a ministry of the amazing Church of the Saviour in Washington, D.C. When I saw today's caption, I groaned ~ please not, on my birthday, someone trying to tell me to make the best of things.

And then I saw the name of the writer and knew how wrong I was. Alfred Delp was a Jesuit priest imprisoned and executed for his resistance to the Nazis ~ one of those people who has the right to speak to any situation.

****************

It does happen, even under these circumstances, that every now and then my whole being is flooded with pulsating life and my heart can scarcely contain the delirious joy there is in it. Suddenly, without any cause that I can perceive, without knowing why or by what right, my spirits soar again and there is not a doubt in my mind that all the promises hold good.... Outwardly nothing is changed. The hopelessness of the situation remains only too obvious; yet one can face it undismayed. One is content to leave everything in God's hands. And that is the whole point. Happiness in this life is inextricably mixed with God. Fellow creatures can be the means of giving us much pleasure and of creating conditions which are comfortable and delightful, but the success of this depends upon the extent to which the recipient is capable of recognizing the good and accepting it. And even this capacity is dependent on our relationship with God.

~ Father Alfred Delp, S.J.

Degrees of NonSeparation

I am not sure what all of this means. Perhaps nothing at all ~ but I prefer to think it means that in our sorrows we are all connected in mysterious ways:

I live in Ohio, and I am Presbyterian, and I attend seminary in Pennsylvania, where I am studying Hebrew in my school's summer intensive language program. And I am working on a certificate in spiritual direction at a Jesuit university in Ohio. And my beautiful and generous and funny son Josh died by suicide at the end of last summer. The Jewish name Joshua means "God saves." It is also a name of significance in Christianity (!), although at the time Josh and his twin brother were born, that was not our reason for choosing it.

Wayne lives in Pennsylvania and is Episcopalian and is an artist and teacher and prays with the Jesuits at one of their most beautiful ever retreat centers in Wernersville. It's due to the Jesuit connection that we found one another through our blogs.

Gal lives in California and is Jewish and is soon moving to Ohio, where her husband will continue his rabbinical studies. Their youngest daughter died almost a year ago, when she was about two months old, after a courageous battle waged by her family and doctors against a medical condition which had revealed itself before she was born. Their daughter's name is Tikva, which means "Hope." We found one another's blogs because of a mutual friend of a friend, who lives in St. Louis.

Yesterday I received a card from Wayne, a card with one Hebrew word beautifully written. Sadly, I struggle mightily with the ancient languages I am required to learn, and so I was unable to decipher it. Wayne sent me an email tonight to help me out.

The word is TIKVA: ת ק ו ה .

Some nights I feel the weight of this sorrow so deeply that I can barely move.

Some nights all I can do is hope that God's salvation means something much wider and wilder than I have ever been able to imagine.

I plan to put the card on my door at school, where I usually stay three nights a week, and contemplate tiny Tikva and tall Josh ~ and hope.