Praying Our Goodbyes
Reverend Holly Horn
First Unitarian Church, Philadelphia, PA
From Andree Chedid:
What else can we do
but garden our shadows
while far away
the universe burns and vanishes?
What else can we do
but visit with time
while nearby
time times us to death?
What else can we do
but stop at the horizon
while far away
and nearby -
the real collision.
In my neighborhood, hugging South Philadelphia, there is a strong tradition of dressing house fronts - with colored lights, signs and banners, stuffed animals, mechanical figures, trees, flowers, wreaths, garlands, ribbons, balloons - for every possible occasion: religious festivals, civic holidays, births, graduations. If sometimes in questionable taste, this makes for a lively sense of community life; and must support a small industry, as well.
Since September 11, doors, windows, and walls have been adorned with American flags and bunting, with cardboard stars and painted signs proclaiming "God Bless America". In recent weeks, the red, white and blue have been joined by black and orange, by skulls and skeletons and jack-o-lanterns. A real collision.
While aesthetically painful, these colliding displays express, I think, a deeper confusion, a more complex pain.
As we enter into the dark time of the year - when the days grow shorter and colder, and the nights lengthen - our bodies shift seasonal gears. Some need more sleep; the appetite moves toward hearty soups and stews. And, as we begin to spend more time indoors, our spiritual lives mirror the physical. We may experience an enhanced sense of interiority; of inwardness; or relaxed boundaries between the worlds of waking and dreaming, the unconscious.
Autumn is a season associated with loss and decline; and in our culture, with death. Halloween, which many of us observe as a pagan religious festival and many others as a cultural celebration, is the time, tradition tells us, when the veil between this world and the next, between the living and the dead, grows thin. Like the Mexican Day of the Dead, it is a time to remember - and to commune with - those beloved who have passed on.
The Roman Christian church appropriated what was an ancient Celtic festival, establishing November 1 as All Saint's Day; and later added the 2nd as All Soul's Day. And, while, as Unitarian Universalists, we do not accept the theological categories of heaven, hell, and purgatory - in fact we hold many differing views as to what happens after we die - nonetheless this is a time when we remember the dead.
We celebrate the saints, those who continue to inspire in us devotion to the good, the true, and the beautiful. And we mourn the loss of those dear to us. As the wheel of the year turns, we, too, note our progress in the cyclic process of saying good-bye.
Under the best of circumstances, mourning is not easy. In a culture that values youth, health, monetary success and material possessions, death signs the negation of all these things. So, we are inclined to fear death, and to avoid it. And, when we are confronted with loss - losses that are unexpected, divorce or illness or unemployment, and losses that are inevitable, the results of aging - we may find ourselves spiritually unprepared.
Still, under the best of circumstances, we will seek out the spiritual resources - both within ourselves and among our friends and religious community - that will help us to heal, to move through our grief, and slowly to reawaken to the many blessings, the awesome joy and the simple pleasures of being alive.
But these are not the best of circumstances. The altered landscape of American life has plunged all of us into a state of perpetual anticipatory mourning.
We are now mourning the death of thousands of Americans, truly horrific murders. And, while we don't want to dwell on the horror - no good can come of that, we must find ways to come to terms with it: those tender good-byes from the upper floors of the World Trade Center, from cell phones aboard American Airlines flight # 93; the bodies evaporated, identifiable only by microscopic DNA remains. This is horror of the first order.
We are mourning the deaths of Americans deliberately poisoned with Anthrax spores, and we fear there will be more.
We are also mourning the death of impoverished, desperate, and innocent people in Afghanistan. People we don't know much about; certainly not the friends of friends lost on September 11. We don't even know how many of them; we may never know. But, we know that our taxes, our bombs have killed them. And we know there will be more.
We also know that "our" war is destabilizing other politically volatile populations; that deaths in Kashmir, demonstrations in Indonesia may produce larger conflicts.
We are mourning the death of two of our soldiers. And we know there will be more.
Finally, we are mourning the loss of something less tangible, if more immediate. Some have named it innocence. Less sentimental, perhaps, is a lost sense of invulnerability, of certainty, of assumed level of safety. We know that our government was unable to protect us on September 11, and that it is only now beginning to cope with the threats of biological and chemical terror. We know that, in all likelihood, there will be further attacks.
Layer upon layer of grief and mourning, known and anticipated, attend the mundane activities of our daily lives. We know that daily life must go on. But, how do we carry on under such a burden of grief and loss?
There are some roadmaps to this territory. In her classic book On Death and Dying, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross develops a schema for the psycho-spiritual terrain traversed by those who are dying. And it applies as well to survivors. The five stages are: first, Denial and Isolation, then Anger, followed by Bargaining, then Depression, and finally Acceptance. Ashley Davis Prend, in Transcending Loss, offers a variant paradigm for the grieving process: stages of Shock, Disorganization, Reconstruction, Synthesis, Transcendence. And Joyce Rupp, in Praying Our Goodbyes, offers a pointedly spiritual approach: Recognition, Reflection, Ritualization, and Reorientation.
Elements of these conceptual frameworks, and surely of others as well, may serve as tools for us to navigate this altered landscape. One important dimension to any schematics of psycho-spiritual transformation, however, is that these are not linear progressions. They circle back, and wander about. We don't move in an orderly fashion from one stage to the next, but may experience several stages simultaneously; or unexpectedly return to an earlier stage we thought we were done with.
On September 11, most of us experienced shock, a sort of shock and numbness that lasted at least for several weeks, and occasionally comes back to haunt me. Whenever I think about the moment when it was announced that all aircraft in U.S. airspace were ordered to land, I still feel a numbing chill - that, for me, was the moment when life changed.
Certainly, there was an element of denial for many people: "I can't believe this happened. I just can't believe it." "How could these planes just show up over Manhattan without anybody noticing?" And anger has been a primary response for many, some of it aimed at innocent Muslim, Arab and Sikh Americans; but most of it at Osama bin Laden.
I think I experienced a taste of the bargaining stage two weeks ago, when I was preparing to fly to Wisconsin to preach the ordination service for our former Intern Minister, Kelly Crocker. "Well, we have to live our lives, don't we? It's a little scary to fly right now, but it would be a personal disappointment as well as professional failure if we didn't show up. So, they just hijacked planes. They'll do something else next, right? They wouldn't do that again, right away. Would they? With all these new security measures, we're safer than ever. Aren't we?"
I think I've even had some moments of depression, of just feeling inadequate to both ministering in this altered landscape, post-September 11, and, at the same time, trying to lead the church forward in so many important areas, trying to keep all of my promises.
Mostly now, it feels as if I am and we are in a period of straddling psycho-spiritual disorganization and reconstruction. We're most of us leading life pretty much the way it looked before September 11, but it doesn't feel the same. There are deep ruptures that it's hard to find the time even to think about, as we work to make up for lost time and assimilate a barrage of disturbing news every day.
But, as I said before, these various stages don't occur in linear progression. And, in the case of our collective mourning, our perpetual anticipatory mourning, it's likely that many of us are experiencing simultaneously many overlapping stages.
An event of the magnitude and horror of September 11 elicits, for many of us, a host of primitive, and often less-than-conscious emotional responses. For some it is an occasion of recrudescence, the re-opening of partially healed wounds. For others, it is an occasion of exacerbation, the inflation of a personal loss to overwhelming proportions. For still others, the natural process of mourning may be inhibited by the feeling that "my personal loss is so insignificant in contrast to this catastrophe."
How to order our spiritual lives in the midst of such multiple mournings?
Let us, with Joyce Rupp, begin with Recognition. Within each of us there is a emptiness, an existential loneliness, which, when are able to recognize it, does connect us, ironically, with a fundamental ache common to all human beings. While there are a thousand ways to avoid it, the recognition of this emptiness is the beginning of wisdom, the threshold of spiritual growth.
This recognition also allows us to distinguish more clearly the specific hurts and losses we have accumulated in our lives, and carry with us still; hurts and losses for which we have not completed a process of grieving; hurts and losses that thus tie up energy, and constrain us in living to our fullest potential, that limit our happiness.
We need to recognize that the ongoing events of September 11 are indeed hurts and losses that affect us deeply, and affect those around us in ways we might least expect. We need to be sensitive to this. When others are overwhelmed, irrationally fearful or surprisingly angry, our patience and understanding may offer a healing balm, a new opening.
Yet, when others behave inappropriately - in negative or destructive ways, complaining about people rather than speaking directly to them, dominating discussions without concern for others, tearing down rather than building up - we can best express our love for them by setting limits; by establishing boundaries about what kinds of behavior are acceptable, in our families, in our friendships, and especially in this church.
Rupp's second step, Reflection, asks that we take the hurt or loss that we have identified and give it our full attention. Easier said than done, I know. But, to take the time to sit quietly and reflect upon all the myriad thoughts, the vagrant emotions - horror, sadness, fear, anger, helplessness, betrayal, abandonment, guilt, confusion, concern, compassion, curiosity, connection, hope, helpfulness, love - whatever is there for you; this exercise will reward you with glimmers of peace and acceptance and hope.
The third step, Ritualization, involves the use of images or symbols and it involves movement. From our reflection amidst the maelstrom of thought and feeling, we allow a picture, a phrase, a gesture to emerge: an empty nest, a song, "a candle lighted to dispel the darkness, emptying and cleaning closets while we are ridding ourselves of some inner clutter, looking at photo albums when we need to remember the love and joy that past journeys have offered us. . .
When we use images, they connect our outer world to the inner world of our self where the divine dwells. This meeting is often an unspoken one. We sense it, but we do not always intellectualize it, or have words for it." Yet, these are the prayers that can lead to Reorientation, to a renewed sense of life.
With attention, we can continue to mourn our personal losses amidst this altered landscape. And with time, we will mourn the losses that afflict us all. As we continue to absorb wave after wave of shock; and to anticipate the next wave, we are simultaneously in multiple stages of mourning.
May we recognize this. May we be patient, understanding, and kind with ourselves and with others. May we minister with sensitivity and awareness, with the strength of our convictions, to all whom we meet. Let these be our prayers.
May we find the time and presence of mind to reflect on our losses and the ways in which they affect us. May we find the symbols, images, and gestures which will connect the outer world to the inner world where the divine dwells. Let these be our prayers.
And may we, every day, visit the realm of acceptance, reorientation, transcendence by giving thanks for all that nourishes and sustains us: the beauty of the world and its endless opportunities for learning and growth, the love of family and friends, the spiritual embrace of this congregation; the needs which others have that we and we alone can meet. For all that calls us to live our lives most fully, to serve the common good and make our own days glad, let us give our thanks and praise. Let this be our prayer. AMEN.
Kubler-Ross, Elisabeth. On Death and Dying: What the dying have to teach doctors, nurses, clergy, and their own families. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969.
Prend, Ashley Davis. Transcending Loss: Understanding the Lifelong Impact of Grief and How to Make it Meaningful. New York: Berkley Books, 1997.
Rupp, Joyce. Praying Our Goodbyes: Understanding the spirituality of change in our lives. New York: Ivy Books, 1988.
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