"Passage" by Brian Federle
The relationship between love and
grief: (Remarks by Jan Richardson, August 10, 2017).
To be undone and remade by grief's hand is a messy, scary and cathartic
process, said the keynote speaker for Aug. 10,
Jan Richardson, an artist,
author and ordained United Methodist minister**.
Richardson discussed her emotional journey following the unexpected death of
her husband, Gary; he died in 2013 just three and a half years after they had
married. In him, she both found and quickly lost her creative partner and
"co-conspirator."
She invited the sisters to consider what it means to
"be the presence of love" (the theme of the assembly) even when it
seems that the "love that's been present seems to have left us." She
said death is a process that can come in many forms: a physical death, the
death of a dream, loss of a familiar lifestyle, or "the ending or changing
of a community that has held our hearts."
That death is universal and yet can take such different forms for each of
us, she said, has been "one of the strange and beautiful things about
navigating grief in the wake of my husband's death."
"When absence erupts in our lives, how do we call upon the presence of
love that goes deeper than our loss?" she asked the LCWR attendees.
"How do we open ourselves anew to the presence of love that endures far
beyond death?"
"It has been crucial to me to attend well to the grief, to give it time
and space, to let it say what it needs to say. … Call it my personal protest or
act of resistance in a culture that so often wants to urge us along in our
grief, wants us to move on beyond our mourning, wants us to be OK, because not
being OK can make other people uncomfortable."
If we try to hurry along the grief, Richardson said, we risk missing the
presence of love.
"May my love be more fierce than my grief," she repeated, a
special prayer for her in this particular moment of grieving.
A seemingly subtle but distressing adjustment Richardson didn't anticipate
was her new relationship with pronouns and tenses: What was once "we"
and "ours" had become "I" and "mine."
"Where can we live in the plural present, with those whose hearts we
hold and who hold us in theirs?" Richardson asked. "When our hearts
break, where can we still say 'we' in the way that enables us to know that we
are not alone? Where can we still say 'now' in a way that allows us to live
into the love that does not end with death?"
