Peteskibreen's Blog

ALSO – Art.Love.Spirituality.Oneness

“Grief explains everything” a friend in another life once suggested to me. She was working on a Masters in Counselling degree when her supervisor made the comment that has stayed with me for the last 34 years. That year [1992] is etched in my mind. It was the year a young woman died in a car crash just 10 days out from her wedding to my wife’s nephew. I was her minister/pastor at the time, due to curate the wedding and instead, I had a massive funeral to curate and a cataclysmic amount of grief to attempt to make sense of. Which I never did – for the family, for the church or for myself. Of course there was the high handed know all Christians in the parish who proclaimed the necessity of trauma as a means of refnining faith! God have mercy! No doubt learning and maturation develop out of the unexpected, bad decisions and trauma but it makes no sense to sermonise in the raw moments of a shocking loss!

The “grief explains everything” suggestion is making some sense for my lived experience and observing family and friends. I am caught up with family of couse and in attempting to make sense of losses in family groups and individuals my emotions and judegements are sometimes too present for me to make sense of their losses, emotions and fears. Different family systems create emotional sparks when they are in decision making mode as values are challenged and loss is anticipated and actual.

The times we are in are full of loss and grief as we carry our smart phones and with one click can see children blown to pieces in Palestine or The West Bank or Nigeria. We can read of the sudden or gradual loss of old well worn respect values in society, the elevation of racism as a value to hold as necessary for white privelege to prosper. And on it goes. Silence and social media abstinence can reduce the overwhelming impact of the “tons and tons” of desensitising exposure. Any loss can bring a grief emotion – a child losing her worn out favourite toy, a favourite book being water damaged or the sudden death of a loved one.

I have attempted to consider love as an intention and regular re-focus in the face of losses I have been experiencing. C S Lewis wrote The Four Loves a “simply profound and profoundly simple” essay on understanding four Greek words for love and activating them as a way of living in community and in a community – however broad and encompassing those communities are.

I keep coming back to sidelining judgement of people – that is, individuals – while attempting to value them as humans of value, critiquing systems without apology and attempting to listen and listen again to understand individuals and their actions. I see this for me partly as what love is. And it is not an emotion as much as value that I have the choice to make my own time and time again.

I’m seeing more and more that grief and loss make up a large slice of some behaviours and activity in my world. Even the current ridiculous interest in One Nation as a viable option to vote for in Australian politics is, I suggest, an inablity to let the old days of simplistic, racist, white superemecy go to where that set of values needs to go.

Loss and love are inextricably locked in together or can be. We can live in the darkness of an unassessed grief or we can, while owning the emotion of our loss for as long as is necesary for healing and change to beging to flourish, attempt at some point and with communication if necessary with other parties and being kind to ourselves, to chose love as a focus on listening, valuing and expanding our understanding of the other.

Peter Breen