July 23, 2002
(A Meditation)
To mourn is to give over to the higher forces, to succumb,
to submit to the realm of Spirit–surrendering up that which is broken,
bereft, shattered, irrevocably missing, to Spirit, to the process of healing.
The balm of love, of comfort, is applied thereof, to soothe the
fragmented soul, to patch together the pieces.
The shattering of the form–be it a life, a job description, a home,
an idea of oneself or of others, an entire belief system,
or even the beloved toy of a child–lays the ground open for change,
for a shift of heart and soul, for a change of mind or venue, a fissure,
a tear in time/space opens up and yawns. The soul surrenders up
itself and is thrown into life’s blender and is churned up and reformed
anew on the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual planes.
This undoing of the form can rend the soul sorely:
mourning is the soul’s response. And mourning places
the soul in direct touch with divine comfort,
which always moves into the gap, the void,
the vacuum created by the shattering form.
Comforting love fills in the gaps like a warm,
all-embracing glue substance,
to hold all the pieces together in the soul
while it mends into its new shape.
Comfort does not help us re-create the old form:
Nostalgia is Comfort’s poor cousin,
giving a paltry imitation of a restored form,
and a hollow imitation of comfort’s divine service.
Nostalgia is human generated comfort, while comfort
itself is of divine source. One can distinguish the two
by their after effects: Nostalgia gives temporary comfort
to the mourning soul through recreating in memory
a reconstruction of an old form, and as soon as the memory slips,
the feeling of grief returns, like a wound which won’t heal.
Nostalgia, in fact, keeps the wound open and weeping.
Comfort, by contrast, coming from the divine realms,
works in the soul itself to weave a fabric of Love
which supports the soul as its wound heals
and slowly closes over the wound with the balm of peace.
Instead of the haunting, nagging feeling of nostalgia,
we are granted peace beyond understanding by the Divine Comforter.
Each time the mourning soul revisits its grief, the pain slowly ebbs away,
and slowly dulls and fades. The pain is real and we must work through it–
level upon level, inch upon inch, tear after salty tear, wrench upon wrench,
month upon month, or year after year–with the faith that, in its good time,
it will fade into a pale scar, a scar which becomes as an opalescent dent
upon the soul: visible, yet painless, kissed and healed by the Comforter Himself.
And while nostalgia moves us backward, into the slavery of time-faded memories
and frozen emotions, comfort, by contrast, leads us forward into freedom
and allows us to form new experiences, create new forms, clothed in new love.
And we learn to embrace the freshness and fleetingness of being,
letting the footprints of God make new impressions within our souls.
