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Beloved people of Arnolia,

We are entering the season of fall. With each passing day we receive a little less sunlight, and this will continue until just three days before Christmas. The first day of November is a stark reminder of the radiance we are losing in our day-to-day lives. The trees around us know this in their very structure. They slow down, knowing colder times are coming. They conserve their energy and tend to the things that matter most. We see it in the leaves as they change color. This year, I am reminded of something simple and true: everyone is carrying grief. Everyone walks through this world with some measure of it. I want to name some of the ways grief enters our lives. I learned this framework from Francis Weller (Note: he was far from perfect and abused his access to power, and his teachings on grief have something to offer us) and his five gates of grief. 

The first gate: the people and places we have lost. We grieve people, homes, beloved animals, and places. We also grieve the things our bodies once let us do. Everything we love, we will lose. This is the grief we tend to focus on most.

The second gate: the places in us that have not known love. These are the parts of us that did not receive compassion, warmth, or welcome as we grew. These are the parts we hide away out of shame or judgment. Everyone has them, and we rarely speak of them. 

The third gate: the grief of the world. We see wars in Ukraine and Palestine. We see children dying and being separated from their families. We see an earth that seems irreparably harmed, and it is not the earth we hoped to hand to our descendants. This all has a profound impact on how we carry ourselves in community.

The fourth gate: what we expected and did not receive. This is our longing to belong. It is loneliness, and it is the quiet, unconscious disappointment of wishing someone had shown up the way we needed. It is the times we lacked the safety or community we thought we needed. Or even all the ways that a community or family didn’t turn out the way we expected.

The fifth gate: ancestral grief. We have lost connection to those who came before us. We have lost their stories, their rituals, and their ways of being rooted in the earth, much of it erased by imperial forces. This grief can leave us feeling that we do not fully belong in this world. Richard Rohr connects this homesickness to our delayed entrance into the second half of life. Ancestral grief can also carry woundedness and abandonment, with grief and shame intermingled along our lineage. It includes the collective grief of abuses passed down through generations, as people still grasp for love and liberation hundreds of years later.

Additional Gates: Trauma impacts the way that we hold grief. We can lose people in traumatic ways, and we can miss love because of trauma. And like traumatic events, many people can experience the same grief event, but it impacts our bodies in different ways. Some of us carry anticipatory grief, the expectation of the worst. Some of us carry ambiguous grief, where we feel we have permanently lost someone who is still here but whom we can no longer reach as we once did. Some of us grieve the loss of abilities in our own bodies through aging, injury, or illness.

Our world is saturated with grief because grief is love persevering. It is love for ourselves, love for one another, love for the earth, love for those who lived before us, and love for our ancestral connections, longing for connections it once or never knew.

The holidays remind us of who we have lost. We feel it in the empty seats at the table. We feel it in the absence of paws crossing the floor. So in this season we must tend to one another. I invite you to:

  • Witness and listen to the grief we each hold.
  • Speak about it in conversation with one another, because we are not alone.
  • Lean into spiritual practices that connect us with the source of love that permeates all things.

Richard Rohr teaches that any pain that is not transformed is transmitted. When we hold grief in isolation, we often lash out, and our pain makes it easy to harm others. When we share it, the grief does not disappear, because it never will. But the load grows lighter. With a lighter load we can turn toward one another and be present.

As we approach Christmas, we linger with the prophets speaking of a better world being possible. One where all can experience love and liberation. And Advent is the season where we name the longings of the kindom of God that has not yet been fully revealed through Christ. In this season of less radiance, may we be curious with one another, as we stay connected. Call the person who has been on your heart, the one you haven't heard from in a while. Let us companion one another through grief, so that we may be the place where God's love and liberation are revealed to the world and to one another.

With love and with you in grief and hope,

Rev. Yost