Nouwen: Love Never Dies

Nouwen: Love Never dies

“When we lose a dear friend, someone we have loved deeply, we are left with a grief that can paralyze us emotionally for some time.

 People we love become part of us. Our thinking, feeling, and acting are co-determined by them.”–Henri Nouwen in Bread for the Journey.

 When loved ones die, a part of us changes. That is what grief is about. It is that slow and painful change in our relationship with someone who has become an intimate part of us. Nouwen goes on to say, “But as we live through the change, they become part of our ‘members.’ As we ‘re-member’ them, they become our guides on our spiritual Journey.”

The God of my understanding does not give us a person we love deeply and suddenly allows that relationship to end with that person’s death. Ours is a God of love. The love from that companion we so profoundly cared about is still there with us. We are still in a relationship with that person, but in a way we do not understand. Their love does not stop. Our love for them does not stop. Death is not a period at the end of a sentence, but more like a comma.

Sometimes, when we remember events of ordinary and extraordinary times with the person we loved, we will also feel their presence and wisdom. We can still talk to them in this new relationship, which is still a mystery. Nouwen believes we can sometimes be even more intimate in this relationship than in real life. It is their love that we feel.

Love continues and never dies. Our loved ones are now in some way always present with us, while in life, they were only present when they were physically with us. Some people find it helpful to wear a piece of jewelry or clothing as a physical reminder of a relationship that is now spiritual.

The grief recovery work we have been involved with for over twenty-five years, Walking the Mourner’s Path, believes that one of the most helpful ways to stay in a relationship with our loved one is to honor our relationship. Amazing transformations have occurred. People have started suicide prevention programs, built walking trails, written books, developed new careers in helping professions, built halfway houses for those in recovery, and given land where their loved one died to habitat for humanity.

 When my Grandfather Whaley died, I returned to the church and stopped smoking to honor him. My grandfather’s love cared for me while he lived and saved my life, even in death. I still feel his presence today, even over forty-five years since his death, especially as I write about him this morning and send that love on to my grandchildren.

Over the past several years, I have been rereading letters my grandfather wrote me in college and medical school over sixty years ago. Words cannot express what it is like to feel his unconditional love through now-typed antique letters. I share some of his letters with you in Letters from My Grandfather, A History of Two Decades of Unconditional Love.  

my grandfather’s 20 siblings

Kites on Clean Monday

Kites on Clean Monday

Guest Writer Susan Cushman

Orthodox Christians worldwide will enter Great Lent on Clean Monday, March 3, this year. You can read about why Western Christians (Catholics and Protestants) celebrate Easter (Orthodox Pascha) on a different date here. But this year, we celebrate together on April 20. I love it when our dates converge!

At St. John Orthodox Church here in Memphis, we began preparing for this day at Great Vespers on Saturday night, when we chanted verses about Adam and Eve’s expulsion from paradise and commemorated the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste. If you’re unfamiliar with this story, you can read it here. There are three things we learn from these martyrs that we need to enter into any kind of martyrdom, any kind of self-denial, even if it’s only increased fasting and prayer for forty days (Lent):

40 Martyrs of Sebaste

(1)  love for Christ,
(2) love for one another, and
(3) courage.

Why courage? For some of us, denying ourselves the things we use to numb pain or escape the reality of life at times takes courage. But also love.

Sunday night at Forgiveness Vespers, we exchanged the rite of forgiveness. You can read a good article by Fr. Alexander Schmemann on this here.

There are almost always tears as we ask one another for forgiveness, “Forgive me, a sinner,” and offer the response, “God forgives, and I forgive.” At the end of the rite, the choir leads us in a few Paschal hymns. The joyful, victorious message of those hymns reminds us, at the beginning of Lent, that we’re heading towards the Resurrection. Without this goal in mind, our prayer, fasting, and almsgiving—our ascetic struggle—could easily become legalistic actions rather than life-giving vehicles of God’s grace.

The Greeks have a beautiful tradition—they fly kites on Clean Monday to celebrate letting go of our sins that weigh us down. I love that image. It reminds me that even this extra body weight I’m carrying around because of gluttony keeps me earthbound. I hope to lose some of it during the Fast, but mostly, I hope to draw closer to God.
May God grant us all a Good Lent!

Susan Cushman

Susan Cushman is a convert to Orthodox Christianity (since 1987) and is married to an Orthodox priest, Father Basil Cushman, who is Associate Pastor at St. John Antiochian Orthodox Church in Memphis, Tennessee. Susan is a retired iconographer, a published author of five books, and editor of four anthologies. In her personal and spiritual memoir, Pilgrim Interrupted, which was published in June of 2022, she shares much of her journey to Orthodoxy and its healing impact on her life.

 Joanna  joannaseibert.com   https://www.joannaseibert.com/

Transfiguration and the Last Sunday of Epiphany

Transfiguration and Last Sunday of Epiphany

"If we want to find God, then honor God within ourselves, and we will always see God beyond us. For it is only God in us who knows where and how to look for God."­—­­ Richard Rohr Adapted from The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See (The Crossroad Publishing Company: 2009), 159-161.

Today is the last Sunday of Epiphany, where we say goodbye to Alleluia and prepare for Ash Wednesday and the first day of Lent. Sunday, we hear the story of the Transfiguration of Jesus when he is revealed on a high mountain to three of his disciples as the incarnation of God. Anyone in 12-step recovery can identify immediately with transfiguration, seeing the light, a moment of clarity, encountering the God who has been there all along within us. Still, we never saw the light within because we were busy making "dwellings" for other idols, alcohol, food, drugs, work, etc.

Moments of transfiguration occur in our lives when we are transported from our deep unconscious sleep to a moment of conscious bright light when we see, feel, taste, and touch God within. Transfiguration is about experiencing our true nature, the part of God inside ourselves. It is the moment when all else falls away, and we are simply of God and desire to turn our life and our will over to the care of God. It is that moment when we let go and let God.

Richard Rohr believes we cannot see God in others until we first see God within ourselves. So, recovery is seeing God first within ourselves, which leads us to being able to see God in others. We encounter that person who once annoyed us, and we begin to notice a tiny glimpse of the face of God, and our only response is now love.

Frederick Buechner reminds us that as we see God within ourselves, we begin to see God in situations we never saw before: "the face of a man walking his child in the park, a woman picking peas in the garden, sometimes even the unlikeliest person listening to a concert, standing barefoot in the sand watching the waves roll in, or just sitting with friends at a Saturday baseball game in July. Every once in so often, something so touching, so incandescent, so alive transfigures the human face that it's almost beyond bearing." 1

Transfiguration is the message and the promise of a new way of living, seeing God's face in others and ourselves.

Today, we are gathered on the internet over many miles to celebrate the new eyes that transfiguration continually brings to our lives and the face of every person we encounter.

1Frederick Buechner in Whistling in the Dark (HarperSanFrancisco 1988), p. 120.

Joanna. joannaseibert.com. https://www.joannaseibert.com/