The Grace of Moving On after Suffering
Posted by The grace of moving on after suffering cannot be forced. It can only be allowed, and the task of the counselor or pastor, the loving friend or companion, is to let you know that, when it is time to move on, the moving on is good and natural. You are not betraying life by moving on; you are participating in its healing powers.
The moving on is a kind of holy forgetting or, if you prefer, a holy reframing. The forgetting is not a denial of the past, but it is an emotional reframing of it, so that the suffering is seen as part of your life, but not the whole of it. You are no longer defined by it; nor is life itself so defined. You realize that there is something more than the suffering: a newness in life, experienced through love and beauty. If your suffering is grief over a loved one, you may well hope your loved one likewise partakes of this newness in ways you cannot and need not fully understand. There is no need to limit life to a single journey through time, birth to death. As you move on you come to realize that, to your surprise, the universe is friendlier, and more enchanted, than one lifetime can ever quite include.
But let me back up.
Last night in a class on Suffering and Meaning someone brought up the idea that, in some circumstances, it is valuable to forget the suffering that you or someone you love has undergone. The idea met some resistance from those who believe that it is always important to be honest about the facts of experience.
However, I was thinking about a good friend of mine who recently underwent the loss of a loved one. She was, and is, grieving. Having undergone this kind of grief myself, I know that it takes time to heal, and that part of the healing lies in forgetting the suffering: your suffering and also theirs.
This forgetting is not an intellectual or emotional denial of what happened. And it is not a forgetting of the loved one. You have photographs and letters, memories, and tears. But it is waking up one morning, after many months, and realizing that the suffering is not the first thing you think of. Maybe the second; but not the first. And then waking up some mornings thereafter and realizing it is not even the second, but maybe the third or fourth. The suffering has somehow found its way into the mandala of your ongoing memory, as one among many things you’ve known and felt. It is real, but it doesn’t define you.
It is not that you have reframed the suffering in a way that makes it OK. It is that life has moved on and that you have moved on, too. The danger is not to allow yourself to move on in this way. The danger is to cling to the suffering so fervently that it controls your life. The suffering has become your god. You are allowing yourself to be defined by the grief. It is at this point, I believe, that the healing spirit of God comes in. The spirit invites you to let go, not of the memory of your loved one, but of the suffering attached to it. In a way this forgetting is a gift to your loved one, too, because it allows him or her to move on, at least in your mind and perhaps in fact, to the next phase of his or her journey.
In the class that I attended, many people recognized that a key to this kind of creative transformation is friendship and community. When we are grieving and others somehow share in our grieving with understanding hearts, the healing gradually begins. But another prompt for the healing is beauty. Indeed, the love we receive from others is a form of beauty, of which there are many others.
In Divine Beauty: The Invisible Embrace, John O'Donohue writes: "The human soul is hungry for beauty; we seek it everywhere — in landscape, music, art, clothes, furniture, gardening, companionship, love, religion and in ourselves. No-one would desire not to be beautiful. When we experience the Beautiful, there is a sense of homecoming. Some of our most wonderful memories are of beautiful places where we felt immediately at home. We feel most alive in the presence of the Beautiful for it meets the needs of our soul.”
Back, then, to my friend. In her grief there are moments when she experiences what O'Donohue calls the invisible embrace. Despite her sadness and in the midst of it, she finds herself surprised by beauty: landscapes, waterways, music, old clothes, furniture. They don't take away the sadness, but they reframe it in a larger context that includes the Beautiful. She trusts that her loved one is himself embraced by these many forms of beauty. They are windows through which a holy light shines, no matter what sadnesses we may undergo.
We seek names for this Beauty. In one of his books the philosopher Whitehead called it God; in another he called it the Harmony of Harmonies. The first name gives a sense of a loving someone who embraces us at all times. The second gives us a sense of the embrace itself. For my part, I think the someone and the embrace are the same. When we are embraced by Beauty, we are embraced by God, however else conceived, and God is in the embrace. The embrace does not eliminate pain, but it subtly reveals, again and again, that there is more to life, so much more, than the pain.
Might this something more include domains and dimensions of reality that contain, but are more than, a single journey through time, life to death? Might there be a continuing journey after death, until wholeness is realized? For my part, I hope so. The problem in life is not death, but rather incompleteness. I hope for happiness for those whose lives were riddled with pain, and redemption for those whose lives were riddled with hatred. Some process philosophers, David Ray Griffin for example, think a continuing journey likely. It is possible that Beauty experienced in this life, in all the ways named by O'Donohue above, is a foretaste of something more. But one thing is very clear. In this life its embrace has a healing effect. In time we can and do move on. Life is a process, never fixed by what has been, because it is ever refreshed, sometimes to our great surprise, by the shock of beauty, one form of which is love.