Many of us have found ourselves feeling out of sorts lately and we find ourselves asking “what is going on?” and perhaps we are hearing that same question being asked of us by others! We have, collectively, gone through an event that has left grief in its wake, even though we may not recognize it as such. Life doesn’t look the same and we are waiting for things to return to “normal”. Rev Leah shares some ways in which we can work with the grief and move forward.
“Indeed, every change is a type of death, a death to the old way of living or being. Yet, ironically, change – a dying to the old – is one of the defining characteristics of growth. To live is to grow; to grow is to change; to change is to die to the old. Jesus said to his disciples, “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.’ The apostle Paul, who was no stranger to unexpected change, writes to the church in Corinth, “I die every day!”
-Richard Brumet, “Finding Yourself In Transition”
“Collectively, the world before the pandemic is gone. There is no way back to life before the coronavirus. We have no choice but to accept the truth of what is and love our way forward, discovering the new life unlived ahead of us.
In the Jewish tradition, the word sabbath literally means “the one day we don’t turn one thing into another.” And we are being forced to stop, to be still, to halt our out-of-balance doing. In essence, all of humanity has been ushered into a global sabbath. We have no choice but to stop running from here to there, to stop planning, scheming, manipulating, even to stop dreaming, to stop turning one thing in to another. All to be where we are, so we might discover, yet again, that everything is sacred and that we are each other.”
– Mark Nepo “Surviving Storms”
“Grief requires us to make new maps. For when we lose something dear—a person or a way of life—the geography as we have known it has changed. And so, our old maps, no matter how dear, are no longer accurate, no longer of use. We have to make new maps for how to move forward. In its paradoxical way, grief forces us back into the world where we have to keep learning.”
– Mark Nepo “Surviving Storms”
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