Thursday, November 18, 2021

My Bright Abyss

 "Human love can reach right into death. Such a realization should ease loneliness-even for the griever who is left alone; it should also, in time, help to propel one back into life. Nothing is served by following someone into a grave. Somehow, even deep with extreme grief, the worst pain is knowing that your grief will pass, all the sharp particulars of life than one person's presence made possible will fade into mere memory, and then not even that. Consequently, many people fight hard to keep their wound fresh, for in that wound, at least, is the loss, and in the loss the life you shared. Or so it seems. In truth the life you shared, because it was shared, was marked by joy, by light. Cradled in loneliness, it becomes pure grief, pure shadow, which is a problem not simply for the present and the future, but for the past as well. Excessive grief, the kind that paralyzes a person, the kind that eventually becomes an entire personality- in the end this does not honor the love that is its origin. Is, not was: our dead have presence. You don't need to believe in some literal heaven to feel the ways in which the dead inhabit us-for good, if we let them do that, which means, paradoxically,...letting them go."


My Bright Abyss; Meditation of a Modern Believer
Christian Wiman

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