God wishes us to love ourselves, as well as all created things, in the measure assigned by him, with a view to his pleasure

THOU: What is grief? I have just opened the window in the kitchen where I sit at the table and marvel at the sun warming my back. The birds have returned. The bare trees yawn and stretch into new want. Spring rain is on the way, weeks of cold runoff, wet boughs, weather-beaten flowers, but not yet. Not yet. I wish I longed to be outdoors, elsewhere, traveling, walking, but on the best days I want to be here, watching the light shift all day through the windows, letting the trees float into the house, letting the porch door open the floor of this house wide to the sky. I love my home. I love it too much.

If in some way grief is a response to what I know is lacking, to loss, as we say, then grief makes no sense. Or it resembles immaturity: a tantrum. It resembles misunderstanding: why? If what you say is true, and if I believe you, if I trust you, then grief is always shortsighted. There is no loss, not in reality. What do I honor, then, in grief? My slow self--my own therapy? The pain my friend experienced, her terror?

My grieving is mundane: "I've remained unshaken by all this death and suffering in the past, I've been a strong support to others who expected me to be strong, I've had to carry on with the demands of work, to respond by not falling apart." No: that is the heroic face mask of the stoic. My grieving is more mundane than that: "I didn't know or really love any of those people who died--what were they to me? Just people."

It is easy to see such stoicism as radical detachment--as healthy to a certain extent, since it's true: I didn't know those people, in life as in death. But this is not the sort of detachment you're asking of me is it, Lord. What you ask is far more difficult, in layman's terms: a paradox. Love without possession. I've kept a safe emotional distance from most people most of my life, with few exceptions (that hurt like hell), much of which amounts to a dehumanizing acceptance of the lack of meaning in human experience.

Which is to say, my grieving is as mundane as it gets: I'm beginning to grieve all whom I did not grieve. I'm beginning to glimpse small aspects of who they were, what they experienced, what their lives meant to them, whom they loved, and how you love them. Not all at once. Here and there: not just people, but individual human beings, each with her own life composed of her own days, her own lived out individual moments, her own body, her own consciousness, in which she wondered, questioned, noticed, thought, touched, knew, feared, despaired, hoped again, and loved. It is overwhelming, Lord, how many, how many. How many suffer their own deaths.

There is some very essential connection between this new grieving and a commitment to chastity I cannot fathom. As if chastity cannot be practiced, attained, without all the walls coming down. For it brings me to understand myself as a person among persons, a person who loves others with the love that only a person can give. It is a freedom, but one that should lead beyond grief to the detachment you want me to understand is the greatest form of love, and of this I can make no headway, no sense. Is grieving, too, a form of possessive love?

Is yours a love, this love with detachment, beyond grieving?

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. To God who is, who was, and who is to come, now and forever.

Amen.

...

"In the language of St John of the Cross, appetites are disordered inclinations or affections for oneself or creatures, tendencies which are, according to their seriousness, more or less contrary to the divine will. God wishes us to love ourselves, as well as all created things, in the measure assigned by Him, with a view to His pleasure and not to our own selfish satisfaction. These inclinations or appetites always give rise to venial sins, or at least to deliberate imperfections, when one willingly yields to them, even though it be only in matters of slight importance. The will of the soul which freely assents to these failings, slight though they be, is stained by this opposition to the will of God; for this reason a perfect union cannot exist between its will and God's. Moreover, if these imperfections become habitual and the soul does not try to correct them, they form a great obstacle to divine union; and according to St John of the Cross, 'they prevent not only divine union but also advancement in perfection.'" (233)

--Fr Gabriel of St Mary Magdalene, O.C.D., Divine Intimacy

...