“Eternity is born in time, and every time someone dies whom we have loved dearly, eternity can break into our mortal existence a little bit more.”
– Henri Nouwen
Sharing our sorrows
A friend who recently lost his own mom and knew that I had been on a similar journey over the course of the past year mailed me a copy of “A Sorrow Shared,” a collection of two short works by the Dutch priest, writer, and theologian Henri Nouwen, both written in the months following his own mother’s death in late 1978. Nouwen was living in the United States by then, working as a professor of pastoral theology at Yale Divinity School. He was in his mid-40s and living thousands of miles away from his home in the Netherlands, but he remained close to his parents and it’s obvious from his writings that his mother’s passing affected him deeply.
Nouwen traveled home during his mother’s final illness and was able to be with her and his family in the days leading up to her death. Then, after staying to celebrate her funeral mass, he returned to the States and resumed his teaching and counseling duties at Yale. The first part of the book, “In Memoriam,” mostly chronicles the week leading up to her death (Nouwen says that he wrote it in part so that he himself would remember all the little details of that time of anticipation and waiting), while “A Letter of Consolation” takes the form of a long letter Nouwen wrote to his father several months later, during the final days of a Lenten retreat leading up to Easter 1979.
Both small volumes have a lot of wisdom packed into them. For anyone dealing with the loss of a parent – and perhaps especially a mother – you could do worse than to pick up a copy. The reflections shared in this post are from my own reading of “A Letter of Consolation,” which I finished in the days leading up to Easter this year, just about a year after my own mom’s death.
It was, as they say, pretty good timing.
Relating to death “as a familiar guest”
Nouwen speaks a great deal about not just coming to terms with death, but actually befriending it. This isn’t just about reconciling ourselves intellectually to a spiritual truth. Nouwen makes the point that our fear of death, left unchecked, can end up becoming a fear of life. We recoil from that “undiscovered country” beyond the grave, and that recoiling becomes reflexive and causes us also to recoil from all that frightens us in life. As Nouwen writes:
“Befriending death seems to be the basis of all other forms of befriending. I have a deep sense, hard to articulate, that if we could really befriend death we would be free people. So many of our doubts and hesitations, ambivalences and insecurities are bound up with our deep-seated fear of death that our lives would be significantly different if we could relate to death as a familiar guest instead of a threatening stranger.”
Writing from a Christian perspective, it’s not surprising that Nouwen would see a great part of the answer in love. First, our own unwillingness to peacefully accept the death of someone we love serves as a clue about the eternal nature of love itself and, by extension, of ourselves. In the persistence of love, we catch a glimpse into eternity.
“Love will always reach out toward the eternal. Love comes from that place within us where death cannot enter. Love does not accept the limits of hours, days, weeks, months, years, or centuries. Love is not willing to be imprisoned by time.”
If we can take this tension seriously – the tension between life and death, between love and loss – and really sit with it, that tension might begin to crack open our own resistance and melt away some part of our own fear.
Love, “the basis of our hope”
Writing in the days leading up to Easter, Nouwen takes up a paschal theme, pointing out that love can direct us not only towards grief, but also towards hope and a renewed sense of holy longing. He writes:
“[T]he same love that reveals the absurdity of death also allows us to befriend death. The same love that forms the basis of our grief is also the basis of our hope; the same love that makes us cry out in pain also must enable us to develop a liberating intimacy with our own most basic brokenness.”
Of course, this journey into our own basic brokenness isn’t easy, and reconciling these tensions within ourselves is at least the work of a lifetime. As Nouwen observes, for some the struggle – and their hopeless fear of death – never really subsides, no matter what they may say or how they may behave outwardly.
“Many people seem never to befriend death and die as if they were losing a hopeless battle.”
Most of us are familiar with the idea of putting a good face on things. Most of us do it all the time, in ways both large and small. For better or for worse, learning to hide our feelings – or even who we really are – becomes second nature for most of us at some point over our lives. Often we think we’re doing this kind of thing for the sake of other people, but we often do it just as much for ourselves. The masks we wear can afford us a measure of protection, a barrier between us and the world that, we hope, will keep us safe and secure. But those masks – especially once we’ve grown accustomed to them – can be hard to take off.
That’s why it can take something dramatic – like a death – to knock us from our comfort zone, or to open our eyes.
“We might think that we have a certain insight into ‘what life is all about’ until an unexpected crisis throws us off balance and forces us to rethink our most basic presuppositions. In fact, we never really know how deeply our lives are anchored, and the experience of crisis can open up dimensions of life that we never knew existed.”
The fact of the matter is that death – especially the death of someone we care about – rocks our world. Things can get very personal very fast. After speaking about it abstractly for a while, Nouwen also acknowledges a basic truth of grief and grieving – that it is, in the end, both collective and deeply personal. The “lonesome valley’ mentioned in the old spiritual is one we all must walk, in some sense, alone. And to have our world shaken by death is to have the fact of our own life and death brought into sharper relief.
Speaking directly to his father, Nouwen writes:
“What did mother’s death do to you? I do not know and cannot know since it is something so intimate that nobody can enter fully into your emotions. But if your experience of her death is in any way close to mine, you were ‘invited’ – as I was – to re-evaluate your whole life.”
To see “what really matters”
The death of someone we love forces us to stop, take a step back, and see our lives from a wider perspective. Eventually that wider perspective can afford us a clearer, fuller view of ourselves and allow us to disentangle from some of the myriad “useful” concerns that we so often let overtake and overcome our lives. It forces a reckoning, as Nouwen explains:
“Death indeed simplifies; death does not tolerate endless shading and nuances. Death lays bare what really matters, and in this way becomes your judge.”
He goes on to describe an idea of life as a long process of “mortification,” or, literally, “making death.” As Nouwen explains it, this process can become “a slow discovery of the mortality of all that is created so that we can appreciate its beauty without clinging to it as if it were a lasting possession.”
Once we learn to recognize the shortness of life and not to shrink away from it – no easy task, to be sure – we can begin to see an element of beauty nested within the impermanence itself, wrapped up right inside the transient nature of all things. There is, in the end, a kind of paradoxical poetry embedded in this complex aspect of all our encounters with the world.
“In every arrival there is a leavetaking; in every reunion there is a separation; in each one’s growing up there is a growing old; in every smile there is a tear; and in every success there is a loss. All living is dying and all celebration is mortification too.”
But to get there, we have to allow ourselves to let go. We have to learn to surrender, both to the reality of death and to the ultimate mystery of life itself. According to Nouwen, life remains “the great unknown” to us, in spite of all our efforts to control it and make sense of it.
Detachment and creativity
In his letter, Nouwen also draws a direct connection between detachment and creativity, suggesting that those who awaken most fully to the reality and implications of impermanence and death – and to the fact that “there is nothing and nobody in this life to cling to” – become free to move away from the safe and familiar places that most of us hold fast to, pushing out instead towards the new, the unexplored, and the unexpected. They become, in a sense, untethered from the kinds of fears that so often hold us back.
One of Nouwen’s boldest arguments might be that the gift and blessing we so readily perceive in the lives of those we love is also, somehow, wrapped up in their death. He suggests that the death of a loved one is, in some mysterious way, also their gift to us – their dying as much as their living.
“This is quite a radical viewpoint and it might offend the sensitivities of some people. Why? Because, in fact, I am saying, ‘It is good for us that she left us, and to the extent that we do not accept this we have not yet fully understood the meaning of her life.'”
That’s an especially hard pill to swallow, but I’m intrigued by the way it connects to the paschal mystery that Nouwen was in the process of celebrating as he wrote his letter. By asserting that our death can act as gift to those we love and care about in life, Nouwen connects the death of a loved one – in this case, his own mother – directly to the death of Christ on the cross. It’s easy for most Christians to say that Christ “gave himself for our sake,” but I don’t know whether most believers’ working theories of the atonement really encompass the idea that Christ might have given himself up, in part, so that we could learn to better bear witness to the transient beauty of the world around us.
Maybe, by dying, he was offering a path towards freedom from our persistent and hopeless fear of death itself. And maybe, by dying, he allowed for the sanctification of our deaths as well – enabling us, as Nouwen seems to suggest, to offer our own death as a gift to the ones we love, or to see a loved one’s death in such a light. In this view, the potential for deification – or, as the Greeks might say, theosis – which comes through Christ’s death applies not just to our lives, but to our deaths as well.
Perhaps all can be gift, poured out and given freely, in compassion and in love.
Bearing witness to beauty
This liberation, this freedom, provides the key to what Nouwen means when he connects detachment and a growing sense of openness and creativity. He writes:
“Now you can say things to yourself, to others, and to God that were not disclosed to you before.”
To be honest, I can’t tell if I’m there yet or not. I wonder if even now – a year later – I’m really ready to receive and to share in the kind of creative awakening Nouwen discusses. I’d like to think I’m trying, but even the timeline of our grief is a mystery to us. Like an unknown seed planted in the ground, it’s something we have to tend, but not tug at. Part of the work, still, is waiting and watching.
At this point, for today at least, here’s what I can say about losing a loved one: For those of us who remain, who still grieve and mourn, our stories are still in progress, our work still goes on (just as the ripple effect continues outward from the lives of those we’ve lost). Part of that work is simply being willing to let the things to which we’ve been witnesses alter and change us – to let them knock the “safe” ground of our own particular spiritual landscape out from underneath us, and transform how we stand in and see the world.
Only then can we say and do something new. Only then can we begin to inhabit the new life we’ve been given. Only then can we stand, at the corner of here and now, at the edge of time and eternity, and bear witness to the fleeting, extraordinary beauty of all that is.