Of Love and Grief

We all love love: storge, philia, eros, agape. It’s easy. It’s as if we were made to love. So the average person-save for the occasional misanthropic Ebenezer Scrooge and those too profoundly traumatized to love-find loving-in all its forms-as easy as breathing.

But what about the twin of love: grief. Well, we face it when we have to but we sure as HELL do not want to. I’m not suggesting we become masochists and become obsessed with this most profound of sufferings. I am just suggesting we take a look at its geminate bond with the nature of love.

Love and grief are intertwined, two sides of the same coin. I have yet to find another analogy that is suitable for their relationship, so these will have to do.

You can only love fully if you have fully opened yourself up to grief. Because no matter what happens during our earthly tenure, someone we love is going to pass away leaving us with all the love and all the grief, being somehow expected to go on.

I’d like to suggest that love AND grief are the two most profound emotions we can experience. They are the states in which we feel most fully alive because they are our closest touch of divinity. They are the deepest realities in which we can find ourselves on planet earth.

God is love. So that’s an easy one to reckon as a godlike because it literally is godlike to love with charity and self-sacrifice. We are literally being like God (whether we believe in a god or not-and, for reference, I am speaking of the Christian God by virtue of the fact that I am a Christian).

Now, on to grief. It’s quite scary to write about this topic. I don’t really know why. Grief is essential to human existence during our time on earth. In heaven, there will be no more tears, Rev. 21:4, (not to say no more grief necessarily) but grief would definitely look different in heaven. Here’s the etymology of grief: 1175-1225; Middle English greven, grieven < Old French grever < Latin gravare “to burden”, derivative of gravis  heavy, grave.

Most of us are convinced that we couldn’t bear to live without some type of love (Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, people), but I’m convinced that during our time on earth, we must have grief, too. We must feel the immense loss of life to sin and the malevolence of death, because we wouldn’t know the value of love and even life without it. I am also convinced that we cannot know true love without the potential for loss of it, whether by severance or death. We wouldn’t value our loved ones were it not for the potential and reality that we will lose them (if only temporarily, for those who believe in heaven). You can ask my friends, I always say that, “to live is to suffer.” Well, I also think that to live is to grieve. Grieving is an experience that we only get earthside so we must pay attention. To grieve (at some point) is to be fully alive.

Henri Nouwen in his book Making All Things New: An Invitation to a Spiritual Life, writes:

“Our life is a short time in expectation, a time in which sadness and joy kiss each other at every moment. There is a quality of sadness that pervades all the moments of our lives. It seems that there is no such thing as clear-cut pure joy, but even in the most happy moments of our existence we sense a tinge of sadness… Behind every smile, there is a tear. In every embrace, there is a loneliness… And in all forms of light, there is knowledge of surrounding darkness… But this intimate experience in which every bit of life is touched by a bit of death can point us beyond the limits of our existence. It can do so by making us look forward in expectation to the day when our hearts will be filled with perfect joy, a joy that no one shall take away from us.”

Not only does grief apply to the death of a human, it applies to the death of hopes, dreams, and humanity/human dignity all over the world. We need to “feel the night” as Strahan writes in a song. We need to groan with the rest of creation at the state of the lonely, heartbroken, beaten, abused, etc., inhabitants of this planet. It is essential for us to grieve for us to then feel hope. As a good friend once said after I was crying because a brief encounter with a man hurt my feelings, “We’re going to listen to ‘Praying’ [by Kesha], you’re going to cry and then we’re going to move on.” And on a grander scale that moving on means acting to effect change, to bring heaven down to earth.

My favorite poem of all time is by a Syrian man named Nizar Qabbani. It’s called Madrasat Al’Hubb, or School of Love. Here are my favorite lines from it: “Your love taught me how to grieve, and for centuries I needed a woman to make me grieve, I needed a woman to make me cry on her shoulders like a bird, I needed a woman to collect my pieces like broken glass…I have never known that the human tear is humane, and that the human without tears is just a memory!”

Grieving makes us human. And it then gives us the capacity to hope and the agency to effect change in love.

Love is not possible without grief and grief is not possible without love.