A Meditation for Winter: “Love in Our Losses”

Encountering loss is a universal human experience. It seems to begin early in our lives with things as simple as losing a contest, a card game, or a favorite plaything. It may be as profound, even at an early age, as the loss of a pet or a friend who moves away.

In our middle years often comes the loss of a parent or grandparent and the necessity of dealing with death and dying. Every family circle is broken sooner or later by death. There are other experiences of loss common to our culture. Few people reach retirement without having lost a job or two along the way. Few people marry without the loss of an old love or a relationship that
didn’t work out.

One may also lose one’s health or one’s wealth. Who has not, on occasion, lost hope? Our ultimate maturity is shaped by how we manage our losses.

What remains for each of us is the matter of how our losses can be turned into gains. With what resources do we address this challenge to our humanity and our sanity? I believe the capacity to give and to receive love offers us hope. It may be that we need to receive love before we have the power to give love.

Trusting a providence that brings us through each testing time means we trust a Provider whose love never lets us down, never lets us go.


Love in Our Losses

When life takes you out to sea, I’ll show you where to find a lifeboat.

If I speak with the words of Kubler-Ross or of other worldly seers and understand rationally that grief is natural, but make grieving a lost love only a head trip without feeling anything, it will not ring true.

And if I know intuitively that this too shall pass, and if I have faith to move mountains of anxiety and regret, but look back and ahead without love, I get nowhere after all.

If I give in to my fears and even offer myself as an object of great pity and compassion, but vent my emotions without love for those near me, I accomplish no real healing.

Love in our losses demands patient waiting and being kind with ourselves. It can’t be hurried. It will not covet the peace of mind others have found, nor brag prematurely of being "O.K."; it does not quote proof texts nor does it promote easy answers.

Love in the midst of grieving does not deny its reality nor parade piously; it does not stay angry, nor does it wear its heart on its sleeve; it is unflappable before evil and searches for each silver lining.

Love that has lost its object has learned to bear burdens, embraces possibilities, keeps its hopes high, endures to the end of time
.
Such love never ends. As for the prediction that all will be well, it will be found groundless; as for trite words of encouragement, they will be silenced; as for certainty that we are better for having suffered, that will evade us.

For our certainty is never absolute and promises sometimes fail; but when unconditional love has claimed us, our conditional gifts have their comeuppance.

When still learning about love, I spoke as one who had all the answers. I thought and reasoned as one untested end untouched by pain; but when I had come through the testing of loving and losing one beloved, I could give up playing childish games.

For now we see only a glimmer of the truth about what we gain in our losses, but we are coming face to face with ourselves.

Now I know only a little of what life teaches, but in time I shall grasp it all, even as I am held by a love that will not let me go.

So faith in a just world and kinder people, hope in a heaven and an earth where everything lost is found, and love that remains when all else fails us, these three, abide to comfort us, but the greatest of these is the love that will never leave us alone.

Make this love your anchor.

(Permission is given to reproduce, with source acknowledged.)
From Love’s Letters: A Poetic Book of Confessions by George Gunn
(Library Lane Press / Copyright 2001)