Monday Morning Musing: The Sweet Solace of Words

I've mentioned here recently that I have many dear ones who are struggling in this season. There is so much sorrow and sadness... grief and disappointment. I work hard at accompanying while not fixing; things repair in their own time and things that are not mine to repair only need my walking alongside.

In order to write in this season....sermons and newsletter articles and answers to endless emails and blog posts and notes and letters, I turn to the words of others. Filled with their beautiful and glorious words I can offer some of my own without only sitting in the struggle.

Maggie Smith (the poet, not the actress); Connie Schultz, David Whyte, Jeff Chu, Diana Butler Bass, Lyz Lenz, Mary Oliver, Margaret Renkl. To name a few. How do so many of them exist in the world? And thank god they do.

David Whyte's beautiful collection of writing called Consolation is a volume I purchased just after the 2016 presidential election. Those were terrible years. I pray we do not repeat them for I fear they would be worse a second time around. The thirst for revenge brings nothing good.

The essay on Solace is dog eared in my volume of Whyte's work. While a bit lengthier than what I usually share here, I offer it to us all, in these long grey January days, on the brink of so much:

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Solace is the art of asking the beautiful question, of ourselves, of our world or of one another, in fiercely difficult and un-beautiful moments. Solace is what we must look for when the mind cannot bear the pain, the loss or the suffering that eventually touches every life and every endeavor; when longing does not come to fruition in a form we can recognize, when people we know and love disappear, when hope must take a different form that the one we have shaped for it.

Solace is the beautiful, imaginative home we make where disappointment can go to be rehabilitated. When life does not in any way add up, we must turn to the part of us that has never wanted a life of simple calculation. Solace is found in allowing the body's innate wisdom to come to the fore, the part of us that already knows it is mortal and must take its leave like everything else, and leading us, when the mind cannot bear what it is seeing or hearing, to the bird-song in the tree above our heads, even as we are being told of a death, each note an essence of morning and of mourning; of the current of a life moving on, but somehow, also, and most beautifully, carrying, bearing, and even celebrating the life we have just lost. A life we could not see or appreciate until it was taken from us. To be consoled is to be invited onto the terrible ground of beauty upon which our inevitable disappearance stands, to a voice that does not soothe falsely, but touches the epicenter of our pain or articulates the essence of our loss, and then emancipates us into both life and death as an equal birthright.

Solace is not an evasion, nor a cure for our suffering, nor a made up state of mind. Solace is a direct seeing and participation; a celebration of the beautiful coming and going, appearance and disappearance of which we have always been a part. Solace is not meant to be an answer, but an invitation, through the door of pain and difficulty, to the depth of suffering and simultaneous beauty in the world that the strategic mind by itself cannot grasp nor make sense of.

To look for solace is to learn to ask fiercer and more exquisitely pointed questions, questions that reshape our identities and our bodies and our relation to others. Standing in loss but not overwhelmed by it, we become useful and generous and compassionate and even amusing companions for others. But solace also asks us very direct and forceful questions. Firstly, how will you bear the inevitable that is coming to you? And how will you endure it through the years? And above all, how will you shape a life equal to and as beautiful and astonishing as a world that can birth you, bring you into the light and then just as you are beginning to understand it, take you away?