The Airing of Grief

THE FIRST EPISODE IN OUR MULTI-EPISODE SEASON FINALE!

With music being so integral to this podcast, running in parallel to the conversations and correspondence we feature, it’s not surprising that the conversations themselves start to sound like music in their own way. They flow like the components of a song. Verses, choruses (etc) repeating.

The more you listen to these stories, the more you can’t help but see their intersections—where they share space, and where they diverge. We’ve weaved together a lot of conversations, but nothing we’ve ever released has ever been at this scale or scope.

The idea is to expand to a larger dialog than ever before. To extend our “choir,” that cloud of witnesses, beyond any statement we’ve ever been able to construct. These stories will be told over more than a single episode, with different people having more or less to say at different points along the path.

“Verse,” this first part, is the one dealing with our points of origin. It’s not about where we are now, or even how things crumbled to get us there. It’s about where we came from, and how that shaped everything.

This week follows our previous episode, not just in sequence, but in substance. It speaks over all of the various stories we’ve been featuring for nearly two years now. Speaks to the process they each give voice to. Like a refrain.

As with our previous episode, Reprise, this episode specifically roots us in the sciences of process.

So from a conversation with a clinical psychologist, we now turn to a conversation with a molecular biologist. From the cycles and rhythms of growth and how they sit alongside trauma, to now probe deeper… smaller… into our very cells. To find what they have to say about release, surrender, context, and adaptation. How we’re sustained by the things we let go of along with the new things we grasp.

In commitment to process, the patterns of evolution emerge — weaving unities within diversities, and teaching us about how our experience changes us.

This conversation features Elizabeth Jeffries. She’s a PhD laboratory scientist and science writer, and she’s just released a book called, “Through the Kaleidoscope: How Exploring Cell Biology Transforms My Relationship With God.” You can find more about the book and Elizabeth at her website.

It’s easy to view our growth as a separate thing from our grief.

…Impatiently, we might perceive the process of grief as something that we need to “get through” so that we can “move on” to growth… But in reality, growth is happening alongside grief as we adapt.

There’s some comfort to be found there. People a bit further down the line will tell you how much they learned in grief. And if you’ve had a harder season, where grief has seemed all-encompassing, it’s good to know that you aren’t in stasis. You are still in process and progress. You are still moving forward.

AND AS WITH SO MANY OTHER THINGS, VIEWING ‘DECONSTRUCTION & RECONSTRUCTION’ AS SOME SORT OF BINARY ISN’T ULTIMATELY HELPFUL.

One of the key benefits to embodiment is that it’s substantial by definition.

In a room (sanctuary) or a nation where many people are prone to detachment and disembodiment, a lot of hollow ideas and promises get promoted as answers, and hope is placed in vapor. A community in which on-the-ground advocacy is discouraged while prayers for intervention abound is no place in which to be fully alive.

Maybe YOU are the miracle you need to see. 

This episode, we continue with a meditation not only on embodiment, but groundedness, real advocacy, and life beyond the limiting narratives and labels placed upon us.

Some of the most resonant stories in our culture are about either finding or coming back to a place where you belong. Home. But the ultimate home to come home to is yourself.

Part 1 (of 2) in our return to the theme of full embodiment, which is central to recovery and reconstruction.

There’s a Sufi proverb from Rumi which says,

“I SEARCHED FOR GOD AND FOUND ONLY MYSELF.
I SEARCHED FOR MYSELF AND FOUND ONLY GOD.”

Whatever a ‘divine spark’ might be, it seems to be carried within our humanity. And yet many of us are healing from teachings and communities which suggested otherwise—which sought to divide us from ourselves, and to keep all the good things in external compartments… So we couldn’t own them. Couldn’t feel their affirmation or their embrace or their warmth.

Much of Christianity loves to talk about something like incarnation, but only in the sense of what it might say about God. It misses the equally scandalous dynamic of what such a concept might say… about us.

It was Jesus who said something about not building a house on sand, where the foundations could not handle a storm. When the storms come, often the unfortunate inadequacies of our constructs and - let’s say our sheltering, are laid bare. From within those shelters, we knew the roles we were required to perform. We knew how we were meant to appear. Many of us carried all of it out meticulously.

But the storms came. And the masks we wore came down with the rest of the house.

And yet, free of the illusion of those shelters protecting us, a burden is lifted. We sense the things that were there all along, however buried, or stifled or censored in us. And in rediscovering the things that were hiding in plain sight, creativity is ignited to build something better, with all of our resources intact.

Reconstruction is complicated. The length of the process we’re in can sometimes leave us longing for simpler times, or at least more simplistic ways of seeing the world. Not so much in missing the ideas themselves that we used to hold, but in nostalgia for that sense of clarity we used to feel (or think we felt) while holding them.

It’s not the same for everyone, but there’s a particular tension which can exist when you find yourself A) no longer attached to these former certainties, and yet B) missing the confidence and sense of self they gave you. You can change or lose your theology all day long, but it’s the former sense of mission and identity and purpose going away that really tends to be more difficult. And the gravity of that is something that comes and goes in waves.

I guess the main point here is simple: Reconstruction is not all happy dances and lightness of being. Plenty of the process will take us into the shadows.

If we don’t deal with trauma, we will perpetuate the cycle of it, weaponize it, and even develop an unhealthy dependence on it for a new identity, living only from our pain… But even in dealing with it, trauma can have a way of fighting back. It can rebound, it can cling, it can trigger.

It can even leave you longing for those simpler days when the world was black and white.

The process of reconstruction is so worth it.
But it’s tough.
It can be frustrating.
And it’s hard work.

Many loves might come and go from your life, but you’re kinda stuck with yourself. Partners, friends, even family members… any time there is loss, the dust settles, and there you are. And that being the case, for those of us with some toxic theology and religiosity in our backgrounds, one of the most important things to grasp might be this: You aren’t tarnished. You aren’t hopelessly broken. You aren’t born guilty and somehow cosmically at fault for death and entropy itself.

You’re just a person. You delight, you suffer, you survive, and hopefully, you love. A lot.

You didn’t choose any of this. You just have to choose what you do with it.

And whether you’re reconstructing inside or outside of faith, that’s a liberating thing to learn and experience. In gain or in loss, in times of clarity and times of everything being a blur, you are a compass.

And you decide what that means, and where it points you.

are you tempted to believe
that you don’t have a choice
you’ve been screaming off your head
and now you’ve lost your voice

that you inherited the curse
and everything your daddy said
compounding like a chorus
or the interest on your debt

and it’s not funny
how momentum can tell a lie
to your face
and before you know it
there’s a bet on every horse in the race
and sunk costs are loading up your gun

it wasn’t wasted time
not a wasted dime or a tear
it’s such a sweet relief
such a good, good grief to get here

no hills on which to die
no reason and no rhyme
just chaos coming down
and the meaning we assign

and that’s not nothing
oh it’s kind of everything
it’s the scars that i can finger
it’s a song that i can sing
it’s the way her hair falls around her face

for every season there’s a burning sun
breaking through
it puts the shadows underneath your feet
if you move
to the rhythm of its crashing love

There's knowing we need change... and then there's boldly moving into it.

In the process of our Becoming, we take on new space, which gives way to new substance… which is only possible from within that new space.

Five considerations for this episode and its conversations:

1) The false promises of fundamentalism are still false promises outside of it. And it can be all too easy for fundamentalism to merely adapt and take on a new form, tricking us into clinging to it even longer in the process.

2) There’s probably more fear and binary thinking to unpack than we might have assumed would follow us out.

3) Maybe the truly renewed mind is simply one which can make a little more room.

4) Being part of a solution on the other side is more complicated than we’re used to celebrating, though the work is no less meaningful.

And 5) Maybe, if eyes are open, there is opportunity where we’ve been a part of causing pain – so that our regret and our redemption might even share a property line.