Can I speak of grief? Of course I can from my experience. Yet every experience is unique to everyone in that we are all individual. A priest, knowing my history, asked once what he should, or might, say to a father who had, in backing up a truck, crushed his five year old son to death. In reply, “Just listen. He will tell you what he needs but give no chapter and verse.”
Presumptuous, perhaps, in retrospect I sense my intuition correct. Better yet when I hear the phrase attributed to Jesus: “Let the children come unto me.” Given the loss of two and the absence of the other children by estrangement what I heard broke my teeth yet now in hearing enter His embrace as the child he meant.
Somehow, and oddly, my questions and reply's seem more urgent not simply for service at hospice; the clinic--not the field--an entirely different experience. For there I learned to consider the needs of staff as well as the patients and their families/friends. It is not so much what I say or do but how they feel that concerns me. Sincerely I carry them in my heart and wonder at what I write since my prayer is continuous and inarticulate ... sometimes I fight to withhold my tears. Since not only is it “unmanly” by some standards to cry but I would rather they receive my acceptance of their pain by me unchanged.
Empathy, compassion and mercy are qualities unremarkable by outward signs; not something worn but something lived; to be. Of particular note are the family members of staff who pass there. Regardless degree, kind, nature of service all participate in significant ways. It is a family into which one can be adopted as familiar seen in new and alarming definitions as well as strangers embraced. There, more than one would expect, who healed leave on their own two feet.
I see life, love, god and myself within each and everyone regardless their health. And pray that when I die I will have the courage to remain unchanged until the end not defined by the cause singular. But, perhaps, that too is vain of me to ask. It is in this sense, a prayer for myself, preemptive.
I see our PTSD returning warriors as much in grief as in extremis emotionally. They sould be offered healing as well as our 'enemy.'
It is not by science/psychology or religion/spirituality that we can be healed but both since to respond in love is to accept them exactly where they are and need to be in this time and situation.
While I remain conscious of Jesus’ healing of others and raising the dead. I see now that it is a process involving the patient as well as the source of healing--intimate--in that love wills the will of God for both. It is something on the order of magnitude equal to loving thy enemy. Effective in the long and lasting term, better than drugs or palliatives, and no nasty side-effects or hangovers.
Love is objectively indefinable. It is Islam’s ideal that God has many names, too numerous to mention, so too with Judaism. I, being a image recorder/creator am acquainted with the fetish nature of symbols which by it’s nature suggests cults.
Subjectively, God is Love, present, personal, specific to each persons experience and responds to requests. So long as it’s not a new Escalade ... maybe, maybe not ... it wouldn’t do a thing for me. We all die and in the end even Jesus said, “Thy Will Be done.”
On an even more personal issue. I used to wonder while I wandered through everything: ‘What is definitive?” And thus everything became too important to attempt and fail. I know better now.
I know nothing of the art and craft of writing and potentially a bit more about photography. Yet the more I learn about life, the more I know that I know less, than there is to be known. So if I lead you astray forgive, please, my trespass. Have mercy for both of us and let us know Love at last together.
Be well
Beloved
Death has no dominion
i know that!
PS In childhood a friend once described me as a tank into which rounds were fired yet I kept moving ... the crew inside, although wounded continued on....a recent insight. Happy in my solitude, my nature, I close with the following:
Loneliness, like flu, is "infectious", study finds
Tue Dec 1, 2009 3:06am EST
SINGAPORE, Dec 1 (Reuters Life!) - Loneliness, like the flu, is contagious, U.S. research shows.
It can spread among groups of people and women are more likely than men to become "infected", according to researchers at the University of Chicago, the University of California-San Diego and Harvard.
Using data from a large-scale study, they found lonely people tend to transmit their sad feelings to those around them, which eventually led to them being isolated from society.
"We detected an extraordinary pattern of contagion that leads people to be moved to the edge of the social network when they become lonely," said University of Chicago psychologist John Cacioppo, a leading U.S. expert on loneliness.
The findings were published in the December issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Before losing their friends, lonely people transmit feelings of loneliness to their remaining friends, who also become lonely.
"On the periphery people have fewer friends, yet their loneliness leads them to losing the few ties they have left," Cacioppo said.
"These reinforcing effects mean that our social fabric can fray at the edges, like a yarn that comes loose at the end of a crocheted sweater," Cacioppo added.
Because loneliness is associated with mental and physical diseases that can shorten life, Cacioppo said it is important for people to recognize loneliness and help those affected before they move away to the edges.
For the study, the team examined records of the Framingham Heart Study, which originally studied the risks of cardiovascular disease for more than 5,000 people since 1948.
The study has since been expanded, and its second generation, which includes another 5,124 people, was the focus of the loneliness research.
The study showed that as people become lonely, they become less trustful of others, and a cycle develops that makes it harder for them to form friendships.
Societies seem to develop a natural tendency to shed these lonely people, something that is mirrored in tests of monkeys, Cacioppo said, adding that this makes it all the more important to recognize loneliness and deal with it before it spreads.
(Writing by Miral Fahmy; Editing by Paul Tait) ((miral.fahmy@thomsonreuters.com; Reuters Messaging: miral.fahmy.reuters.com@thomsonreuters.net, +65 6870 3813)) ((If you have a query or comment on this story, send an email to news.feedback.asia@thomsonreuters.com))
PPS what makes me do barrel rolls and loops amongst the starry nights soaring or in free fall . . . .
--John Dryden
“Beware the fury of a patient man.”
--John Milton
"So dear I love him, that with him all deaths I could endure, without him live no life."
036. Flower Shower
Subhuti was Buddha's disciple. He was able to understand the potency of emptiness, the viewpoint that nothing exists except in its relationship of subjectivity and objectivity.
One day Subhuti, in a mood of sublime emptiness, was sitting under a tree. Flowers began to fall about him.
"We are praising you for your discourse on emptiness," the gods whispered to him.
"But I have not spoken of emptiness," said Subhuti.
"You have not spoken of emptiness, we have not heard emptiness," responded the gods. "This is true emptiness." And blossoms showered upon Subhuto as rain.
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