Dear Readers,
At long last, I’m making a return to this blog and to posting writing on the internet after several shifts in my life due to the global pandemic. I hope that you are all staying well and safe as we continue to do what we can to promote public health and keep ourselves and other people as healthy as possible. What follows is a more or less verbatim account of the speech that I gave during the Memorial Chapel service at the Ethel Walker School, where I’m teaching for the year. When I gave this address a week before All Saints/All Souls, I was asked to keep the talk nondenominational and accessible. I did so, and I doubt that it will take long before the underlying message about the widespread emotional needs of our moment/ecumenicism of the talk itself shines through.
Yours in Christ,
JKR+
Good afternoon, everyone. Before I begin my address proper, I’d like to start by recognizing a simple fact, namely that any discussion of grief and loss can be emotionally challenging. If at any point while I’m speaking, you need to quietly leave the room or step away from your screen to get some fresh air or to collect yourself before returning, I invite you to do what you need to do in order to take care of yourself. With that said, I’d like to invite you to imagine with me for a moment.
Imagine you are in 15th century Japan, looking over the shoulder of a shogun who’s carefully holding a broken tea cup, a crack along its side. He sends this teacup to expert craftsmen in China, asking that they repair the vessel. After a few weeks, the teacup returns, its broken seam joined with heavy functional, but ugly staples that attempt to hide the fracture. The teacup regains its place on the shelf and its usual function. Sometime later, another of the shogun’s teacups breaks, but, this time, he sends it to craftsmen within Japan, tasking them again with repairing the item, but doing so with an eye towards beauty as well as function. This time, the second teacup returns, its cracks and chips at once outlined and mended by a carefully interposed web of golden lacquer. The shogun nods, recognizing that the evidence of the teacup’s damage has now become the mark of its beauty, and delicately places the second teacup back on its shelf.
The scenario we’ve just imagined together is a narrative take on one of the purported origin stories for the Japanese art of kintsugi, the practice of repairing broken pottery by joining the vessel’s cracks with a mixture of lacquer and powdered gold. This process highlights and beautifies the broken areas and flaws in the original piece of pottery, rather than attempting to hide them; vessels repaired in this manner are beautiful not in spite of their brokenness but because of it. Formed from the words kin, meaning “gold” and tsugi meaning “joinery”, kintsugi as an art form falls under the general Japanese aesthetic principle of wabi–sabi, the embrace of transience and imperfection as inherently beautiful. One of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism, the concept that pain and suffering are fundamental to existence, deeply inflects wabi-sabi. Often, here in the Western world, partially because of the focus on symmetry, youth, and permanence that we see in European art and thought, historically speaking, we often have little to no framework for recognizing or discussing imperfection, let alone suffering, or, worse, we’re encouraged to hide it or smooth it over. There isn’t much of a cultural premium placed on acknowledging our faults, the wear and tear that comes with aging, or making space to recognize and hold our psychological or emotional pain; we don’t want others to see our brokenness.
Within such a thought system, experiencing grief and loss feels like an interruption in our life pattern. Typically, when most people talk about loss, they describe their bereavement as permanently disruptive, painful, and viscerally ugly, and, often, it is. Grieving, especially in the early stages, feels like painstakingly piecing together the fragments of a broken life without an adhesive. We keep busy, try to smile, go back to work or school after the funeral, but, if we haven’t made time and space to sit with where we are, time and space to release grief from our heads and our bodies, time and space to let ourselves messily fall apart so that we can begin to heal, we are at best reassembling ourselves with duct tape, hiding, but simultaneously also pressing our broken areas into place in disorderly fashion.
Conceiving of loss and grief as interferences in our lives denies the regularity and relative mundanity of suffering and contributes to the bewilderment that we often feel when we first experience loss because we have no prevailing framework for recognizing its normalcy. In his final sermon, Buddha identifies all of the following life stages as forms of suffering: birth, aging, sickness, death, experiencing that which is unpleasant, separation from that which is pleasant, and failing to attain what one desires. Rather than pedestalize death by setting it apart from other forms of suffering, Buddha encourages us to both see and internalize death as a regularity so that we can begin to live alongside it. This approach to suffering is not intended to trivialize pain and loss, but rather contextualize it within a framework that allows us to understand and then move through our pain. Understanding grief and our own emotional/psychological weather allows us to begin processing it, and this should be a regular process, not just a trauma response. We get chips in our teacups every day.
In the same vein, when we lose people who’re dear to us, there’s usually a period in which we both desire a return to life as it was before loss, then mourn both the loss of the possibility of regaining our pre-loss life and our loved one who’s passed on. While this desire for a life that is no longer possible is often part of the process of beginning to healthily grieve and hold the weight of our memory of those who’ve died, we cannot remain in the space of denial; denying the depth of our grief, the heft of the lives lived in close proximity to ours, makes both true recognition of loss and substantive healing impossible. We have to admit that there’s a rupture, and then closely examine where the breakage is, before we can start to repair it. In doing so, we might learn from another Japanese concept, mushin.
Mushin, which translates to “no mind”, is a mental state accessed by releasing anger, fear, and concern with one’s own ego. I first encountered mushin when, nearly seven years ago, I sat across from a grief counselor after flying back to Dublin after my mother’s funeral. I had no particular desire to be there, but in order to get credit for the months of schooling I’d completed abroad, I needed to return to sit for exams. I knew that, without help, without recognizing or speaking about my pain, I wasn’t going to be able to function as a human, let alone sit in a general examination room for several hours and perform at my best. The counselor asked me to close my eyes and breathe, with each inhale thinking the phrase “I accept” and exhale the phrase “I release”. The first time I went to her office, we did this exercise for an hour and said nothing else to each other beyond a simple greeting and some parting words. The next week, we did the same exercise for two hours, and in week three, we began to talk. But, before I was capable of talking, I needed to relearn how to breathe. I needed to recognize and sit with where I was, with how much pain I felt, and with how much had happened that I simply didn’t understand and couldn’t control.
After I’d reached this point, she drew a circle on a piece of paper and shaded it in fully with her pen; this shaded circle represented my life at the moment, entirely filled up with my pain, the shading within the circle. She then drew a second circle, featuring a small shaded circle inside it; this was a representation of how counselors used to think about grief, namely that, over time, the pain of loss shrinks down to something that takes up less space in our lives. She drew a big red X over this drawing to show me that this is not what actually happens as we grieve. Instead, “what does happen,” she said, as she drew one large circle with a medium-sized shaded circle inside it, “is that your life grows around your grief. On some days, your grief will take up most of the circle, on others it won’t, but grief will never be the full circle. Your task is to keep both types of days in balance.” Holding the shaded circle drawings in mind, once I accepted my mother’s passing, released the need for control, and understood that I shouldn’t expect grief to go away, but I could learn to live without it consuming my life, I was able to grieve properly.
If you carry nothing else with you into your day following this service, I encourage you to hold onto this: you are a whole person because of where you’ve been broken. In some form, during the past year, we’ve all experienced loss on both a personal level and a global scale. The ongoing pandemic has its own weight, and we all feel it, whether or not we’d like to acknowledge it, as a daily reality. However, even though the stresses of the pandemic are an ongoing occurrence, we can allow our lives to grow around them, understanding that we can name and then process the suffering we experience now and knowing that we won’t emerge from it undamaged, but instead enlightened.
Realistically, none of us will make it through life wholly unscathed. In fact, as we age, we continually run up against the list of things that Buddha identifies as forms of suffering, birth, death, sickness, negative emotions, etc. The point is not to turn from our pain, but to recognize it, allow ourselves to feel it, heal from it continually, and continue living alongside it, aware of the fact that we will meet suffering again someday, but that it also doesn’t have the final say in who we are or what our lives look like. We should also, as we learn from our own grief and loss, meet others where they are in their pain. Handle yourself and others with care, love, and mercy; repair is a delicate process, but it is also a process of strengthening. Not all of our breakages are the same size or happen in the same way, but we each, in turn, must recognize and learn to love the cracks in our own being and make space for others in their fullness, inclusive of their wounds. Do not hide your brokenness. Take time and space to speak about your grief, about the loved ones you’ve lost, both who they were and what they meant to you, and live in such a way that the people whom you’ve loved and known and the experiences that have marked you are the source of both your power and your beauty. Thank you.
Africana Anglo-Catholic 