Holy Spirited

The question of grief is quite deeply connected to the notion of ‘where’.

You were just reading about a Guardian crime reporter who has died, and you started thinking about how his partner must be feeling to grapple with the reality that her love is suddenly ‘gone’.

The reason there is no ‘gone’ is that there is no ‘where’.

The ‘living’ are somewhere, in a manner of speaking. They are actually more than somewhere, but yet they are not quite everywhere.

But the dead, if you want to call them that, are everywhere, once released from the chains of the body that keep them grounded and stuck, for most of their awareness, on this little planet.

One way to think about this is to stop imagining that someone is located somewhere.

Cathy is not in the cafe. Tom is not driving home in the car.

When we think of people in terms of where they are, we give a reality to the place we think they’re in as a means to ground them, pin them down and otherwise not have to worry about it.

If we think in terms of existence, however, and its undeniable reality, where someone is falls into irrelevance.

Where is the boy you were at school with, who moved to New Zealand? You’re not exactly sure. He might still be there, or he might have moved back or be somewhere else. He might not, in fact, still be living on Earth.

Where are the people who lived in the flat beneath you? Since you cannot see them with your physical eyes right now, they’re nowhere, for you.

And while you don’t know their postcode, it’s a good time to practice feeling the difference between

• knowing someone is somewhere specific

• believing they're probably out there somewhere, and

• worrying they're nowhere at all

In other words, does knowing the specifics give you the strongest sense of belief in the reality of someone's existence.

Are you relieved at Joseph’s presence because you can see it? It’s undeniable that you feel safe, and cared for, and not alone, because of his tethers to this planet and his tethers to you.

If those tethers break, as they surely must one day when either you or he moves along, where will the fear come from?

Grief is another word for fear. We fear that the person is gone forever, and nothing will be the same, and we’ve lost them.

But we fear what it will mean for us far more than we fear what it will mean for them, if indeed we believe it means anything to them any more.

If you absolutely knew where a dear departed soul was, would you feel grief?

Yes, you would miss Joseph if he went to live in Australia. But because you could define and imagine his location, maybe even call him. It wouldn’t be as bad as if he died, would it.

Without getting too morose, at this moment you are in one room and Joseph is in another, and you assume he’s alive but you don’t know.

Ah, you say, you can feel he’s okay, so you do know. But is that true, or is it you hedging your bets and not able to bear the thought of another loss quite this soon?

I said that 'grief' and 'where' were connected, and this is how.

When we think we know a time and a place over which we can place the reality of something, we can relax because we feel like we understand it.

You understand ‘meet me at this time under the clock’. You do not understand the concept that there is, in reality, no time or place.

So if you believe in 'over there' and 'somewhere else', you also think you can get lost there. This makes your mind create 'safe' spaces where people know you, where you're familiar with the layout.

When someone you love dies, the layout changes, You find it disorientating, confusing and it doesn't feel right. Your safety is threatened and the stakes feel raised. You get frightened that you too will become lost.

Remember the feeling you had as a six year old when you wandered off in a supermarket and suddenly, briefly, lost sight of mum and dad?

You didn’t worry that they’d disappeared. You worried that you had.

Your stomach lurched with "What’s going to happen to me?" not "Are they okay?"

And grief is the same. It is a selfish emotion – concerned most of all with the turmoil your life has been thrown into. It is rooted in the fear that arises when we become unmoored, and this happens whenever we cannot see our person physically any more.

We can’t pin them down, so we worry that we will fly off and get lost.

I know you are grieving, and I also know your mother and father are blissfully happy. So my perspective is different than yours, and I encourage you to believe that mine is also more loving, and more forgiving than yours.

You can, all of you, have your materialistic rants about the unreality of anything you cannot process with your physical senses. I wouldn't curb your enthusiasm for those in any measure, for I know what a wonderful teacher a rant can be, once you get past the fury and grow enough curiosity to wonder why you got so hot under the collar.

But I tell you that grief is incompatible with faith. Yes, you can and will naturally miss a person’s presence – we have all felt that and I have much compassion for everyone going through the lesson.

However, I'm not here to sympathise, but to love you. And in loving you I tell you the truth and only that.

When you grieve, use it as an opportunity to look at your faith. It is not inevitable that you will weep and wail and hate the world when a loved one completes their current journey and returns home. You can also simply wave them off, wish them well and get on with your lessons.

The wailing grief, the inconsolable tortuous grief, the 'nothing will ever be any good again' grief – that's fear. When you see that, when you feel it rising up, remember your faith. It's a good measure of how you're doing with it.

You’ve teetered on the edges of deep grief once or twice, but you've not fallen in completely.

Consider why you and Joseph have been able to do that, and how you can bring more of that knowledge into other areas of life where fear has taken root in you.