…I have often wondered why grief – the deep, cleansing kind –
is so difficult to reach when, upon reaching it, tears spilling involuntarily
down the cheeks, it feels so like the most priceless sweetness, as though one
has reached a shore in a new land where all will be well; the
arrival at a “homier” home than one has ever known.
The problem is deep grief is not accessible using the
ordinary logical thought processes by which we talk about
sadness and grief without actually feeling it. So, if thinking doesn’t get you
there, would it be amiss to conclude it’s the heart that hosts
this “scene” of self-transcendence, entered only with difficulty,
and only according to terms set by the heart in imagination?
In other words, what’s mysterious to
left-brain-oriented me, may be “child’s play” to the
heart. Although I share the problem with grief I’m
discussing, I have been there. And having been
there, I know the rapture of grief, shown so movingly in the
scene between Lisa and her mother at the end of Margaret. The
restoration of the truth of human connection, of love, of meaning.
With grief not being given its due as a health requirement, our society is stuck in aggrievement. And what is aggrievement,
with its potential for rage, resentment, projections, and plain indifference to
the suffering of others – its shaky moral basis that wants to blame – but a derailment of the process of grief?
What if this aborted grieving process is the way to restore
the imagination of the heart, and with it, the truth of
all-connected, now so endangered? After all, though we
wish success for ourselves and others we care about, success is not what binds
people to one another. We are bound by our wounds,
failures, the in-common but under-acknowledged experiences that both threaten
all meaning and – I’m asserting – make it
possible.
In some ways supreme among the horrors today that defy
meaning is the ongoing genocide in Gaza; we know terrible suffering is being
inflicted on children, and also that we are helpless to stop it. But keeping in mind the fact – and this is a fact substantiated by
neuroscientific trauma research – that both the infliction of
atrocity and the need to justify it are symptoms of trauma, we
could say meaning – its retention or loss – is not
entirely dependent upon ending or ameliorating a particular catastrophe. This
is not to shrug and say what can one person do or call it “God’s
will.”
But the reality of trauma means the so-called good guys as
well as the bad guys are all traumatized; all handling unconscious
trauma in different ways, all adding up to keeping things the same, leaving the
odds stacked against meaning – i.e., connection,
love.
But what if the “good guys,” us, opted for meaning, instead
of accepting the reality we’re in as if there’s no other? That
is, the possibility for meaning remains, despite everything, in
the individual human heart, in its capacity for
transcendence. And for transcendence, one must know one’s
undeserved suffering. Meaning, that is, is in the hands of individuals who will
seek it, even unto entering the darkness within oneself.
The experience of black Americans of inconceivable suffering during the Jim Crow era, theologian James Cone points out, gave meaning to the symbol of the cross that, in white churches, with white supremacy unchallenged, was in effect meaningless. That capacity to transform suffering into energizing belief fed and led the powerful civil rights movement.
Not dogmatic belief, not necessarily Christian or other specific ideology, but experience of the transcendent allows the divine energy
of all-connected unity to work on human beings. The results will be different –
not everyone has the same genius in them, but moral vision, the truth of
all-one, can be attained when suffering is not denied, and grief can reach its
truth.
I do not expect America to alter its course by my speaking
this way. Suffering, as I’ve noted many times, doesn’t make a great
lure. But knowing what we now know about trauma, each of us has a
basis for transcendence within, in personal darkness. Each one, in realizing
one’s trauma, suffering undeserved, now has ground for seeing one’s
life as a revolution, without ideology or hierarchy, overturning the American
way of life that has been constituted in order to deny that very truth (for
white people).
As I write about grief, into my mind come memories of that
“grief shaman,” Robert Bly, who would weep unashamedly before an audience,
over, for instance, the death of a friend such as he did for the poet Etheridge
Knight. Not just a quick watering of the eyes and tremor in the voice, but
full-out weeping, loss of control! By now, the heart inside most of
us could justifiably feel reproachful towards ego’s demand for stony
control. One can imagine the heart even saying, on those rare
occasions when we experience that mystery of grief, what took you so
long? […]
Arrested Grief: Liberal America’s Moral Problem? Kim C. Domenico
CounterPunch
