Grief & Glory in Deep Belonging
For this time of Lent, we are inviting our ICN community to embrace a time of grief and glory. Each week, we are offering reflections and practices on grief, glory, and their integration, as a way of evolving our participation in this season.
We’ll focus on one word and one beatitude as pathways of mystical practice. We encourage you to hold and engage with them throughout the week ahead.
We hold in the divine womb our personal struggles and fears alongside our dreams and unique soul calling. We hold our collective pain and loss alongside our communal nurturing and creativity. And we hold our global crises and suffering alongside our deep courage and ultimate faith. We invite you into this collective womb space/time of painful lament and generative possibility.
May we walk with grace together in this season of grief and glory, through the Mystery and portal of death and resurrection.
“Integration” - Image by Paul Fryer
At first blush, grief and glory may seem like opposites.
We may see grief as a state of sadness, a sorrow because of what once was and has now been lost. We feel the loss of the past that felt more whole and now is lacking.
We may see glory as a state of immense happiness, a rapture at what will one day be. While we may have felt glorious at times in our lives, I would guess that most of us consider “glory” primarily as something apart from ourselves—something ascribed to God beyond or a future reality we may one day come into (maybe only after death).
In isolation, both may be states that leave us bound to the bygone past or dreaming of an out-of-reach future.
Our answer is not just to “live in the now” with a carefree and oblivious presence, disassociating from the many griefs of life, personal and global. Nor detached from a holy longing for a better world and ignoring the spirit’s call to evolve—how we might be a part of making that happen.
Rather, in integrating both grief and glory into our everyday lives, we can come into the power of interweaving the now with the past and future.
And this sacred now is always infused with great joy and great sorrow. It is full of love and full of loss. It is pregnant with possibility and littered with failures. It is of the womb and the tomb.
We can come to make peace with the paradox because our deeper experience of embracing and integrating the multi-faceted nature of life reveals to us that everything belongs.
This is a mystical invitation to live from eternal wholeness.
In the season of Lent, we are invited into a time of waiting and a cycle of letting go. We can move with the deep lessons and flow in the spiritual groove carved by centuries of Christian practice in this way. The process of releasing our attachments and owning our loss is one we all must embrace with vulnerability and humility to continue our lives forward in the ripe and ready time.
And, we are not bound to this alone. We can move, at the same time, with glory in merciful and beautiful ways, in the wombful embrace of all that has come before and all that is now, opening new pathways of divine becoming. Letting the ashes serve as compost from the rot and decay, nourishing the buds and blossoms of the blooms of glory still to come, yet alive here and now in us.
Even as we experience the ebbs of flows of life, even as the tides cycle and the seasons turn, we find the embrace of belonging to each moment in the fullness of what it brings, alongside the eternal wholeness of all that has been and is yet to come.
Image by Surajit Singha Sisir
Belonging
Our word and primary invitation for this week is belonging.
We invite you to pause and speak the word aloud several times. As you hear your own voice, where do you feel drawn to in your body? Where do you feel spirit stirring you within?
When you’re ready, follow on to this breathing practice:
Breathe in
I am spirit and flesh,
Breathe out
matter and energy
Breathe in
I am a human,
Breathe out
earthly and cosmic
Breathe in
I am being,
Breathe out
infinite and finite
Breathe in
We belong
Breathe out
to heaven and earth
Breathe in
We are belonging
Breathe out
with stranger and kin
Breathe in
We are whole
Breathe out
In grief and glory
together
(Adapted from The Language of Creation, by Tantra Maat)
Preparing the Ground
Our beatitude for this week is commonly known as, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.”
Again, at face value, this may bring to mind anti-war protests and mediators of conflict. While these responsive and reactive forms of peacemaking are certainly valuable, the type of peace Jesus would have been speaking of with the Aramaic “shlama,” essentially the same as the Hebrew “shalom,” speaks to something more.
Consider some of the layers of meaning from Neil Douglas-Klotz's renderings of this phrase:
Ripe are those who exert themselves, planting health and wholeness every season…
Healthy are those who strike the note that unites…
Aligned with the One are those who prepare the ground for all tranquil gatherings…
Integrated are those who joyfully knit themselves together within…
Healed are those who bear the fruit of sympathy and safety for all…
When we think of the peace of nations and great authorities, we may feel we have little power and influence to make a difference—though we do what we can. Especially when there are great atrocities occur and innocents suffer, which is tragically happening now in Gaza and other parts of the world as well. Our last three weeks of Lent will move into grief, glory, and integration on this global level.
And, even as we want to be peacemakers in the world, it begins in our own hearts and communities. How can we bring others peace if we are not knit together within our own selves? If we cannot play the note that unites?
How do we plant health and wholeness and bear the fruit of sympathy and safety for all?
How do we learn to plant peace with each step, exerting ourselves to walk together through this world of grief and into glory?
Image by THỌ VƯƠNG HỒNG
“Every breath we take, every step we make, can be filled with peace, joy and tranquility.”
Peace/Shlama/Shalom is about universal flourishing. It is about wholeness. And delight.
Our spiritual power is vast and significant. Most rarely know or feel the immensity of glory that flows in divine spirit. Because we often still hold that spirit in mind and body apart from ourselves. It remains in the ether and of another realm.
In integration of heaven and earth, body and spirit, human and divine, we find the deep belonging of the peace of God, here and now, within and without.
This is to be a child of God, one who lives in the divine birthright. As Paul Smith would often love to teach, “The children of cows are cows. The children of sheep are sheep. The children of humans are human. The children of God are…you guessed it, gods!
A place will be prepared for oneness, a channel will be dug for Unity to flow.
They shall be remembered as rays of the One Unity.
They shall become fountains of Livingness.
They shall be stamped with the seal of Cosmic Identity.
They shall hasten the coming of God’s new creation.
Image by Brigitte Werner
The Peace of Belonging in Communion
The peace we speak of and co-create here is inherently communal. It has to be relational, even as we cultivate it in our personal being. An inner peace removed and undisturbed by relationships, by one another, by the world, is not real peace.
Shlama/Shalom holds within it a meaning of “happy assembly” or, as rendered above, “tranquil gatherings.”
Of course, any form of community will not always be tranquil and happy. Difference and conflict will always emerge, as we all have shadows and areas of further growth in our lives. Peace is not about the absence of disturbance but the conscious and active cultivation of belonging to a deeper wholeness together, amid and throughout all the phases of communal life.
From the soil of deep belonging can spring the sprouts of new creation.
From the kinship of soulful belonging in the bosom of God can we bear our divine becoming.
From the mercy of wombful belonging can enfold great care and capacity to be with pain.
From the vulnerability of authentic belonging in grief together can emerge deep healing.
From the ground of deep belonging can grow our glorious and holy longings, arising from wholeness rather than lack and loss.
In peace, we live in the now and the not-yet of eternal time here and now. We can live in both the tranquil belonging and the holy longing together. We can mourn together. Create together. Act together. Rest together. Become together. Be together.
And as we take our steps together in the communal walk from/toward wholeness, we go beyond the self-enclosed belonging that constructs barriers to separate, that finds solidification of collective identity through the exclusion of others, which is rooted in tribalism.
We step out beyond safety and sequestered comfort into, with, and as the world. Bearing, becoming, and co-creating peace.
“Peace I leave you with; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.”
Blessed are Those Who Cultivate Belonging in Peace
Throughout this season, we will use his teachings, often referred to as “The Beatitudes,” as pathways to help us walk with grief and glory. We offer various translations, many of which are illuminating the rich textures of meaning that are contained in the original Aramaic language Jesus would have spoken originally.
We invite you to receive these various translations as a meditative practice. Let your whole body receive them, slowly, absorbing them deeply. This might include thoughts about the words or phrases heard in a new way, but as those come, integrate them in your whole being, into the deeper spaces of your soul and embodied receiving.
This practice can also be done with a partner, reading aloud to each other. One person can read all of them, pausing between each for at least 30 seconds, and then the other does the same. Or you can each say the phrase aloud to one another, pausing to receive before going on to the next.
A Practice of Blessing
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.
(King James)
Enriched are those who author and celebrate peace, for they will be called students of God—like children, those who learn at his feet.
(Greek literal)
Ripe are those who exert themselves, planting health and wholeness every season; in them a place will be prepared for oneness, a channel will be dug for Unity to flow.
Healthy are those who strike the note that unites; they shall be remembered as rays of the One Unity.
Aligned with the One are those who prepare the ground for all tranquil gatherings; they shall become fountains of Livingness.
Integrated are those who joyfully knit themselves together within; they shall be stamped with the seal of Cosmic Identity.
Healed are those who bear the fruit of sympathy and safety for all; they shall hasten the coming of God’s new creation.
(Aramaic)
Greek literal translation by Dave Brisbin
Aramaic translations by Neil Douglas-Klotz
“Belonging to Peace” – Image by Paul Fryer
We invite you into your own deep process with this season, engaging in reflection and practice with these themes and experiences.
Questions for Reflection
1. Where do you feel belonging in your body? In your life? Where do you feel the allure to step into or gather together in deeper belonging?
2. What is your experience of living with time? Do you tend to focus on the past, present, or future? How might you move into a deeper integration with belonging to eternal time?
3. Where do you plant peace? How are you cultivating or feeling drawn to foster greater wholeness and new creation?