Sunday, February 15, 2009

Morning Meditation - Explanation for sorrow


I woke up this morning thinking about unrequited love. Needless to say, I am grieving the losses in my life. I went to bed happy and wake up sad.

My biggest loss is my wife of 35 years who somewhere along the line and after 9 children decided she didn't love me anymore. The loss of love is an interesting thing and is largely unexplainable as far as I can understand. People just move on or move back or become interested in other things.

I then thought about the loss of the congregation I was involved in where a loosely organized group of us wanted to grow the church and move it forward and it got rejected by the minority ( it took 2/3rds to pass) and so most of us moved on and yet I am still sad because I had high hopes.

Disappointment, rejection, separation, loss all bring about a sorrow and grief that are normal. When we become invested, bonded, attached and then loose the people, places, and things we become attached to and invested in, we bleed and cry.

And so today is a sorrow day, a day for grieving, and the fact that the day my children were killed is coming up in less than a month doesn't help either. It will be sixteen years this year on March 10th. If Brigid were alive she would be 21 and Ryan would be 24. I miss them, and my wife, and my church, and so I am sad. It is part of life. I will sit with it for awhile and wonder what Unitarian Universalism has to teach me about losses in life. Not much like my old religion Roman Catholicism did.

When I was Catholic I could look forward to going to heaven and offering my suffering up for my sins and the sins of others to shorten my time in purgatory. I could look at the crucified Jesus and by comparison know that my loss and suffering is nothing like His and be grateful that I don't have it as bad as He did.

And I don't know that Unitarian Universalism has much of an explanation or theologically encouraging words of solace and maybe that's why it is dying as a religion because it has so little to offer the sad and sorrowful and grieving who are everywhere in life and looking for some explanation while they take their Prozac.

1 comment:

  1. I hope your friends and family can offer you encouraging words ... you have many.
    The contrast is huge between Unitarian-Universalism and Catholicism as you know. I hope the love expressed for others in the UU faith can be of help, with or without prozac.

    ReplyDelete

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