Days of remembrance are important especially when they’re hard

Well, it’s Mother’s Day, and from a minister’s viewpoint, it can be difficult to negotiate – so many individual responses from celebration, joy and the deepest gratitude to lament for broken dreams, sorrow for lost mothers and losses around mothering, the triggering of trauma experiences, etc – and even experiences of a confused mix of the complete gamut of emotions.

Days like Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, and all kinds of other remembrances are crucial especially when we languish.

Days of remembrance are opportunities – invitations – to:

§     process further cavernous depths of sorrow and emptiness and any other kind of difficult mental and emotional experience

§     honour what the occasion celebrates

§     journey with those who have different positive and negative experiences of these days, or to receive such a journey

Particularly helpful is the experience of digging deeply into the grief that may be present on such days.  This is so we can learn about why we grieve as a way of searching for ways for ultimately resolving it.

I call this ‘facing’.  Nothing needs to overwhelm us forever.  If we find something like a day of remembrance triggers much negative cognition and emotions, there is the opportunity to face what comes up.  It’s an opportunity – an invitation – to overcome the negative power and grow in resilience.

Without such opportunities – that realistically only come up perhaps once a year – we continue languishing.  Recovery from grief is strategic in that healing is a wisdom principle.

We all have opportunities to grow in resilience.  We can deny the presence of the fearful things of life, or we can resent them, or we can resolve to go a third more positive way.

Denying things doesn’t make them go away, and resenting things makes us bitter.  The third way of facing facilitates life.

Photo by Sandy Millar on Unsplash