The integrity in intimacy that cannot be ignored

Those who have most capacity to invest intimacy into their marriage and relationships love others truly through an integrity between what they promise and what they deliver.

By integrity, I mean alignment between the intimacy that’s promised and what’s delivered.

By integrity, I also mean alignment between a good heart and a resolute mind.

It’s as simple as that.

Yet there are those who feign publicly what they cannot and do not deliver privately — and some even completely betray their overtures of passion and invest their intimacy elsewhere, worst of all in the destructiveness of affairs, and many are there the variety of those.

These are the personification of dishonesty, scooping up for themselves praise from those in their sphere of influence all the while betraying those who truly know them — those who know what liars they really are.

Then there are those who promise little or nothing and deliver exactly that in terms of intimacy. Though there’s integrity here in terms of what’s promised and what’s delivered, there’s clearly no motive or desire to deliver an intimacy that a person in a relationship with them quite rightly would expect.

Think of the vision presented: a person who walks humbly on this earth serves the purpose of their being to the extent that they exist to be a blessing.  Their honesty is trustworthy.

Such a person cringes at the possibility that their intimacy might fail its potential, and yet even when they do fail, they’re contrite about it and their heart is exemplified in their repentance.

Contrition or lack thereof is a test of a person’s heart.  The heart of a person is visible in their capacity of contrition.  Those who can be wrong, who can transact with their wrongness, have the most potential for intimacy, because they have most capacity to relate.

There is a paradox is this:
Only the person who CAN be wrong is able to be righted.

Think of a person’s ability to receive salvation — they can SEE their wrongness, and THAT sets them apart to receive God’s forgiving grace.

A person who CANNOT see their wrongness cannot receive what can only be theirs by virtue of their acknowledgement of their personal complicity.

If a person is unable to behave contritely — in other words, they can never be wrong, or they’re incapable of sufficiently sincere apology when they’re wrong — they don’t demonstrate the capacity of intimacy.  They cannot move back toward another’s heart when they have wronged them.  They cannot demonstrate that they’re trustworthy of further opportunities of intimacy.  They bear no desire of commitment to the intimacy they promised in the first place.  IF they cannot apologise in a sincere way.

Isn’t it interesting how we maintain our intimacy, and thereby exemplify the integrity of our heart for relationship, chiefly through how we reconcile our failures as much as we do when we achieve intimacy?

Integrity in intimacy cannot be ignored.  There’s a direct alignment that is easy to see and difficult to deny.  This is why a lack of intimacy in what was promised as an intimate relationship is so stark.  This is why a vacuum of intimacy proves impossible to ignore and simply becomes louder and more pronounced the longer the vacuity is experienced.

This is how intimate relationships become toxic — what is promised is not delivered and the one who suffers the lack of intimacy experiences gaslighting.

Intimacy is the greatest invitation of all to the depths available in a relationship.  The integrity sewn within it is definitively true.  There is a oneness in this intimacy that is best defined as symbiosis — a connectedness of intimacy of a mutually beneficial relationship.

A mutually beneficial relationship is shared 
between two who BOTH reach toward the other.

The feature is their collective capacity to sacrifice for the other.
One alone cannot achieve this on behalf of the whole.

Intimacy is the chief test of a person’s ability to relate with another in the enjoyment of a trust that is freely given and freely received.  If there is any pattern of indifference to the ideals of intimacy, the relationship will be stilted, and this will be most borne out, most felt, in a lack of trust.

Intimacy is a felt thing.  We feel it or we don’t.  Where we feel it, we feel the other person moving toward us, and where we don’t feel it, we feel the other person resisting or moving away.

It’s very hard to sustain the intimacy of trust in a relationship where such intimacy of trust isn’t returned.

The wisdom of lament, of victory over defeat

Nothing can defeat us if we get this principle and apply it to our lives.  This is the first and only wisdom that is needed when life itself has conspired against us.  It is a gospel wisdom.

In a commentary on Romans 8, John Chrysostom (349 – 407) said,

“Yet those that be against us, so far are they from thwarting us at all, that even without their will they become to us causes of crowns, and procurers of countless blessings, in that God’s wisdom turns their plots unto our salvation and glory.  See how really no one is against us!”

See what this is saying?  No matter what people do to us in this life, we, by our responses, have the victory IF only we can look at the bigger picture — life and eternity are much more than we can see!  Much, much more.

We do not need to insist on having all the answers, victory at every stage, and a way of ameliorating our embarrassment when someone “owns” us... let them own us!  What can their will do to us?  NOTHING.

By entering into this wisdom, we show that we have the wisdom of eternity, the deeper knowledge, stowed and utilised for the power of his kingdom and glory.  But to enter into this wisdom, headlong in the intent of one day owning it, we must commit to it one day at a time for the rest of our lives.

This principle applies within the midst of all personal struggles, not just the interpersonal ones.

There is a way of superintending the struggle.  There is a way of overcoming that which is designed by the enemy to overcome us.  This is a vital word for anyone who would believe it is possible, and from such a belief to have the audacity to make that possibility a reality.

This is the wisdom of lament: 
an overwhelming victory is possible 
even as we’re overwhelmingly defeated.

Live it, and you will know that you’re living it!

We glory in this defeat, and this is exactly what the cross shows us.  Even though Jesus was dead — gone for all money — the absolute enigma of it all is that only at “It is finished!” was there comprehensive, everlasting victory.

Even as Jesus exhaled his last breath, there is an eternal sigh of relief.

Do you get it?  How else do we beam with a smile even in the torment of grief?  It is otherwise a rampant absurdity.

But that beaming smile MUST be underpinned in the reality of lament.  Lament accepts what can never be changed.  Lament is the power of facing an unchangeable truth.  Lament doesn’t need to dissociate, knowing that the enemy of everything good is dissociation from truth.

Please, please, exist in the struggle by facing it, by allowing it in your presence, by allowing it to crush you when it will, by making you supple enough to seek support, by causing you to grow in humility to permit the ebb and flow of grief and acceptance as they come and go, by engaging in the lament, which is to honour the truth and not look away from it.

~

The wisdom of lament is evident in having victory over defeat.  The only way we take this into ourselves as a possession is to live it and therefore know it as a blessed way of living in the grief of life.

Lament is a final frontier of growth and healing

It’s only when you’re in a dire situation that you cannot change that you realise the gift of lament. That is, to accept in practice what is unacceptable.  It leaves you in a place of torment or anguish or depression... or of just simply sitting in it, with it, allowing the situation to be as painful as it is.

I would say that sitting in the presence of lament in such a way is the practice of patient maturity, considering that such a practice is nothing about the end point, it’s all simply about the practice of it.  It’s not about achieving anything, except that is the achievement of sitting peaceably in dread and sorrow — which just seems wrong when our western eyes read that.

Many years ago, when we were losing Nathanael, people would often say, “All we can do is pray.”  We would say, “That’s the best thing you can do.”  Prayer seems useless until it’s the only thing left.  Then we pray because it’s all we can do other than sit and wait and endure the pain of the moment.

There are many who possibly won’t have any idea about these concepts.  A living hell has never descended against them.  Or they denied the reality and ran.  They remain unenlightened.  There’s no need to convince those who cannot be convinced.

Instead, we work with the impossibility of the moment.  Instead, we spend time in silent retreat with those who understand.  Instead, we give up on words and questions and statements of conjuring.  We come to understand the sanctity in moments beyond human reconciling.  When we face these moments, we quickly recognise there are mysteries we will NEVER understand.

And that is okay.  Okay, because it must be.  There is no other choice.  Until we’ve been to a place like this, we really haven’t grown up.  Until we’ve been to a harsh reality that cannot be changed, we have no concept for how to move forward.  It’s a problem all must face and come to accept if we’re to truly mature.

It’s only when we have no concept for moving forward that we recognise that there ARE places in life that have no answers.  We can get angry or deny these realities as much as we want, it’s not going to change things.

We are invited into a better answer 
when there is no answer.
That answer is lament.

Sitting in the lament of the heartbreaking situation we cannot change, we understand, finally, that lamentation is nothing about performance or achievement or anything that we can add to it.  It is simply something one does and it’s an inherently humbling place.  We come to the end of ourselves.  What begins from there is God.

But what is good about not being able to change the heartbreaking situation is we finally come to a place where we have no control, and the only way forward is to accept that.

One of the biggest challenges to our personhood in all our lives is our insistence on controlling situations.  But when we come to this place, where lament is the only answer, the ONLY thing we can do, we approach the situation where we’re invited to understand a deeper knowledge about the fabric of life we otherwise did not yet know.

We finally understand the goal of humility 
is to bear the capacity of humbling gracefully.

There is something good about all this, and that is how we gather the eternal competence of maturing through bearing heartrending situations we cannot change and therefore can only accept in the moment.  See how it’s NOTHING about our performance or how good we are at it?

When we stay in a season of lament, when we are able to sit in it without insisting our circumstance be changed, we practice a maturity that can only be practised and never attained as a possession.  It is both the hardest and easiest thing to do.

Only when we have practiced this ancient contemplation of lamenting and have consistently experienced the ability to surrender our control does God show us what maturity looks like.  Until such a time, we cannot see it, and it is not a reality we can claim that we’ve attained.

Lament is a final frontier of growth and healing.

Receptive hearts transform things or there’s no hope at all

I think I will need to write about these things ad nauseam to get my point across.  There is absolutely nothing that compares with receptive hearts able to listen and comprehend what is going on for the other person, and you need this in both parties.  Then, truly then, does conflict become an opportunity where miraculous outcomes are possible.

When we deal with the opposite situation, which is rather the default, where one or both parties cannot step into the other side at all, there is no hope and the plans and dreams of both perish in a calamity of despair.

Far too many people have grown up in these circumstances as their parents warred with one another whether within the marriage or as divorced parties.  Adults behaving as spoilt children, or as often is the case, one adult and on a collision course with tyranny, doing their best to steal, kill, and destroy as an agent of the enemy — always justifying such abhorrent behaviour.

The only hope for happiness for any of us is when we step out of ourselves long enough to stay in the other person and their interests.  Interests are defined as what a person wants, and importantly WHY they want it.  Many people want what they want because these are needs.

Consider that sometimes the way to get what you want is to give the other person what they want.  Consider too the power dynamics within conflict.  It is too easy to see ourselves as the least powerful.  As a counsellor, I view anyone who feels unsafe as vulnerable and threatened as a party with less power, but of course often the other side says they feel unsafe too.  It is one thing for a person to feel they’ll be taken advantage of, and it is another thing entirely for the other person to feel in mortal danger.  See that in terms of safety?

The absolute masterstroke for an ex-husband, and I lived this life successfully for many years, is to keep on giving, keep on being kind, and keep on being understanding, and be the emotional support.  The more you give your resources away with no thought of return, the more spiritual grace you’re given, and there’s nothing to compare material retention to spiritual graces.

What I’m trying to say to ex-husbands is throw away your demands, invest in a life that gives itself away, and you will suddenly find yourself living a life you always, deep down, wanted to live.  Throw yourselves away to your children, giving them your time, your love, your energy, your kindness, your patience, your gentleness, and many times this is augmented by becoming known for a regimen of genuine apology.  This cannot be faked.  You will be believed when your heart has changed.

Do you want your children and ex-wife to start saying to people, “He has changed, now he’s so humble, and we feel safer, and he is now more trustworthy than ever.”  Nobody will say these things about you until they see them in you for six or 12 months, because it requires a heart change, and heart change sticks simply because the core of life is in the heart.

As Proverbs 4:23 says, “Watch over your heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life.”  The best investment any Christian can make is to invest in watching over their heart, keeping it soft and pliable, so it would listen to others’ needs.  A Christian’s life is a life of service to others, especially those in our family.  Much of the time it is mothers who watch over their children and who notice their anxiety.  Mothers and children have safety needs on a deeper plane than husbands ordinarily.  There are some exceptions to this, but few in comparison.  The parent who has the children’s needs most in mind needs to be listened to.

Finishing this where I started, change only comes when two hearts come together for the common good, but this will invariably involve one heart — predominantly the husband’s — willing to give by faith.

Indeed, it has been my experience that those who have given more have ultimately received more, but the heart must give in these situations with the intent not to receive.  The heart must give away unconditionally.  The heart must give away with the full expectation that anything that comes back to them will be offered back in return.  There is no interest in returns.

The more we seek to bless another, the more we will be blessed.

Men, be the one known as humble enough to forge a new path for your estranged, broken marriage and family.  Humility is the fuel of miracles.  Just remember, humility expects nothing of others, and serves with cheerfulness.

Give away what you cannot keep to gain what you cannot lose — those riches in the eternal realm (yes, they come in the here-and-now) come at us WHEN we’ve given ourselves away.

Depression when the realities of grief overwhelm

Some moments in life swallow us whole without any consideration whether we can bear them or not.  Clearly, we cannot.  We’re consumed and absolutely unable to respond as we otherwise would like to.

Such a moment, though both exposing and terrifying, is instructive.  It takes us many levels deeper as we journey from the deck of our life to the engine room to become acquainted with the workings within.

The fact that we’ve descended to a place far deeper and lower than we’ve previously conceived not only shows our strength to bear such weakness, it shows our capacities of humility in being momentarily humiliated without being comprehensively crushed.  Even if we do feel crushed.

Depression within the realm of the realities of grief correlates that much with clinical depression, the two merge and may be indistinguishable.  The symptoms of deep grief and clinical depression are so similar, all we may deduce is that grief separates from depression only to the degree that a tangible cause of loss is identified.  Surely there’s a huge part of depression in grief.  Both are an affront to and an overhaul of the identity.

When the realities of grief overwhelm us, where there’s panic because a life we cannot let go of has ended, and that life is either ours or someone precious to us, there is absolutely no scaffold to hold onto, and the sense of acute or chronic panic is justified.

Even as we will enter into such a season where there is withdrawal from life at large, as light diminishes and hope shrinks under the gravity of despair, as new powers of darkness hover overhead, there is a broadening of the personhood under such a temerity of challenge.

That’s what must be held in tension all along—when you’re going through hell, keep going, as Sir Winston Churchill said, because hell is a place, a situation, a time, a bearing, and it’s not a destination.  It takes such courage to face hell, to travel so close to it, to approach it knowing it nears upon the moment.

The moment of overwhelm in depression comes like a thief in the night.  When it’s snuck up on you a few times, it leaves you feeling vulnerable to its capacity to drag you under, especially as a bout of acceptance is enjoyed for its fleetingness.  The scary reality in that bout of acceptance is it will end at some point, and as peace ebbs quickly away, despair fills the void with cosmic emptiness that resembles death.

Depression in its fullness is the most terrifying reality on the record of our consciousness.

Validate the one you know who faces their depression valiantly.  If it’s you, be validated by these words.  You’re braver than you know to face these terrors alone even if there are a crowd of helpers.  You know how brave you’re being.  Perhaps you’ve never before conceived life could ever descend to this.  Now you endure a state of consciousness that opens your mind and heart that loss, grief, and depression could end you.  There’s nothing scarier than situations where the floor disappears.  Just know how brave you’re being.

Your courage is exemplary, and God knows, of that be assured.

Submitting to the sifting Spirit that challenges pride

This, I find, is the absolute core of Christian discipleship.  It’s the moment when we are revealed, by the Spirit of God, as culpable in some way or other.  The fact is, we are all susceptible to mistakes and errors of judgement and morality.  It’s when we are caught in the act, either by another person or by discerning it for ourselves, that we have the opportunity to respond to that cherished principle of the conviction of sin.

The Spirit of God pointed this phenomenon out to me during a recent counselling session where the person I was counselling identified this very wrestle.  It lit a light in me.

I think we’ve all been there, in our pride, justifying our self-justification, all the while negating that conviction of heart that would propel us in the humility of restoring a relational dynamic.

In this moment, we sit on a precipice, as we listen to both the flesh and Spirit.  The moment is a conquest between good and evil, between God and the enemy, between humility and pride, between right and wrong.

In this moment, we are very unlikely to look at the log on our own eye, preferring the attractive glint in the speck we see in the other person’s eye.  If natural forces are to prevail, and most often they do, we will completely nullify that still silent voice that would lead us in the way everlasting, recalling that mightily cherished prayer of Psalm 139:23-24 — 

“Search me, God, and know my heart... test me and know my anxious thoughts... see if there is any offensive way in me... and lead me in the way everlasting.”

None of us likes to pray this prayer or be this honest, because it requires us to submit to the sifting Spirit that challenges our pride.  But this, right here, in the present context, is the absolute essence of Christian Living 101.

Indeed, Christian faith has nothing to do with knowing the Bible back to front, inside and out, being an expert on theology, knowing creeds, and all sorts of other knowledge that puffs us up.

What Christian faith is centrally about is 
orienting the heart toward trust in God.

Orienting the heart toward trust in God requires us to fall into line with the truth.  And so often the truth testifies against us, especially when we operate in self-justification and in the condemnation of others.

For any of us to sit there and ponder the war going on in the head and the heart as we choose between pride and humility when our sin is revealed, we have a cosmic choice before us.

90 percent of the time I’m sure we will go with the natural flow and stick with self-justification to our peril.  But if only we can go against a record that would acquit us, preferring to see the inconvenient truth, we might turn toward the truth and choose to walk by faith, and be humbled by the truth that would set us and others free.

The person that goes the latter way of walking by faith, against the pride that’s been sifted by the cleansing Spirit, pours contempt on their pride, and walks directly into freedom — but they don’t experience the freedom UNLESS they first walk that way by faith.

This operation of being humbled by the Spirit of God when our pride is riled proves who we are really committed to.  If we cannot submit to the sifting Spirit that challenges our pride, we really do not have a part in the Kingdom — it’s as simple as that.

We serve God when we love others, and this is done most especially in the heat of conflict.  In the heat of conflict is when our true spiritual mettle is tested.  Where humble hearts come together in conflict, an opportunity to transcend selfishness prevails.  THIS is how Christians ought to behave with other Christians and with everyone else who don’t yet call Christ their Saviour, Lord, and King.

Those who don’t submit to the sifting Spirit that 
challenges their pride don’t display the fruit of the Spirit.

Those last 49 hours before Mum died, her death, the days since

The days and events surrounding Mum’s death were up until a few days ago replayed over and over in my head.  I guess I was just making sense of a profound little season of history.  I have found that as a funeral celebrant, until I went through the loss of one of my own parents, I didn’t really ‘get’ that style of grief.  Ordinarily, I’m not one to compare griefs — it can be very unhelpful!

Even though we as a family had been given a range of one to four days to expect Mum would pass away in, there was still something in my mind telling me we had more time.  From the time we were told Mum would start palliative care to the time she passed was 49 hours.

I’ll never forget the call I got from Dad at 10:10 or where I was when I received it to alert me that the hospital could do no more for Mum.  I was over two hours away in a regional town inspecting tyres on a fire appliance, and that feeling of being psychologically ambushed I’d not had since 2014 or 2003.  It was the familiar feeling of a panic attack, but not quite as sharp as what I’ve experienced in the past.  I was in a place and a location that I didn’t want to be in!

I immediately advised my manager and told the staff I was working with the situation.  Then I was on my way back, making hands-free calls where I had signal.  A strange calmness fell over me between bouts of tears and praying.  I returned the vehicle to my workplace and immediately made my way to the hospital.  Family were already there.

At one point, I asked one of my aunts to take a photo of Mum, Dad, and us three boys.  The palliative care team took us aside while the nurses were tending to Mum, and we advocated for Mum from a position of disbelief.  Surely, she could make it through this time as she’d done so many times in the past two years.  I bargained with the palliative care doctor, “Can we get one more month,” and the doctor said that that was ambitious (unrealistic).  The palliative care doctor and nurse attended Mum with us family there, and those details are private.

Soon Mum was unconscious as the treatment started.  The following morning, though Mum looked comfortable, it was clear that Mum’s condition has worsened — my eldest daughter was stellar in updating all of us family throughout the week from her experience as a nurse and discussions with the doctors.

That day basically the entire family sat in vigil with Mum as she slept in comfort with her body dying.  I stayed that night with Dad at Mum’s bedside, a family member to support him.

At one point early in the evening, the nursing staff re-positioned Mum and it was clear that she was anything but comfortable.  I rang the nurses and needed to advocate for Mum.  “She could get bed sores,” the nurses said, and I quipped back, “Mum’s dying, bed sores are the least of her concerns.”  They re-positioned Mum on the side she always slept on.

Early in the morning Dad left briefly to have a shower.  When Dad returned I waited until about 9:45 when more family were there, and I left for the hour trip home to freshen up and be back later in the day.

As I approached home, my phone rang, and it was a sister-in-law, and I knew immediately what was happening.  “Steve, Mum’s passing...” and I turned straight back to the hospital, in a state of surreal disbelief.  Over the 50-minute trip back to the hospital, I had about five bouts of sobbing and a few bouts of simply praying for Mum, thanking God for her life.

As a family we spent time with Mum and each other in the hospital.  She had passed away in a peaceful and very graceful way with several family around her, Dad, two sons, a daughter-in-law, and a granddaughter.  As a family we then gathered with Dad for a few hours to take stock.

We left mid-afternoon to take our son to a birthday party he’d been looking forward to, and something really horrible happened.  We were shutting the boot of the car before going into the party and it came down on top of our son’s head and he screamed in pain — like shutting a child’s fingers in a car door.  We were suddenly all in tears again.  Those few hours were the most horrible hours almost in living memory (I’ve actually had far worse to be fair) as we were all upset at a celebration of life.

I struggled in absolute shock of Mum’s passing for two days, and an immense state of feeling alone in this world came over me.  That night was hard, waking in the morning was hard, but I did wake with a sense of purpose to gather together several of Mum’s photo albums together to take down to Dad where us brothers were gathering.  It was a good day, and the entire week of planning Mum’s funeral was one of Dad and his three sons and their families being together and working together for a beautiful funeral for the best Mum any child could want, and the best woman any man could be blessed to have by his side for 60 years.

The shape of my grief has changed over the past two weeks.  In the past few days, being back at work, I’m filled with more purpose, but thoughts of Mum never leave, but the pain has morphed into acceptance relatively quickly.  I’ll never not miss my Mum.  I accept that.  But I think the abiding sense of gratitude fills my heart because Mum truly was an exceptional Mum.  Her memory lives on in her husband, sons, daughters-in-law, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, other family and friends.

Mum, for who you were and are always, thank you from the bottom of my heart.

So dearly loved, endlessly missed.

Rescuing people from their pain is as bad as emotional bypassing

Compassion is such a nuanced thing that care often sits on a knife’s edge between not caring enough on the one hand and enabling or rescuing on the other.

When I was planning Mum’s funeral last week, being the one conducting such a precious occasion, I gave one of my daughters the heads-up to be on the lookout for those who might try and rescue me.  Her task was to be a guard.  I didn’t want anyone interrupting the sanctity of that time of grieving.

Rescuing can seem the ideal opportunity to come to someone’s aid when they’re experiencing distress.  But it isn’t always a good idea.

Indeed, rescuing someone from the pain they could endure and learn from betrays their opportunity to grow.  It’s destructive.  At the very least, a person can learn to depend on another person instead of learning to bear the pain that is ordinary to life.  Oftentimes those who come in and rescue have the ulterior motive of, “I’ll be there for them on every occasion,” or “They need me,” or “They won’t get through this without my help.”  And so they intervene.  Some even see themselves — consciously or unconsciously — as playing the saviour role.  It’s always harmful.

Being rescued is like the opposite of emotional bypassing, but both are damaging to the grieving process.  Emotional bypassing interrupts the vocalising of pain and squashes that expression with some flippant remark like, “Time heals all wounds,” or “You’ll get over this,” or “Look at all the good things in life you have,” or there’s some justifying of the pain of grief that simply doesn’t belong.  Rescuing is at the other end of the continuum of over caring rather than under caring — which is what emotional bypassing is.

In terms of enabling, a person who rescues someone from a pain they could otherwise bear enables a toxic pattern of maladjustment to occur.  As emotional bypassing interrupts the vocalising of pain and squashes its expression, rescuing a person from the natural processes of lament also interrupts the grief process.

Such an interruption forestalls the grief process entirely, when simply engaging in truthful lament would actually facilitate healing, albeit a long process.  But it works, does lament.  Lament works because it is about facing truth, and it is only truth that will set us free.

But there are people, and I have manipulators in the frame here, who exist for a purpose to connive and coerce and control.  Some rescuers do have a good heart, but they still do the wrong thing.  Those who manipulate, however, manipulate people and situations so that they can control the narrative to make themselves look good.  This is birthed in insecurity.  It’s all about them and they bring death to the hope of healing.

~

This article wouldn’t be complete without making some effort to explain what care looks like that neither enables nor rescues.

True care bears another person’s struggle 
without reaching in and attempting to fix it.

It takes management of one’s own anxiety.  It takes a heart that genuinely serves the other person.  It takes ‘putting off the self’ and ‘putting on the servant’.

It takes the authentic empathy of being ‘in’ the other person.

It takes silence by and large, with the only exceptions being to utter small though powerful affirmations, especially to counter untruths that those that suffer often speak over themselves, and doing this without lecturing, with silent affirmation being the predominant posture.

It takes the commitment to bear the tension of another person’s struggle WITH them, and in doing so they can see that it CAN be done.

~

True lament connects us so intrinsically with our broader truth that it opens the door to reason and a more holistic perspective.

Whenever we connect deeply with painful truth we’re also inadvertently connected to the truths of the joys in our life.  Once peered into, truth is a prism through which many thoroughly good things are seen.  Commit to seeing the depth of pain and hurt, and inevitably the truths of joy and cheer also shine through.

Commit to the truth in the pain and the eventual reward is a deeper sense of joy.

But when the journey of grief is interrupted by rescuing, healing is averted.

On the night before Mum’s funeral

One thing that helps with my grief is to write about it; to both explore the nuances of pain and mystery, and to share those things with others.  Like on at least two occasions previously, where a single life event has changed the course of my life, this too has that same effect.

Life has never been like it is right now and it will never be like it was when Mum was here.

This is NOT to say that it’s all doom and gloom; it’s just me saying that the person who brought me into the world, the person who believed in me every step of the way, the one who disciplined me and loved me with the truth for my own good every single day of my life until the recent days, is gone.  I’ve never lived any of my days without my Mum being physically alive before.

I know there will be many reading this who will really understand, those who have lost a parent, and who will attest to the hole that a parent’s loss leaves in oneself.  Frankly, I’m pleased for this, as a funeral celebrant myself, what I’ve experienced this week is almost essential life experience for a funeral celebrant.

On the night before Mum’s funeral, we as a family could not have done better in standing together and in planning a wonderful send-off for the matriarch of our family.  We’ve been together constantly every day deciding each decision together, imagining what Mum would like, and dividing the responsibilities in a way that could only please her.  We’ve stood by Dad and cried and laughed with him.  As a family we are all so grateful for the legacy both Mum and Dad leave in showing us how to love with a love that loves mercy and walks humbly.

Knowing that life will never be the same again is on the one hand a tragedy, yet on the other hand says so much for a love that makes a huge impact both in life and death.

During the week we have reflected on so many beautiful messages of how Mum has touched others’ lives, and each of these touches us, because we notice how much impact Mum has made by her just being her.

Personally, I have not tried to keep up and communicate back to people with the majority of these messages, simply because the focus this week has been on one thing and one thing only, and that is to plan the best funeral possible, and in doing so spend time with precious family and affirm one another in our love.

I think there is so much wisdom in grieving as a whole family for the complete week after a loved one’s death.  I’m sure many of us have been tempted to try and integrate our grief into the flow of our hectic lives, but at least in the present time, our family has genuinely enjoyed doing this for Mum together.

One thing for sure, once the dust settles, and we are back into the swing of ordinary life, I feel quite certain that the thought of Mum and her memorial presence with us will be the key difference of what life was like beforehand and what life’s like now.

All this is a reminder not to take a moment for granted, because in the moment we take for granted is the stuff of life that really counts.  But the strangest thing about all this is that we are bound to take life for granted, because life is full of mundane moments, and those mundane moments only take on the significance from the view of hindsight having lost someone special.  Now I look back on my activities of writing during the days that would now be Mum’s last, and wonder, “What was I thinking?  I was clueless about what was coming.”  Yet, I was getting on with my life, just as Mum would have wanted.  She’d have had it no other way.

The process of healing grief is interrupted by many things, not least guilt and other blockers to forgiveness, in the journey of accepting what life has come to be.

All this simply leads us to a better focus, and that is to be thankful for what we had, and to live with a new purpose, knowing that our dear loved one is with us.  I know that Mum is.  Mum, who was a constant reassurance, and someone who could beautifully balance and inform a skewed perspective, still offers that wisdom, if only we remember what she would say.  We can take that loving, kind and wise perspective with us beyond her death.

A few nights before Nathanael’s funeral I wrote, “Not long now, son, and we will mourn you, for your tent will be gone.”  We had such little time with our stillborn son.  Just four months to get to know him (after we learned his plight at the 20 week scan) and then say goodbye.  We’ve had Mum all our lives to this point, and she was a woman who left such a profoundly kind and gracious legacy.  THIS is the reason there’s a hole left inside of us that cannot be filled, and yet this hole is like classic Japanese kintsugi—the art form that takes broken pottery and lacquers the pieces together with a substance mixed with powdered gold.  In our brokenness is our healing.

What is left to say?  So many things, the limit of which is possibly infinite.  I will save you, poor reader, that task.

For who you were and are to me and us,
for all you gave to me and us,
I will love you always, Mum.
See you when it’s my turn.