LEAVES FALL

While the leaves fall

As autumn takes hold, the mood, the traditions, even the weather of the month of November often turn our thoughts to those whom we have lost. But death need not mean the loss of meaning – love and loss are forever inextricably linked November winds carry echoes of loss. It is the month of All Saints,

All Souls and commemoration of the war dead when memories

that bless and burn come back to haunt us.

We sense anew the absence of the loves of our lives. But by now we have learned that love and loss go together. If you love, you are sure to suffer; if you do not love, you will suffer even more.

Most of us, in fact, in the fine resiliency of the human soul, are willing to try loving, again and again, though we understand how

vulnerable that makes us to loss. But we cannot live without love and loss. They are written into our DNA; into the very nature

of life itself.

One way or another, loss forever shadows the light of our lives. And the more we love people and things, and the more attached we are to our dreams and hopes, the more deeply we will feel their loss. Each of us has our own story of loves and losses, of coping with the raw joys and hurting edges they score into

our soul.

The impact of loss is often unpredictable, and can be utterly poignant. It can suddenly ambush you, that aching sense of someone’s absence brought on by a spring morning, a summer pathway, an autumn sky, an empty chair, the first Christmas carol you must listen to alone.

Long after she had died, the sight of some scribbled comments by my mother, tucked away in the pages of the book I was rereading,

twisted my heart in a way impossible to describe.

Loving someone wraps invisible blankets of blessing around both people. The most beautiful and essential parts of us are entwined

with those of the other. These invisible realities are often below consciousness. I remember a mother in my last parish telling me that she suddenly woke up one night with the shocking

realisation that her son had just died.

This awareness came to her, I felt, not as any kind of sad news from the outside, so to speak: it came from within, a sense of the

absence of an invisible bonding that was central to the throbbing substance of both their lives. It was not the arrival of something new that had come into her head; it was the death of something essential that had left her heart.

Spiritual writer Henri Nouwen reflected on the inescapable presence of loss. “There is a quality of sadness that pervades all the moments of life. It seems that there is no such thing as clear-cut pure joy; even in the happiest times we sense a tinge of loss… But this intimate experience of loss can point beyond the limits of our existence.”

When our hearts are broken from bitter mourning, there is little comfort in Nouwen’s words. Our mourning is not turned into

dancing overnight. We can discern no hidden grace in grief and loss. We are like a seed buried in the darkness, alone and waiting.

It is only when the time is right, when the heart is ready, that loss, like a midwife, brings something very special and undreamt of into the emptiness of our lives. The moment of a new and slowly emerging reality will only come when we trust the possibility of such a resurrection, and open ourselves to it.

Our life, we discover, has not lost its meaning. Something in our soul forever senses possibility. In “Love without Frontiers”,

Preston-born poet Phoebe Hesketh wrote:

A love without frontiers that sees without

eyes, Is present in absence and never denies The unexplored country beyond.

Loss is like a teacher. Its value lies in the space it makes for something new to grow. “Loss makes vital clearance in the soul,” wrote John O’Donohue. “Loss is the sister of discovery; it is vital to openness; though it certainly brings much pain.”

Where the loss is caused by the death of a dearly loved friend or relation, that sense of loss may now begin to open the slow door to another way of being with that person.

Unrestricted by time and place, a new intimacy becomes possible. Jesus was so conscious of that mysterious transition – the need to

leave us so as to possess us more intimately.

The felt sting of death lessens; the reality of the love does not. No matter what subsequently happens, where love was once true,

it will never be replaced. Part of you will always be a presence around the other, and from their unseen places, they will most certainly be minding us with the purest love.

This is the message of the angel of grief.

We do not have to become stuck forever in the sands of sorrow. We step free beyond it. There is a wider and firmer space in which

to move with the rhythm of life. It does not mean that we turn away from the person or place that we no longer experience as we once did. Nor does it mean that a new love replaces the old one. True love is not like that.

In “The Unfilled Gap” (Letters and Papers

from Prison), theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote about the dynamic of space between those who have truly loved: “Nothing can fill the gap when we are away from those we love, and it would be wrong to try to find anything, since leaving the gap unfilled preserves the bond between us. It is nonsense to say that

God fills the gap. He does not fill it but keeps it empty, so that communion with another may be kept alive even at the cost of pain.”

There is a nourishing paradox in the way another peerless theologian, Karl Rahner, reflects on the unfilled gap. “There is no such thing in either the world or the heart as a vacuum,” he said. “And wherever space is really left by death, by renunciation, by parting, by apparent emptiness, provided that the emptiness

is not filled by the world, or activity, or noise, or the deadly grief of the world – there is God.”

Those who have loved and lost, and grown through it all, have already tasted death and resurrection. They have followed their passion, they have risked for love; they have been devastated by loss. And because they loved and trusted life once, the final death will never be a fearful stranger.