War lays waste to the landscape of a country and to the landscape of a human life at the same time, leaving ruin and suffering behind it, the broken windows and roofs of our souls and, often enough, the walls as well.
Grieving belongs to our existence on this silent planet rather than to the list of things needing a cure, and when death and destruction become the ordinary weather of a place, grief works itself into the daily struggle along with everything else.
Grieving is a human response and not a flaw in the character, whatever those who prefer to spiritualise it and diagnose it may say, since diagnosing grief is a convenient way to avoid taking in how deep it runs in the people you work with, partner with and live beside.
Grieving is no disorder, and calling it one attaches a stigma and then withdraws support precisely from those whom grief has carried so far down that they have lost the sense of their own life and even of their own pain.
Grieving is no mental illness, and there is no reason to feel ashamed of recognising it in yourself in front of the spiritual iron men. Looking for a safe place to let your grief out is nothing to apologise for, a place where your mind and your soul can be emptied enough that the Holy Spirit alone can fill them again, not with something, but with Himself.
Grieving reaches well beyond the death of those we love, deep as that source is. It includes the loss of our homes, our communities, our whole way of living, and the sense of safety we once had for our children and our parents and our brothers and sisters. Those losses ruin people too.
Our grieving is an inborn answer to death, and to the fear of death coming for the people we love, in the middle of chaos and loss. It says something about the sacredness of life and about the bonds of love that hold us together in wartime, and it ties us back to what is human in us, our capacity for deep attachment and for shared empathy, which neither the walls a society builds nor the violent divisions of a war can cut through.
Grieving is how we work through collective trauma, emotional and spiritual and moral, and how we fasten ourselves to life again. Those who label wartime grief as pathological have therefore misunderstood something in themselves, and in the human condition, and in the very nature of the Other.
Grieving has to do with our need for meaning and purpose in our relationships with the Other.
Grieving is how we come to understand our place, not in the ideal world but in the broken one, shattered by war, where everything feels beyond our control and we badly need to reassert that we are human.
Grieving reminds us that we share a humanity made in His image and likeness, while war works in the opposite direction, aiming to dehumanise us, to silence us on the silent planet, and to drive us off the floating islands onto the fixed land before sunrise, at the hour when only the Green King and the Lady are permitted to go there.
To call grief a disease is to say it must be treated and cured so that people can go back to normal functioning. After a deep loss there is no normal left to go back to, since we are changed permanently. Even the Son of God carries the wounds in His hands into the eternity that is and the eternity still to come, eternal scars, though without the burning and tearing pain of hell.
If Jesus grieved in the garden of Gethsemane, and on the road to Golgotha, and then on the cross, who am I to play the spiritually invulnerable Rambo who refuses to admit that he can be wounded at all?
“Who am I, my Maleldil?”
“I am with you, Ransom, as Who I am. I am near, and I am grieving with you. One day you will be un-incarnated, so that you may be incarnated again into a new body without grieving, with the scars still there, and the pain gone.”
Peace be with you, the People of the Bridge, and I wish you a silent night, you and your children.
Taras Dyatlik, Ukraine
24 June 2023
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