What do we do with those we have lost?

What do we do with those we have lost to death? After reading “Vocatis Atque Non Vocatis, Deus Aderit” four days ago, my friend Bill shared a quote from Simone Weil: “Love is not a state, but a direction.” He had been struck by my reference to a God who waits and waits and waits, who is with us in the present and moves with us toward our future. And he suggested that perhaps Love is both a state and a direction, and he said something profound about our relationship to God:

"We are advent people with an advent God. The great mystery of 'already but not yet.' … Dan's waiting is over. His direction and God's have merged."

My brother Dan is clearly a part of me, Dan who we say is “dead”. I remember my emotions taking me when I first used the past tense to describe him, there at his memorial service. “Dan is…was….” Whether there is some afterlife, where we have an individual identity, an autonomous self, is a question that arises when death is near to us. But I am certain that Dan is in the present tense in me, and in all of us who re-member him, bring him to life in our memory, bring him back to our company.
Simone Weil uses the word “state” to describe what love is not. We describe the body of the deceased available for viewing as “lying in state”. Stationary, status, static…it means that they’re not moving; it means that they are still. She suggests that our love for those we have lost to death is not static, unchanging, not just that stillness that settles on us in memory, but that by loving them, we take them in some direction.

What do we do with those we have lost to death? Bring them with us; go where they need to go to grow to their fullness. Consider the woman who is “with child”, carrying inside her this life that is part of her, but itself, too, an identity that is part of hers, but not hers. The development of that unborn child is determined by what she does for herself, how she eats, works, sleeps, feels, handles stress, loves. The child is “already, but not yet”. Perhaps this is the first stage of grief. But I think that there is a second.  Our direction and theirs merge as we move together toward God. I cannot take Dan where I do not myself go. If I want him to feel the love of God, I must feel it myself, he will be refreshed in the rain in which I dance.  If I want him to enjoy the laughter of children, then I must enjoy it myself, and let the Dan in me hear it.

Perhaps we bring those we have lost to death here within as we ourselves move toward the God of our own wholeness and healing. Perhaps they are, like that unborn child, still within our movement, but not a burden we carry, but rather bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh, spirit of our spirit as we ourselves move toward the timeless God, the God who is already but not yet, who both accompanies us in love and awaits us in love. Perhaps they are healed in our healing, and arrive at their own wholeness as we do.

Tomorrow - Transfiguration.