Rituals of Grief

People are kneeling in the darkness of a cathedral as a candle is processed by a dancer through the middle of the group to the center where a circle of candles is lit. A cello plays a meditative melody. A loaf of bread is broken and passed among the people. A bell rings, and we open ourselves to the mystery of this moment, not knowing what we will discover tonight.

No words have been spoken, but the gathering is filled with symbols. It is ritual, and we feel something rise within us, something we had forgotten was there, something that quickens our pulse and draws us in.

The holidays are filled with rituals. Which ones affected you the most? Which ones were comforting? Which ones disturbed your focus on what you thought was important?

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For this post I gathered two pages of background material on rituals, but I’m not going to use them because they have too many words. In our rituals we find a great symbol, but then we feel the need to explain the symbol in words, diluting the power of the symbol to speak in its own way.

Ritual is what engages our whole being, the body and the spirit in addition to the mind. It involves all of our senses. Movement, poetry, incense, bells, candles, and art help us move outside our conscious mind, which perceives only part of reality, and guide us into Presence, into the Unknown beyond our knowing.

For death and grief, there are communal rituals like the Irish wake, sitting Shiva in the Jewish faith, and the Lakota Sioux coming together for mourning and dispersing the dead person’s belongings. There are personal rituals like lighting candles in the evening, a small remembrance altar at home with ashes and objects important to our loved ones, visiting the gravesite, and keeping an empty chair at the dinner table. The Japanese have shrines in their homes where they continue to communicate with their ancestors.

In her TEDx talk, Elaine Mansfield, author of Leaning Into Love, says we turn to rituals to connect our lives to the sacred.

In her husband’s cremation box she put mementos of their life together and things important to Vic. She put in coffee beans and chocolate, not that she thought he would actually need them, but they were symbolic of what he enjoyed in life. She put in photographs of their life, flowers, and written prayers. Later she buried his ashes near their favorite tree and built a cairn of rocks from the stream over it. She goes there to be close to him, bringing, at different times, red crabapples, gladiolas, and candles, and moistening the rocks with her tears.

Ritual carries us over the chasm of disbelief.

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Imagine a weekly ritual of drinking tea with someone who is also grieving, and no one speaks. The two drink tea in silence and watch each other’s eyes. They watch expressions change on their faces as each one thinks about and feels their grief. There are touches on the arm and hand. When the tea is gone, they rise, hug each other and smile, then depart until next week.

We are drawn to create rituals with our lives, to get lost in the language of our hearts like poets, be filled with the images and curiosity of artists, and dance like Zorba the Greek when our emotions can find no other way of expressing what has filled our entire being.