Doesn't the non-fixability of these relationships put a person into perpetual and continual and everlasting grief that will not resolve?
Oh, Boat. I understand this question. From my heart cells.
A friend of mine who has been homeless is in a major crisis (to update on another thread)...and his sister wrote that a woman she knows who directs a program said that her accumulative impression is that most homeless people are very gentle souls, who in many ways are too gentle for this world. (That didn't accomodate the pure-bad-luck and this-cursed-economy factors). But it struck me as an insight. (And I would say cruel culture, rather than world...because we CAN make it different.)
For me, the community answer is not so much the group doing anything to me, but me repeatedly RE-deciding that this is how I will interpret my life in that community. Once I figured out that to belong to the human community in one positive setting was as important to my survival as protein (this was actually a surprise, but interviewing Alan Luks years ago, and the research on altruism, I began to see it)--I just began to look at sticking with it. It could've been Quaker, Buddhist, or a community garden group, or art group, or whatever...for me it fits to be in a religious community that embraces very diverse beliefs, including my agnosticism). Anyway I began to look at
the repetition of the behavior of going and showing up as something I:
1) have do to to have a chance at wellness (I lived as an outsider as a poet and writing is hermetic anyway, I had to do this for balance)
2) continue to do because it does divert me from that Great Grief
I think the Great Grief is true and real and I have been near-destroyed by it before.
Tossing my lot in with this particular community is my only chance of exposing myself, regularly, to words and notions and companionship that, some of the time, remind me there may also be Great Love.
(Being agnostic, I'll never prove whether that's true or not. But I will repetitively expose myself to the possibility that it might be, or the despair engulfs me.)
The only think I can do, in community life or in my own struggle, is to keep presenting the vibrant Great Grief...with episodes of love, service (which I do precious little of), and beauty.
I think I can handle the Great Grief better than I can Great Fear.
Another thing I think about when I'm going through repetitive heartbreak is that really, maybe the best goal I can have is to keep my eye on the much older people in my congregation who seem to have a lot of serenity. Normally, it's those who have simply settled into a repetitive life of living simply for themselves, and spending a lot of time in service. Whatever's empty after survival is met, I think I'll put there. And though I'm unhappy now, maybe in 10 years, when I'm 71, I'll find myself more like them. (And if I'm wrong and I'm still crawling on the floor pushing my wailing heart along ahead of me, I know most folks there will be kind enough to pick me up and haul me off to a potluck.)
I also remember the look on my father's face when he died, which was a blast of wonder. So I figure right or wrong, correct or confused, I can go the same place he did.
love to you,
Hops
