Notes on Ritual and Grief
Excerpts from The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller
In essence, we are asked to take up an apprenticeship with sorrow. . . .this apprenticeship leads us below ground, into the hallway of shadows and forgotten ancestors.
Learning we can be with our grief, holding it softly and warmly, is the first task in our apprenticeship. . . . For us to tolerate the rigors of engaging the images, emotions, memories, and dreams that arise in times of grief, we need to fortify our interior ground.
“Where there is sorrow there is holy ground.” Oscar Wilde
It is our unexpressed sorrows, the congested stories of loss, that, when left unattended, block our access to the soul. To be able to freely move in and out of the soul’s inner chambers, we must first clear the way.
We have the sense that we are on a slow walk with no obvious direction. Fortunately, grief knows where to take us; we are on a pilgrimage to the soul.
Ritual offers us the two things required to fully let go of the grief we carry: containment and release.
Ritual is any gesture done with emotion and intention by an individual or a group that attempts to connect the individual or the community with transpersonal energies for the purpose of healing and transformation.
One of [ritual’s] most powerful impacts is that it breaks us open to a vast and more enchanted world.
…[R]itual…began with an invocation to include those energies that are bigger than us — the spirits of the place, the ancestors, the mystery, and whatever it is that we hold sacred. Then we invite them to tell us the whole story.
Keep the appointment with ritual.
Note from Sharon: As many across the globe enter the upcoming season of rituals, may the possibility increase for the healing and transformation that Weller explains is possible when individual and community connect “with emotion and intention.”
