The Slow Way: Grief, Wisdom, and Circles of Welcome

What does it mean to let our grief shape us into elders, choosing wisdom over bitterness? I’m certain the answer is in the circle of welcome.

for the frantic strivers, serial doers, and weary achievers

I picked back up a book about grief this week. I’ve had a project I want to write about my dad, and in my naive sense of how I wish summer worked versus how it actually works for me, I hoped I’d have some time to write it in these months in which my kids are AROUND all day long, and I’m driving Ace seventy miles every day back and forth for a seven-week-long therapeutic treatment, dropping my big boys off at various camps, and returning emails qualified with lots of “thank you for your patience with my delay”s and “I apologize for the slow response”s.

All that to say, the long form essay hasn’t come to be. But The Wild Edge of Sorrow, one of the books I wanted to read, has been sitting in my morning reading pile, and I picked it up this week in a moment of stillness. It’s a book that’s not as much about walking through a season of grief as it is about learning to embrace a relationship with grief, understanding that grief is not “a period of mourning—but . . . an ongoing conversation that accompanies us throughout life.” It’s a book about having a healthy relationship with grief, learning the practices that will develop in us “ripened melancholy combined with rituals of gratitude.” That’s how Francis Weller says, we become elders. We learn “to face the world and not turn away.”

At the same time, I’ve been thinking about how one of the gifts of having a teenager has been the reminder of how raw it feels to be alive when you’re fresh on this planet. When the pain of the world and the longing for your life are only beginning to swirl inside you, when there is no determined path yet and all things are possible, and hope is almost a physical ache inside.

When those feelings rage, what do you need the most? As a youth pastor I think about this question a lot, and the answer I keep coming to is our desperate need for belonging. Weller comes to the same conclusion when he talks about grief: “We need to create circles of welcome in our lives in order keep leaning into the world; to keep moving grief through our psyches and bodies, so we can taste the sweetness of life.” Circles of welcome, he says. 

This past week I left my oldest son at a camp where he’s working in the dining hall as a waiter with a crew of other high school kids for three weeks, volunteering. He didn’t know a soul there and went through various stages of feelings as we drove closer and closer to the camp. It was going to be great! Maybe the kids would be totally weird. Ugh, this was going to be awful. No, he was really looking forward to it. Okay, it would be okay.

He arrived a few days later than the rest of the team, which had already bonded, and which could have received his presence kindly but unenthusiastically. I watched as he was introduced to the team: “Everyone, this is August! August, tell us one thing about yourself.” 

“Uh, well I just saw Barbie last night.”

Roaring. The seventeen other teenagers whooped and high-fived him, moaned about their fate as people who had not yet seen Barbie, and laughed and moved toward him in the course of seconds, all of which felt sacred. A circle of welcome. I watched from the outside like a scientist, fascinated by humanity and its goodness. And I knew in that moment that my kid would be okay, that his heart rate was lowering, that his fears of whether or not these other kids were normal or weird, kind or exclusive, fun or boring all dissipated. I was also reminded how the ache inside us needs the ache inside others. We need circles where we can share our lives together. 

This week I also picked up a book of essays by Brian Doyle, who like my dad, passed away from the monstering of cancer in the brain. His first essay in his collection One Long River of Song is about hearts—the hummingbird’s heart, the blue whale’s heart, and somehow our hearts—“We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must…When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore…” 

What carries us in our grief and in our hope? What does it mean to hold our fragile and rickety hearts with the hope we naively carried in our youth? What does it mean to let our grief shape us into elders, choosing wisdom over bitterness? I’m certain the answer is in the circle of welcome: the magic of our fragile hearts holding one another’s fragile hearts, and how, somehow, in this uncertain carrying we honor each other’s experiences, loves, and sufferings. We learn to be vulnerable together, which just might be the hardest thing of all.

A Slow Practice

This week I want us all to consider belonging as an invitation to build circles of welcome in our everyday lives. If our grief is a lifelong conversation with the world, how are we holding that conversation right now? And how is that conversation keeping us vulnerable enough to invite the fragile hearts around us into the dialogue?

I’m not sure how to give us a practical way toward that lofty goal, except to invite us into awareness that it matters. The vulnerability we hold, the rituals we practice, the community we build—it all matters.

Today our practice is to lean into that vulnerability for the sake of making us a little softer toward one another. Take a sheet a paper and tear it into eight or ten pieces. And take a few minutes to write on those pieces of paper the great losses of your life. Those losses can be people, of course. But they can also be relationships, friendships that drifted away or ended suddenly, romantic partnerships that came to end. They can also be a significant loss that may be hard to define—a financial blow, a life-altering diagnosis, a child who rebelled or hurt themselves or others, a couple whose divorce impacted your life, rejection from a once-dear community, and on and on. Our lives are full of griefs, big and small. Don’t deny yourself the right to name your griefs. All of them matter. 

Now take your little pieces of paper and find a jar or container to keep them in for the week or as long as you want. Psalm 56:8 declares that God has “taken account of my miseries; put my tears in Your bottle. Are they not in Your book?” This week, as more griefs come to mind, write them down and add them to the bottle. This is your ritual of grieving. And if there is an opportunity to share what you’re doing with someone else in your life, tell them. Circles of welcome are made gently, not through big declarations of intentions to build community, but through gentle and vulnerable acts of trust. This is your invitation. 

This is how we move toward wisdom, friends. I’ll go with you.