Thank you for joining us!
Before we begin, I wanted to share a Comment Highlight from Monday’s discussion question:
This is from
’s lovely response:I don’t think full clarity is ever guaranteed. However, this made me think of a commentary I read a long time ago (no idea where or who) about Psalm 119:105 “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.”
Basically, it said to consider the “lamp” more like a flashlight then a spotlight. A flashlight only shows you a few steps ahead. It doesn’t illuminate the whole path, which tends to be what we want it to do. ;) We have to take the next step to be given more light to see by. I think this aligns well with needing to take a step deeper into the fog in order to see more clearly.
Beautifully said, Sheryl, and thank you so much for sharing with us!
Encircled
Here’s something you should know about The Wildroot Parables: while it’s not written in an entirely spontaneous way, I do like to leave a lot of room “for the Spirit” when it comes to my weekly entries. Sometimes a topic is very obvious to write about, and sometimes it’s a bit murkier. But when I sit down to write, I always find that I have something to say.
Last night, when I was thinking about what to write, the only thing that was coming to mind was just…the heaviness. Shared grief of the news lately, the news always. Last night’s horrific news out of Maine, recent events all tumbled together. There is always pain to be felt, no matter whether we choose to bury our heads in the sand and ignore it, or not.
This is the final Thursday before Hallowe’en, and I truly wanted to dive deeper into topics that I felt were more seasonally appropriate, especially about ancestry. But all I could think of to share was, instead, a prayer for grief.
Arguably, grief is also seasonally appropriate. Death and grief go hand in hand. As the actor Andrew Garfield said in a beautiful interview with Stephen Colbert, “Grief is unexpressed love.”
But what about community grief?
I believe that the wider grief of the community—local, national, international—looking in on a tragedy is also love, but of a different kind. It is the helpless feeling of wishing we could comfort, soothe, and surround. Of maybe even hoping we could turn back the clock, make it all go away.
This kind of grief is a deep yearning to repair, restore, and redeem what has been broken.
Obsessing over the news is not healthy. But I do believe that there is a place for us to grieve, even for strangers. To that end, I wrote this prayer after the tragic deaths in Uvalde, Texas last year. It is a caim prayer.
A caim is an “encircling” prayer. In the wisdom of Celtic thought, these prayers would be said when walking in a circle around a person or place as a symbol of protection, or surrounding. These are some of my favorite prayers to write, and to say. There’s nothing magical about the circling aspect of a caim. It is simply a physical way to embody a spiritual truth of God’s protective “circle” around us.
This prayer is dedicated to all of us as we navigate what it means to grieve as a collective when terrible things happen on a larger scale. Maybe we can’t physically surround the grieving with our love, but we can do so with our prayer, even from a distance.
To symbolize the way God surrounds us with His peace, you could say this prayer while walking, while embracing, while drawing a circle with your finger on the tabletop or in the air…or even while stirring your morning coffee.
A Prayer For Collective Grief
June 2022
encircle us, O Lord we whose knees kiss the earth we whose arms are heavy from carrying we whose eyes ache from weeping God of every circle, the seasons of birth and mirth and death the sunwise path that leads us on, keep grace within, keep discord without keep safety within, keep danger without encircle us, O Lord encircle us, as grass grows tall encircle us as fledglings fall encircle us, one and all as the blackberry vines grow sharp and sweet alike: green leaf and choking vine thorn and berry, too.
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seasons of birth and mirth and death ...beautiful, my friend.
I too have felt heavy the past couple of weeks. Not hopeless heavy, but there is a definite weight felt almost constantly. So much pain and grief in the world.
I find written prayers really helpful at times like this when I can’t always formulate words myself, and your beautiful encircling prayer is so appreciated.
Thank you for your kindness in sharing my comment. :)