Mourning to Hope
In a recent post, Peter Rollins shares a stimulating story from the Buddhist tradition. He summarizes it as follows:
The story tells of a mother whose baby dies. She is so distraught that she carries the dead body strapped to her chest and travels around attempting to find someone who would be able to breathe life back into her beloved infant’s body.
Eventually she finds a holy man who says that he can help her, but only if she can bring to him a handful of mustard seeds from a home whose inhabitants have not suffered the loss of someone they love.
The woman begins to search but is unable to find any home that has not been marked by the dark shadow of death and loss. Yet, in her futile search something truly amazing happens. For as she hears the various stories of these different people she slowly begins to come to terms with the death of her own child. After a little time she is finally able to let go and bury her infant in the soil of the Earth
Rollins goes on to discuss how the Ikon collective was originally established as a place for those mourning the death of a particular conception of God.
This story is strangely relevant to my own personal journey, for it was the death of my own first child that precipitated the death of my conception of God. In many ways, the past few years of my life have been dominated by my own search to find others who are mourning the loss of a previous conception of God. I have traveled far and wide, carrying the lifeless remains of my previous faith within me, desiring to find anyone who might share a similar story or listen to my own story.
After the loss of our child, it took my wife and me a year before we were able to go to the cemetery and acknowledge the place where our son was buried in the soil of the Earth. In much the same way, I think it has only been during the past year that I have let go and buried my previous conception of God. I still desire to hear the stories of others who have experienced a similar loss, but I have also moved more fully in the direction of imagining a new way of believing, and a new way of living. I think this new blog is one way I am stepping into this new stage of the journey.
Perhaps my reflections on this Buddhist story also shed some light on why the Bonhoeffer quote that serves as an inspiration for this blog has been so meaningful to me over the past year, and why it gives me hope as I move into the future.
Before God and with God we live without God.
