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Defining
Life:
Healing the Pain of Loss
by Father Paul Keenan |
Two years ago there began a cycle in my life that seemed
to lead to one loss after another. It all began with the
death of my friend, Phil Salberg, alias "Phil from
Howard Beach," a long-time listener to my radio
shows who became a very dear friend. I had visited Phil
in the hospital, but learned of his death when his son
called one of my shows while I was on the air. The day
after Phil’s funeral, New York’s John Cardinal O’Connor
died. Losing him was like losing my father all over
again. For many years, he had been both my bishop and my
inspiration. Later in the summer, my cat Flicka passed
away at the age of twenty-five. In the thirteen years
she had been with me, I had watched her go from severe
depression to a lively and cranky domination of her
surroundings. The last night of her life, she ate her
usual hearty dinner, went away quietly, and – during
the night – left us. The next day, my dear friend Ned
Giordano, in the prime of his life, suddenly fell over
dead while talking to his mother- and father- in-law. A
few weeks later, another old friend, Larry Murphy,
affectionately known as "Uncle Dink," passed
away. The year 2000 was a year of funerals.
So was 2001, if you measure it by the more than 3000
people – many so very young – who perished in the
tragic terrorism of September 11. Among them was my good
friend Chris Hanley, whose company I had shared at a
baptism just two days before. Chris to me became a
personal symbol of the horrible losses we all shared on
and after that tragic day. I wondered if I – if we –
would ever stop grieving.
2002 has left us to deal with those losses, and with
others as well. Many companies have downsized, leaving
employees holding pink slips and worries about bills.
The scandals surrounding Enron, WorldCom and other
corporations have affected the jobs and incomes of
countless workers. There has resulted a loss of investor
confidence. The threats of a similar loss of confidence
motivated church leaders to revamp policies regarding
clergy sexual abuse of minors. Our losses in recent
months have included losses of people, of jobs, of
income and of social confidence. That’s a lot of loss
to endure.
Having endured numerous personal losses and having
experienced heavy societal losses as well, one question
rises head and shoulders for me above all others. How
can the pain of loss be healed? Or can it?
In dealing with any life problem, such as healing the
pain of loss, it’s important to start deductively –
from above – rather than inductively – from below.
That’s not as complicated as it sounds. For once you
think about it, our usual approach to problems is to fix
them. That’s the inductive way: we work at eye level
to try to come up with a solution. When we lose someone,
say, we’ll look for ways to fix our grief. Some people
hide in bed. Others drink excessively. Still others lose
themselves in projects. A sudden loss of income can
trigger escape mechanisms in some and in others a
frenzied rushing around to find any job, any source of
income available. The problem is that fix-it solutions
seldom work. The reason they seldom work is that they
leave out the most important thing about us – namely,
who we are and what we’re doing here.
The only cure for the pain of loss is to go back to
the higher (or deeper, if you prefer) principles of Life
and to work deductively from them to resolve the issues
of our grief. My book Heartstorming explains this
in detail. But let’s take a bird’s eye look at what
this higher, more enduring healing is all about.
In dealing with the pain of loss, I always like to
start with the question – What is Life? Whether I’m
dealing with the loss of a loved one or with another
kind of loss, the first thing I want to do is to recall
what I think about Life. When I’m dragged down by
feelings of grief, I’m tempted to think that Life is
in the world around me; and as I sense the loss of a
part of that world, I suffer. On the other hand, if I
remember that Life is not defined by the world around
me, but is truly spiritual and infinite, then I further
remember that it is the spiritual that constitutes the
dearest essence of Life. Ideals like Beauty, Love,
Truth, Purpose, and Peace. I work from that principle,
deductively, and apply it to my grief. When Chris Hanley
died so senselessly in the World Trade Center, my heart
broke for the loss of my friend, on top of all the other
losses I had had. Why is it that every loss seems to
bring up all the ones that went before it? When I sat
down to try to heal my feelings, I discovered that the
essence of our friendship – our common love of
Knowledge and Truth and the Beauty of music and the Love
of God, for example – had not died with him at Ground
Zero. If anything, it had been strengthened, and I knew
that those shared ideals and our common dedication to
them would long surpass the thirty-five short years of
Chris’s earthy life. Do I still miss him? Absolutely.
But his mortal absence from this world is no longer a
stopping point for me, but rather enables me to move
ahead with direction and purpose.
Something similar applies when we lose a job or lose
our financial status. On one level, we feel fear and
anger and other emotions as we look at what we have
lost. But when we go back to the Life question and start
from there, we can see how our former situation put us
in touch with values such as Purpose, Patience, Concern
for Others – that are what Life is really all about.
These are not things we need ever lose. As a result, we
can attune ourselves to a sense of Life’s abundance,
rather than its scarcity. Life’s values are unlimited,
and need never go away.
The first question, then, to bring to our grief is
– what do I believe about Life? Coming to see the
spiritual ideals embodied in our loved ones or in our
former circumstances helps us to heal. It keeps us in
touch with their essence, and helps us to remember that
the essence of these relationships will never pass away.
A second healing question we can bring to ourselves
in times of grief is – what do we believe ourselves to
be? Lost in the throes of grief – especially if our
losses have been many – we can come to see ourselves
as helpless victims of fate. "I guess I’m just
unlucky," we say. Or "I’m just a loser, I
guess." Death and loss are inevitable and
ineluctable masters, we believe, and there isn’t a
thing we can do about it. All good things must come to
an end, after all.
That’s what happens when we allow ourselves to be
locked into grief and loss. On the other hand, if we
allow our thoughts to proceed from above, we can see in
the aforementioned ideals the possibility of a legacy,
which will allow us to move forward while keeping the
best of our relationship alive. In Stages of the Soul,
I spoke of Antoinette Bosco, whose one son and
daughter-in-law were brutally murdered, only to have
another son later commit suicide. When I asked her how
she managed to go on, she told me, "I decided that
my children needed a legacy, and that my life would be
their legacy." She is a prolific writer of
inspirational articles and books, and a passionate
opponent of the death penalty. Antoinette went on by
drawing on the best qualities of the lives of her loved
ones, and by empowering herself and her work with those
values. By doing so, she continued to enrich and bless
the world.
If we are to heal from the pain of loss and grief, we
must move beyond quick-fix solutions and draw upon an
understanding of what Life truly is and who we really
are as bearers of the best values of Life into the
world. Can we heal? Yes. Is it an easy process? No. Is
the healing complete? Usually not. But don’t despair
– the edge of sadness that we retain is a gift that
keeps us tenderhearted while it endows us with an
appreciation of how precious our loved ones and our
cherished moments are.
Where is God in all of this, and what if we find
ourselves angry with God in the face of our losses? I
believe that when we turn from our morass to look at the
essential qualities of life, we are beholding the face
of God. God is the Goodness and Beauty and Truth and
Love that are the essence of Life.
Yet what about the anger with God that we sometimes
feel in the face of our losses? People ask, "Is it
okay to be angry with God?"
It’s a difficult question, because no one likes
being angry with anyone, really, including with God. No
matter how justified we think our anger at someone might
be, we’re never happy at bearing the burden of being
angry. In that sense, there is always something
"not-okay" about it.
Granted that, there are really two parts to the
question of being angry with God. One, are we ever
right, ultimately, in being angry with God? Two, does
God mind if we are angry with him?
To the first question, my own answer is that I don’t
believe that God causes natural disasters, acts of war,
acts of terrorism, illness and other evils. Rather, I
believe he works at preventing them. In popular
conversation, you hear the notion that God
"permits" evil. Personally, I’m never sure
what that could mean. God always respects human freedom,
yes. Yet he always gives every help possible to entice
us to choose good. But when people talk about God’s
"permitting" evil, they often make it sound as
if God really did want the evil after all. On the
evening of September 11, when I was walking home from my
office, a young man stopped me on the street. "What
does God think about this?" he wanted to know.
"He’s shaking his head," was my reply. I
wasn’t kidding.
Does God mind when we get angry with him? The Hebrew
Bible stories of Jonah and Job and the New Testament
stories of the Prodigal Son and the anger of Martha and
Mary with Jesus after Lazarus’s death, indicate that
when we get angry, God listens. He does not react in
kind or blame us for our anger. He listens, takes it in,
and responds wisely and without rancor. By listening to
our anger, God is able to heal it; for listening is what
anger really needs and wants. When God replies, it is to
uplift us rather than to retaliate. It seems that God is
larger than our anger. He is Love, and he knows how to
embrace us when we are angry and how to teach us without
demeaning us.
The experience of grief challenges us to open our
horizons from the material and temporal to the spiritual
and eternal. When we allow ourselves to recall who God
is and who we are, we can find a measure of healing and
a way of cherishing Life.
© Copyright 2002 Father Paul Keenan. All Rights Reserved.
Father Paul Keenan: Popular speaker, author and
radio co-host of WABC Radio’s "Religion on the
Line," Father Paul Keenan likes to talk and write
about the issues that matter to people. Widely
experienced as a national and local television and
radio news commentator, he is the author of Good
News for Bad Days, Stages of the Soul and Heartstorming.
As Director of Radio Ministry of the Archdiocese
of New York, he supervises, produces and writes for
various radio and television programs. In addition, he
serves as a parish priest in New York City.
Father Paul Keenan, came to his
now-ten-year-old career in New York broadcasting after
having been a college teacher and administrator and a
parish priest for many years. He hails from Kansas City,
where he graduated from Rockhurst University and
completed an M.A. in Moral and Pastoral Theology at
Saint Louis University. He was ordained to the
priesthood in 1977, and went on to complete an M.A. in
Philosophy at Fordham University.
Father Paul is also known for
his work on the Web. He hosts his own website (www.fatherpaul.com)
and contributes regular articles to various other sites.
He is a regular columnist for the monthly newspaper,
"Catholic New York." His other talents and
interests include reading, cooking and being humble
servant to his three cats, Teddy, Lionel and Midnight.
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