Gregory Orr writes:
‘Not to make loss beautiful,
But to make loss the place
Where beauty starts.’[1]
Orr was writing from a place of grief, which is so rich a part of love. But his words resonate at a time when so much of ‘life as we know it’ seems to be disappearing. Is there a different kind of beauty to be brought forth from this place of loss?
‘The place where beauty starts’ was the theme of a Lent 2025 email series[2] which reflected how the ashes of Ash Wednesday define the journey of Lent as involving loss, as well as gain: a laying down of self, a yielding to God, so that a beauty is revealed which may otherwise lay hidden. It’s an unconventional beauty, as the divine so often is: after all, the ashy ‘mark’ of Ash Wednesday is cruciform. It’s not ‘attractive’, yet how wondrous the Cross is to survey.
The prophet Isaiah suggests there’ll be nothing attractive about the Messiah ‘that we should desire him’. Yet his life’s work, which begins with his giving up of self-life in the desert, unveils the source and essence of divine beauty itself, in Him. His is the path of descent, the very embodiment of ‘wounded wisdom’.
Much of what automatically ‘attracts’ our attention is eye-catching or ego-stirring. Yet Jesus offers a very different path in which he gives himself away in selfless love. He dies to self and opens up the life of love which God longs for people to discover, even though it involves letting go of what they have held so tightly to.
Visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTnYpE_bkNERosemerry to watch an interview with the American poet Rosemerry Trommer. She speaks movingly about the deaths of her teenage son and her father some years ago. Through tears of grief and sorrow she speaks with of the joy and wonder which, from her experience, still seeks to be found within all – if, with compassion and courage, folk are willing to look. She is the embodiment of wounded wisdom, and she asks a profoundly powerful question: ‘How can we say ‘yes to the world as it is’ even from within a breaking open heart of grief?’
Her “Yes” to the world had begun as a creative project, many years previously, when she decided to ‘show up’ every day, whatever life held for her, by writing a poem and sharing it widely. When asked how she managed to say, “Yes to the world as it is” in the aftermath of her son’s death, she reflected that really, what she’d most truly experienced was the ability to say “OK”. “Yes” was just not fully possible – but crucially, “OK is not no,” she said. It is, “Thy will be done” within each coming moment. It is, very gently, an ”OK… OK… OK.” Joy and grief can not only co-exist, but they bring out the beauty in each other, because they’re part of a mysterious whole. After all, ‘how can I be only joyful, when you grieve? How can I only grieve, when you are joyful?’
The mystic Hildegard of Bingen uses a wonderful metaphor when she writes that we’re like birds who fly with two wings of awareness: ‘The one wing is an awareness of life’s glory and beauty. The other is an awareness of life’s pain and suffering. If we try to fly with only one of these, we will be like an eagle trying to fly with only one wing’. As this geo-political world slips into fearful binary opposites, it matters to learn to hold the paradox of pain and joy at this time, and to find a richer kind of beauty here. The beauty that comes by learning to let go and enter the mystery of life in God’s kingdom, rising as if, indeed, upon the wings of eagles.
Questions for reflection:
- How can you learn to say yes to the world as it is, today?
- What small practice can you adopt, to help you in this regard?
- What difference does it make to look for the love within difficult circumstances instead of the fear?
This year’s SPECTRUM Conference, Wounded Wisdom was held at Highgate House in May and was attended by around 25 people. The subtitle was Discovering Healing and Hope – Words and Wisdom for these days, and the content addressed how our minds and bodies try to cope with the sense of woundedness and vulnerability which are a familiar result of wrestling with all that the news and daily life throw at us. The speakers were Jo Cox-Darling and Brian Draper, who also prepared papers for the Spectrum annual study guide, which we also share through on Theology Everywhere. This is part three of a series of six articles. Also see The art of vulnerability and This is my body and Love for the unloved days.
[1] Gregor Orr, How Beautiful The Beloved (Copper Canyon Press, 2009)
[2] https://www.briandraper.org/product-page/lent-series-2025
Theology Everywhere 