“If prayer is the attempt to understand God, then grieving is the deepest form of prayer, rising from the body and soul and mind, asking God and really and truly wanting to know, no matter what the answer: Who are you? Why did you create a world with pain? Why is life this way? What are you? Because you are not what I thought you were.

Grieving, at its deepest level, is to acknowledge that creation can be cruel and that people suffer. To look at this truth, to allow yourself to feel it, you are forced to consider the nature of this world and this existence. you ask how this can be and who set this up and why this happens. To grieve is to ask God the hardest questions. To grieve is to ask who God really is. It’s to change your perspective on all other human beings and their relationships to one another and to you and your place in this world. To grieve is to start over, to be re-created.

Why suffering? Why grief? And why grief and God?

I don’t know. I’m not sure anyone does.” ~ Kerry Egan, Fumbling

Thanksgiving, 2014 will be my 38th year of addiction recovery. Every anniversary I seem to go through a period of growth. This year I seem to be stuck in sadness/mourning. I don’t know yet why I am feeling these feelings. It has been three weeks so far that the feelings wash over me. I stay in the feelings because I know that if I don’t I won’t get to move through the learning. More will be revealed when I am ready to accept the new reality.

A possible solution from Minddeep: “Another Invitation to Love“:

“Grief as I felt it this afternoon was of the more subtle kind. Nobody had died. Instead, I had been reminded of a painful bond, a loss not clearly visible to the outside world, but very real nevertheless. Heart aching still, I got to see up close again, the suffering that comes when love gets thrown back onto itself, with no one to respond at the other end. This is where mindfulness practice is put to the test. Mindfulness helps one to not wallow in self-pity and despair. Instead, one can investigate the full impact of hanging on to the idea of love on one’s own terms. One can feel the physical pain from grasping, and make the connection with ancient wisdom.

Every time I fall into that place, I feel compelled to revisit Ayya Khema’s Metta talk. And each time, I come up with another treasure.

“There are six billion of us, so why diminish ourselves to one, two, or three? And not only that, the whole problem lies in the fact that because it is attachment, we’ve got to *keep* those one, two, or three in order to experience any kind of love. We are afraid to lose them: to lose them through death, through change of mind, to leaving home, to whatever change happens. And that fear discolors our love to the point where it can no longer be pure, because it is hanging on.” “Grief begs us to listen to the suffering within, and to slowly let go of the cause. Life is too short to waste one more moment in self-inflicted misery. True love is limitless and independent of external conditions.”

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