Growth after mourning
by Debra K. Farrington

I had never seen a landscape remotely like it. Several years ago I spent two weeks with a group on pilgrimage in Ireland. We visited a dozen sacred sites, but one of the most impressive was the Burren in southwest Ireland. Where we entered the Burren, an endless plain of flat, barren limestone rocks, perhaps six feet thick, stretched before us. An impressive 25 miles from east to west and 15 miles from north to south, the landscape presents a view of desolation, of deep and endless emptiness. With no trees or even much visible vegetation rising from the rock, the limestone formation is broken only by wide crevices that only increase the sense of dry, arid, and lifeless space.

But that’s only the first impression; it’s not the truth of the Burren. Barren landscapes — physical, spiritual, and emotional ones — are rarely as empty or desolate as they appear to be at first glance. Enter the Burren, as you would any apparent emptiness, and look more deeply, and you will find life in abundance.

The Burren is an easy landscape to spiritualize; its story lends itself to metaphor. Once upon a time it was covered with forests of pine, hazel, and yew. Later, ice buried the land, and when the glaciers receded, all that was left behind was limestone. Under normal circumstances, the land would usually reseed itself and, over time, re-develop into the forest it had been before. But the appearance of human beings and the agricultural practices they brought with them prevented this, and centuries later the Burren remains mostly limestone. It is a landscape forever changed by the ice and the changes it has experienced since the ice receded.

The barrenness of the Burren reminded me of another large expanse of seemingly empty space, the desert through which the Israelites wandered after leaving Egypt. Both the Burren and the desert mirror the journey through difficult times everyone experiences at one point or another. The loss of a job, the death of a parent or loved one, the end of an important relationship, or other losses throw us into periods of confusion, sadness, or even desolation. The internal compass of life doesn’t seem to be working during these times, and like the Israelites’ desert journey, the walk through these times can seem directionless and without focus. “Why have you brought us out into the wilderness just to die?” the Israelites screamed at God, and anyone who has been through a significant loss can identify with those words. Explanations for these periods in the wilderness of mourning are hard to come by. All we can know is that our lives, like that of the Burren, will be forever changed.

That does not mean, however, that our lives are changed for the worse. Don’t misunderstand me: I don’t believe that God orchestrates loss to teach us a lesson or force us to change direction. God is not a puppeteer pulling strings and determining our every move. Bad things happen in this world, and God cries in pain along with us. Yet in the midst of the most barren spaces — just like the Burren or the desert — God can present us with something new and, often, something unexpected.

In the Burren the new and the unexpected come in the form of wildflowers. Rain brings out an astonishing profusion of them, blooming from cracks and crevices that appeared to be lifeless. The Burren is home to an unusual collection of flowers, some of which thrive in alpine and others in Mediterranean regions; nowhere else on earth are these flowers found together. Out of the catastrophic ice age and the changes that followed has come a unique environment. Out of our own losses will come the same one-of-a-kind life landscape.

That promise may seem absurd if you’re in the midst of a major loss in your life, and if that’s true for you, that’s okay. You don’t have to believe it right now. In the midst of loss there is a time for mourning, for not moving in any direction at all, but simply managing to get from hour to hour and day to day. When loss is new the “what-ifs” can seem more pressing than anything else. What if I don’t find another job and can’t pay the rent next month? What if I don’t find another important relationship? How will I live without my loved one? Imagining a future, much less a bright one, seems impossible.

There will come a time, however, when you’re ready to start looking around you with new eyes, a time for beginning to imagine or uncover the “might-bes”, rather than focusing only on the “what-ifs.” Though God does not inflict loss on us, God does use those times — when we are ready — to invite us forward into new life. Catching a glimpse of what God hopes and desires may take awhile. The Israelites didn’t see the land that God had promised them for forty years. Most of our own travels won’t last anywhere near that long, though they might feel like that at times. Sometimes they feel that way, however, because we’re not noticing that the journey through what feels like dry, arid spaces is actually a rich walk through a landscape full of possibilities.

In one of my favorite children’s books, Ellen Raskin’s Nothing Ever Happens on My Block, Chester sits on the curb, bemoaning the dullness of his neighborhood. All the while he fails to notice that behind him, kids play practical jokes on adults, police capture robbers, a girl breaks her leg and gets taken away in an ambulance, a parachutist drops in, and so on. Chester is so focused on his own vision of excitement — or lack thereof — that he’s oblivious to everything happening right where he sits. In the midst of our own travels through the desert of mourning, it is easy to be like Chester and not notice the gifts of the land through which we are traveling and who we are becoming as we move forward.

The Israelites struggled with this throughout their desert travels. Focused almost exclusively on what they had lost, they were often blind to what and whose they were becoming. Terence Fretheim, professor of Old Testament at Luther Seminary, writes that the book of Exodus “is concerned with how these people more and more take on their identity, becoming in life what they already are in the eyes of God” (Exodus, Westminster John Knox Press, 1991, p. 22). In other words, the Israelites needed to wander until they discovered how to stop being slaves of Egypt, and become, instead, what God already knew them as — the people of God. In the same way, our journeys through grief and mourning, at least in part, are about leaving behind who we were, whether that was welcome or not, and becoming what God calls us to be now. The desert, whatever shape that takes for each of us, is our home for that process, and though it may not always seem so, it is a rich resource full of life if we are willing to look around and pay attention.

In the midst of the desert God provided the Israelites with food, water, and companionship; God walked with the people every step of the way. God makes the same promise to each of us. Whether we are aware of it or not, God provides for us and walks with us. God is also shaping us in ways we may only understand later, just as was true for the Israelites. (One of the great truths of the spiritual life is that all is clearer in retrospect than in foresight!) May your own journey be blessed, and may it lead to a place rich in wonders — like the Burren’s wildflowers — that you can only dimly imagine right now.

Debra K. Farrington is a freelance writer and the author of eight books of Christian spirituality, including The Seasons of a Restless Heart: A Spiritual Companion for Living in Transition.

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