Mother of God by Miri Rubin

Courtesy of a wonderful friend, my life has been blessed with a copy of 'Mother of God - A History Of the Virgin Mary' by Miri Rubin, in all of it's astonishingly beautiful Marian blueness. The book depicts the cultural imagination that has taken hold of the story of Mary and retold the life of a character practically invisible in the Bible as the centrepiece of devotions, communities, faith, art and, in Rubin's interpretation, a sizeable chunk of Western history.

I'm just beginning to delve into it, but having had a bit of a flick through and a read about the expansion of her role as bereaved mother, I've been reminded that I've been meaning to post a reminder to myself about the sensations that are associated with grief.

The thing with grief is that, I've read Kubler-Ross, I've started working through my Bereavement and Loss practical for my Counselling Diploma, and I've read bits and pieces of books on death and suicide and so on, and I still haven't come across a decent description of what grief actually feels like. Which strikes me as a bit odd, because, for me, there is actually no comparable subjective experience to really relate it to. I was hoping to be able to relate it to other people's perceptions of what it is like.

Because, at the level of spirit, we're never disconnected from everyone around us, be it of the past, the present or the future of which we speak. Always, everywhere, united. At the level of soul, we can cognise our connection to each other, and so we have experiences where our soul cries out for our other, regardless of the distance of kilometres, time or planes of reality. At the physical level of human incarnation, our connection to each other is grounded in our re-cognition of each other in real-time human-skin contact awareness. In death, a physically presenced sense of each other is irrevocably altered. From our own perspective, the loss of someone else, through death, while we're alive, is a massive, and unalterable change. At the level of physicality, it's like a cold gap, an emptiness, fills the place where a whole warm, live, beautiful person once was.

That's what I'm talking about when I talk about the sensation of grief. Bodily speaking it's a cold swamping emptiness in me, it runs head to toe, and it momentarily de-voids me of my humanly sensation of myself. It's not the cold sinking feeling of knowing that you've done something wrong. Moreso, it's the absolute momentary absence of warm life force, gone, gone, gone far beyond. It stops me, dead, in my tracks, and demands I attend to this emptiness, that I match all the love, all the thought, all the experience and all the knowing of that other person, against this space, this call of spirit. It asks that I be still.

Emptiness. Which brings forth a new awareness maybe, of grief's potential for fraternity with a sense of kenosis.

Pray for us, O Holy Mother of God, that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.