The earth was entrusted to us in order that it be mother for us, capable of giving to each one what is necessary to live.… The earth is generous and holds nothing back from those who safeguard it. The earth, which is mother of all, asks for respect, not violence.
—Pope Francis, Our Mother Earth
We can learn to drop down into the sweet current of deep grief that helps us appreciate—to know, to praise, and more fully to love—all that we are losing, all that may soon be lost.
—Brian McLaren, Life After Doom
Brian McLaren describes a favorite place in nature from his childhood. He honors the grief that arises when the places we have known and loved change:
I think of a wetland I used to explore as a boy growing up in Maryland, part of the Rock Creek watershed. I spent hours exploring that wetland in every season, sometimes barefoot, sometimes in boots that nearly always overflowed and filled with cold water because I ventured in a little too deep.
How could I stay dry when trilling toads and wriggling tadpoles moved among cattails in the spring? How could I stay away in summer and miss a chance to see that single great blue heron or mammoth snapping turtle who both hunted there, resident dinosaurs to my boyhood imagination? How could I not search for newts and crayfish in its cold waters in autumn, its sky-mirroring surface dappled by yellow tulip poplar, red maple, and orange-amber sweet gum leaves?... How could I not return again as soon as the ice melted to search among the brown soggy layers of decomposing leaves where spotted salamanders gathered for mysterious, slow-motion mating rituals, while red-winged blackbirds called conk-la-ree! from the nearby willows?
Several years ago, I was in the old neighborhood again…. The trail was still there, but now it was broad and paved for bicycles. The wetland had disappeared…. As I sat on one of the benches and looked around, I was overcome by sweet grief for the delight I once enjoyed as a boy, a lost magic boys and girls today will never know, at least, not there….
I’m returning to this precious place in my memory, this sacred swampy ground. I’m appreciating it, praising it for what it was, all the more because it has been lost…. You have your lost places unknown to me. I have mine unknown to you. We could not protect them.
But we do not let these good creations disappear only to be forgotten, unappreciated, unpraised, unlamented. Our love for them outlasts their existence. So together, we remember them in grief. We feel them more fully revealing themselves to us in their passing away….
Stay with grief long enough to feel its sweetness, long enough for the sweetness and grief to deepen our sensitivity to the exquisite agony and ecstasy that we call appreciation, praise, love … and life.
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