A Season of Healing A Season of Healing A Year-Long Journey Toward Wholeness A Season of Healing A Year-Long Journey Toward Wholeness A Season of Healing A Season of Healing 365 Readings A Year-Long Journey Toward Wholeness Frank Logue A Year-Long Journey Toward Wholeness A Season of Healing Published by King of Peace Episcopal Church All proceeds benefit the church and its community All quotations are the copywritten material of the authors cited. Original content © 2009 Frank Logue, all rights reserved The cover photographs were taken along the Blue Ridge Parkway. The front cover is a photo of a tree at Ravens Roost Overlook in Virginia. The back cover was taken at Standing Rock Overlook in North Carolina both photos © 2009 Frank Logue This book is dedicated with love to my mother Julia Sullivan Logue who has had more than her share of mourning and is offered with thanksgiving to Maris Cato Morris who patiently weeded out the worst of my errors during her own season of healing. She edited the text and offered helpful thoughts on how to improve the book you hold. The remaining errors (and oddities) are my own. A Year-Long Journey Toward Wholeness A Season of Healing The Start of a New Season Like an early frost, the shock of loss never comes in due season. Whether a surprise, or long anticipated, there is the time before the loss and the time after. A clear delineation in our lives, cutting apart what was, from what will be. Grief takes time. There is no shortcut. Healing after a loss is not soon accomplished whether the loss is a divorce, the death of a loved one, or the loss of abilities due to disease or an accident. And yet we know that time in and of itself accomplishes little or nothing. These seemingly opposing statements fit together as healing is a journey. That journey takes time, but it also takes the work of the Holy Spirit. This book was created to make that journey with you as you grieve. The daily readings are short and varied as the last thing you need on this journey is weighty advice, no matter how well meaning the words. The title A Season of Healing may be a bit odd for a book that will take you through four seasons of the year. This is purposely to acknowledge the way time stretches and bends in grief. The first year after a painful loss will at times seem so long. And yet looking up and finding a year is already passed happens another way so quickly. While, as these pages seek to make clear, real grief does not ever completely go away, the sense of unbearable loss can. This book works on themes of dealing with loss, finding forgiveness, and being open to healing as each of these subjects are bound up in grief. Often after a death, and almost inevitably following a divorce, there are issues of A Year-Long Journey Toward Wholeness A Season of Healing forgiveness. You may need to forgive the person who has died. You may need to forgive youself. There is also a theme of love through this book as recapturing a biblical view on loving God and loving our neighbor as ourselves is also closely tied to healing. The daily readings are meant to open your heart to how the Spirit of the living God is speaking to you on a given day. Listening to God, or even yelling at God, are more important than the readings themselves. So whether you find the reading for a given day helpful or hopelessly pointless, remember that you are not reading this book alone, but in the presence of The One who is seeking to heal your heart through this year-long journey. And it is that process of opening your heart to the healing which can come from God alone which is the goal of this season. One word of warning If you have just experienced a loss, wait to start reading. Give yourself at least two weeks and probably a full month before beginning this season of healing. You need time to grieve without these words getting in the way. Then when the friends and family have gone home, and the calls become less frequent, you will be ready to start the daily readings. A Year-Long Journey Toward Wholeness A Season of Healing Day1 “My Mother is a fish.” These five words are the full text of the nineteenth chapter of William Faulkner’s stream of consciousness novel As I Lay Dying. They offer a window into the chaotic course of coming to terms with death. The book tells the story of the Bundren Family’s quest to honor their matriarch, Addie, in her desire to be buried in the town of Jefferson. When this shortest chapter in literary history comes along, we have already seen Vardaman struggling to comprehend his mother’s death. The boy caught a huge fish earlier in the day and wanted to show it to her. But his mother died before he got to share his catch. When Vardaman understands the coffin will be nailed shut, he drills holes in it so that she can breathe. These five words, “My Mother is a fish,” offer Vardaman Bundren’s enigmatic view of what is happening from his 7-10 year old point of view. This short chapter shows in brief, what the novel reveals more fully, that each of us comes to term with the death of a loved one in our own way. The mental and emotional process is messy and sometimes incoherent to others or even to ourselves. The emotional roller coaster of grief has so many ups and downs that it is difficult to get your bearings at times. One moment you realize the reality of death; the next you see how impossible it is that the person has died. Know that as you come to terms with the death of someone you love, some of your responses will naturally be a bit irrational. Be kind to yourself. Don’t make rash judgments. Wait to make big changes in your life. As much as the demands of others will allow, leave room to grieve first. Some things do have to be done. Put off everything else. If you do need to make key decisions, lean on the counsel of those you trust to guide you. Go slow. Breathe. Pray. A Year-Long Journey Toward Wholeness A Season of Healing Day2 “Trust in the slow work of God. We are, quite naturally, impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We should like to skip the intermediate stages. We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new, and yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability— and that it may take a very long time. Your ideas mature gradually—let them grow, let them shape themselves, without undue haste. Don’t try to force them on, as though you could be today what time (that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will) will make them tomorrow. Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be. Give our Lord the benefit of believing that His hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.” ~Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) A Year-Long Journey Toward Wholeness A Season of Healing Day3 John Donne (1572-1631) was an Anglican priest and a poet. In the 1620s, Donne contracted a serious illness and thought he was dying. Around him, he could hear the bells of London tolling following the deaths of many a person. Lying in extreme sickness, he composed in his head a series of devotions which on recovering he wrote down. They were published in 1624 as Devotions upon Emergent Occasions. In the most famous, Donne writes: “The church is catholic, universal, so all her actions; all that she does belongs to all. When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that body which is my head too, and ingrafted into that body whereof I am a member. And when she buries a man, that action concerns me: all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated...and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.... “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by sea, Europe is no less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of a friend’s or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” A Year-Long Journey Toward Wholeness A Season of Healing Day4 Start a journal. It will give you a place to think out loud about what you are going through. Don’t try to create beautiful prose, or a moving meditation. Just write what you feel. If you are not sure what to write, try the time-tested advice found in Julia Cameron’s book, The Artist’s Way, in which she counsels to just sit and write three pages of whatever comes into your mind, even if you only write that you don’t know what to write.