Grief Shadows

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken."

~ CS Lewis

I have come to the conclusion that grief exists as a shadow to love and beauty. While we may love something because we find it beautiful, I think that often a thing becomes transformed into something beautiful once we love it: like the transformations in the stories of the frog prince or in beauty and the beast. I also think that sometimes beauty and love work together - not one causing the other - but both working in and on the heart in a mysterious, confusing, simultaneous nature.

And when that beloved, beautiful thing (or person) is taken away, lost, damaged, or hurt - our heart takes the beating. Because our hearts have become attached. In that beautiful, beloved person or thing, we get a glimpse and a taste of God's beauty - of the way that things were meant to be.

Grief, then, acts as a testament to the worthy nature of that for which we mourn. Grief points not only to injustice and the sense that this should not be, but also points to "that" was good.

The last time I reflected like this was when my grandpa died and my world was rocked by wave after wave of heavy grief - because I loved him, and he was gone.

* * *

I am angry. 
I never thought before that I would ever identify with the title of God as Judge. Although I'd never admit it, I subconsciously thought that the term was archaic. I did not understand it - because I am good and my friends are good people. Of my/our lack of goodness and the presence of pride and self-centered individualism in its stead, I am sure God will someday lead me to explore in a more honest way. But today, I am learning of standing before Him as Judge, demanding justice.

Today, and yesterday, and the day before that, and probably tomorrow, and the day after that, I stand before God angry at violent injustice. I am broken about active evil executed by a man against my heart's sister. I don't know if he was blind to how fearfully and wonderfully made she is; or if he saw how she had been crafted in the image of God and, filled with evil, decided to lash out. I don't know.
But I am angry.

It wasn't personal. He didn't even know her. But in violating her body as a woman, he violated my body, the body of my mother, my grandmother - the female body collective. It might not have been personal for him, but as a female, it was personal for me. And this isn't even about me.

And I want to stand before God and scream for justice. I better understand the Psalmists because I, too, want people dashed against the rocks.

And then, I reflect that Christ died on the Cross just for instances such as these. He died for rape, and bombings, and genocides, and theft, and assault, and racism, and institutionalized poverty; and for pride which leads good people to think, "Well, I'm not that bad..."

* * *

So, I stand in the shadows of grief, reflecting upon love and beauty; crying out for justice - and praying it does not fall upon me.
Lord, have mercy.