Elias, this is a remarkable - and remarkably original - essay. I have lately become aware in my own spirit of a kind of sullen ennui. I hadn't connected it to grief, but it seems to fit very neatly into the space between bargaining and depression, with lingering anger and even denial. To your list of seven historical sources of destabilizing grief, I would add the ongoing collapse of the American Republic into authoritarianism. That is a grief every bit as present as watching a loved one's death agonies.
Thank you for your thoughtful analysis. Your framing of American society as suspended in a bardo of unprocessed grief resonates deeply. I appreciate your insight that grief could function as a "spiritual enzyme" to metabolize loss communally, not just individually.
Your work here brings to my mind Vanessa Machado de Oliveira Andreotti's "Hospicing Modernity," which explores similar terrain in a slightly different way. Where you emphasize the need for grief rituals and ceremonies to heal American culture, Andreotti explores how "Modernity/Coloniality" as a global system (the words for her have specific meaning beyond the typical) is dying and requires "hospicing": sitting with the demise without guarantees of what comes next. She also draws on Indigenous wisdom traditions to critique modernity's denial of death and limits.
The two frameworks feel complementary: your bardo work offers the emotional and spiritual practices we need, while Andreotti provides systemic analysis of why Western culture lost grief capacity in the first place. In both, we can't think our way out; we must feel the losses, and learn to accept uncertainty.
I think you're onto something. When I read essays from decades ago that could in their essence and even in many of their details read like recent commentary (I was reading Merton's "Rain and the Rhinoceros" this morning), I know that our difficult issues long predate this administration.
I think you're onto something also because calls to national "repentance" become just more vehicles for polemics. Collective grief, it occurs to me while reading this, would necessarily involve what we Christians call repentance. How to become a repenting collective, like Jonah's Nineveh?
Your points and examples about the need for collective grief makes me wonder if peoples who (somehow) develop teachings and regular celebrations involving collective grief become less likely to oppress other peoples, even if they have been oppressors in the past. James K. Rowe posits that the unexamined and unchecked fear of death will make us oppressors. I suspect there’s some overlap between your insightful work in this new series and Rowe’s book Radical Mindfulness: Why Transforming Fear of Death is Politically Vital, which I’m reading. Rowe counsels the incorporation of death into communal life through ritual practices, as you do in your citations of Buddhist teachings about the bardo realm and elements of The Hungry Ghost Festival.
I wonder (finally) if your future posts in this series might suggest ways we could begin to develop ways to collectively grieve the historical sources of destabilizing grief you site as well as others. It seems like the suggestion that the nation adopt any such proposals would fall on stony ground. But maybe proposals could be modeled in local communities—an approach that in many areas of community life might in time bear fruit.
I'm now well into Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey and Ivan Illich: The Powerless Church, both of which you recommend elsewhere on your Substack. I can't thank you enough for pointing me to these books. I mention them here because Illich's essay "How Will We Pass on Christianity?," republished in the latter book, makes me see your project of grief and public rituals of mourning in another light.
That light mostly emanates from this passage: "The future of the Church is in God's hands. I am responsible only for my and our past, not for the future of the Church. You must understand, and come to understand anew, that the density of the Incarnation, the only time the Lord is present to us, is at the present moment which we celebrate together" (159).
He then moves from incarnation to redemption, still eschewing any direct concern for the future: ". . . only in the present the Lord redeems [the Church]. We have no idea if there is a future. To live as a Christian means to live in the spirit of the Maran Atha--the Lord is coming at this moment. It means to live and to enjoy living at the edge of time, at the end moment of time" (159).
This passage, not surprisingly, attracts Giorgio Agamben's attention in the book's foreword. After quoting "We have no idea if there is a future," Agamben expands the thought to claim that, despite the Church's teachings, "there is no 'history of redemption,' no divine oikonomia that is progressively manifested and fulfilled in history. Redemption has no history . . .," by which I think he also means that redemption has no future outside of the present.
He then quotes from "Illich's later thought" consistent with Illich's "constant distrust of the future": "I will not allow the future to cast its shadow over the concepts through which I try to think what is and what has been."
To my point. My previous comment, and I'm sure the thinking of many, may focus on this reservation to your general proposal: It'll never work. Illich and Agamben might respond to my reservation with, "So what?" There may never be a future in which something may never work.
I think a concern with practicalities, always anchored in the future, keeps us in our armchairs. The future is found in what N.T. Wright calls "the pre-packaged theologies of atonement or justification normally on offer" or in an Hegelian notion of inexorable history. Practicalities with respect to societal grief and change seem anchored in elaborate futures described in chronological notions of time. They make me passive. Even the idea of the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice makes me passive, honestly. (But for some reason, millenarian kingdoms, particularly Jesus's "now and not yet" kingdom of God, tend to get me moving.)
Illich's entire essay "How Will We Pass on Christianity?," of course, is premised the possibility of "passing on" the faith--on a future that we can affect. But that passing on, I think he says, can't happen outside (that wonderful phrase) "the density of the Incarnation," which is celebrated during Mass. Agamben quotes Illich elsewhere: "And I say celebration, not affirmation or contemplation. Faith is only acquired in con-celebrating, in the conviviality of a gratuitous act, as exemplified by a meal of bread and wine . . ." (xi). He goes on to describe this celebration as "a gallows meal--every Mass we celebrate is a memory of such a last meal, the sort they give a condemned prisoner before execution" (160). This seems a fitting analogy to the kind of "con-celebrations" of collective grief that you give examples of to make your argument.
We can affect any possible future as a byproduct of celebrating and grieving together in a culturally sensitive way.
This brings me to an Illichian question, maybe. Can a society or community not professing Christianity--or without a "now and not yet" conception of the kingdom and of time (which would exclude many professing Christian churches)--conduct such celebrations? Illich, as I understand him so far, suggests that the Church in each distinct culture must both be faithful to its traditions and change. The tradition, in fact, seems to require the change to be total, requiring "a certain poverty of spirit on the part of the missionary," according to David Cayley in An Intellectual Journey, since "he/she does not know and cannot know what form the church will take in its new surroundings. The new church will be built up 'in the imagination and the wishes and dreams of the community' . . ." (69).
Maybe "the imagination and the wishes and dreams" dictate the form of the community's "gallows meal"--its forms of mourning its profound losses and sense of lostness. I'm wondering about these things as I think through my occasional entries in my street liturgy series.
A pastor in Arlington recently led people in her church as well as people outside of her church in a simple liturgy to witness the disappearance of their neighbors in ICE raids. The liturgy centered on the placement by the group of a "stumbling sticker," designed for the occasion by a Hindu friend of mine, where the neighbors were last seen. This liturgy, while not at all Mass or a Protestant celebration of the Lord's Supper, seems to address my questions very nicely.
A very long comment here. No need to respond. I'm using this space to work out my thinking about your essay and what I've read so far in Illich. Keep up the good work!
I believe America is in an endless argument 250 years old… we are like a few family whose initial conflict generations ago is forgotten paved over, but whatever gets left un resolved by one generation gets passed down to the next.
America did not begin from scratch. It was born with all of the pain, suffering growth, and challenge of our ancestors from all corners of the world. This is our inheritance.
Thank you for taking the time to name and explore our collective grief. Recognition and reconciliation are the key to healing and renewal.
We are in a dark place, but like the lotus flower, we strive for the light. Thank you for being a reflection of that light Elias Crim.
I think of the pandemic mostly; thx for highlighting a whole continent of grief in our experience. Therein the utility of the blues, my friend. Suns gonna shine / in my back door someday. G Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo also has something to say about the peculiar American nature of grief.
In my journeys I have had the good fortune to spend time with teachers like Joanna Macy, Malidoma Somé, John Seed, Desmond Tutu, Michael Meade, Thich Nhat Hanh, and others. All of them have spoken of the need for and healing power of shared grief rituals. I have benefited hugely from participating in such rituals led by many of these people.
Perhaps one of the most powerful responses to the unraveling of the social fabric we see going on is to create and participate the public sharing of grief. While Joanna is no longer with us, her Work That Reconnects is being carried on by many and offers trainings for people interested in helping to make that happen:
Elias, this is a remarkable - and remarkably original - essay. I have lately become aware in my own spirit of a kind of sullen ennui. I hadn't connected it to grief, but it seems to fit very neatly into the space between bargaining and depression, with lingering anger and even denial. To your list of seven historical sources of destabilizing grief, I would add the ongoing collapse of the American Republic into authoritarianism. That is a grief every bit as present as watching a loved one's death agonies.
Thanks, Mark, and of course agreed about our national catastrophe. I plan to get to that as well.
I know with your military experience, you must have watched the Quantico show in stunned disbelief—I certainly did.
Thank you for your thoughtful analysis. Your framing of American society as suspended in a bardo of unprocessed grief resonates deeply. I appreciate your insight that grief could function as a "spiritual enzyme" to metabolize loss communally, not just individually.
Your work here brings to my mind Vanessa Machado de Oliveira Andreotti's "Hospicing Modernity," which explores similar terrain in a slightly different way. Where you emphasize the need for grief rituals and ceremonies to heal American culture, Andreotti explores how "Modernity/Coloniality" as a global system (the words for her have specific meaning beyond the typical) is dying and requires "hospicing": sitting with the demise without guarantees of what comes next. She also draws on Indigenous wisdom traditions to critique modernity's denial of death and limits.
The two frameworks feel complementary: your bardo work offers the emotional and spiritual practices we need, while Andreotti provides systemic analysis of why Western culture lost grief capacity in the first place. In both, we can't think our way out; we must feel the losses, and learn to accept uncertainty.
Thanks, Peter, for the reminder about Andreotti's wonderful book--which is indeed complementary to my direction here.
I think you're onto something. When I read essays from decades ago that could in their essence and even in many of their details read like recent commentary (I was reading Merton's "Rain and the Rhinoceros" this morning), I know that our difficult issues long predate this administration.
I think you're onto something also because calls to national "repentance" become just more vehicles for polemics. Collective grief, it occurs to me while reading this, would necessarily involve what we Christians call repentance. How to become a repenting collective, like Jonah's Nineveh?
Your points and examples about the need for collective grief makes me wonder if peoples who (somehow) develop teachings and regular celebrations involving collective grief become less likely to oppress other peoples, even if they have been oppressors in the past. James K. Rowe posits that the unexamined and unchecked fear of death will make us oppressors. I suspect there’s some overlap between your insightful work in this new series and Rowe’s book Radical Mindfulness: Why Transforming Fear of Death is Politically Vital, which I’m reading. Rowe counsels the incorporation of death into communal life through ritual practices, as you do in your citations of Buddhist teachings about the bardo realm and elements of The Hungry Ghost Festival.
I wonder (finally) if your future posts in this series might suggest ways we could begin to develop ways to collectively grieve the historical sources of destabilizing grief you site as well as others. It seems like the suggestion that the nation adopt any such proposals would fall on stony ground. But maybe proposals could be modeled in local communities—an approach that in many areas of community life might in time bear fruit.
Grateful for these insights, as always Bryce. And the suggestion about Rowe's book which I will seek out!
I'm now well into Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey and Ivan Illich: The Powerless Church, both of which you recommend elsewhere on your Substack. I can't thank you enough for pointing me to these books. I mention them here because Illich's essay "How Will We Pass on Christianity?," republished in the latter book, makes me see your project of grief and public rituals of mourning in another light.
That light mostly emanates from this passage: "The future of the Church is in God's hands. I am responsible only for my and our past, not for the future of the Church. You must understand, and come to understand anew, that the density of the Incarnation, the only time the Lord is present to us, is at the present moment which we celebrate together" (159).
He then moves from incarnation to redemption, still eschewing any direct concern for the future: ". . . only in the present the Lord redeems [the Church]. We have no idea if there is a future. To live as a Christian means to live in the spirit of the Maran Atha--the Lord is coming at this moment. It means to live and to enjoy living at the edge of time, at the end moment of time" (159).
This passage, not surprisingly, attracts Giorgio Agamben's attention in the book's foreword. After quoting "We have no idea if there is a future," Agamben expands the thought to claim that, despite the Church's teachings, "there is no 'history of redemption,' no divine oikonomia that is progressively manifested and fulfilled in history. Redemption has no history . . .," by which I think he also means that redemption has no future outside of the present.
He then quotes from "Illich's later thought" consistent with Illich's "constant distrust of the future": "I will not allow the future to cast its shadow over the concepts through which I try to think what is and what has been."
To my point. My previous comment, and I'm sure the thinking of many, may focus on this reservation to your general proposal: It'll never work. Illich and Agamben might respond to my reservation with, "So what?" There may never be a future in which something may never work.
I think a concern with practicalities, always anchored in the future, keeps us in our armchairs. The future is found in what N.T. Wright calls "the pre-packaged theologies of atonement or justification normally on offer" or in an Hegelian notion of inexorable history. Practicalities with respect to societal grief and change seem anchored in elaborate futures described in chronological notions of time. They make me passive. Even the idea of the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice makes me passive, honestly. (But for some reason, millenarian kingdoms, particularly Jesus's "now and not yet" kingdom of God, tend to get me moving.)
Illich's entire essay "How Will We Pass on Christianity?," of course, is premised the possibility of "passing on" the faith--on a future that we can affect. But that passing on, I think he says, can't happen outside (that wonderful phrase) "the density of the Incarnation," which is celebrated during Mass. Agamben quotes Illich elsewhere: "And I say celebration, not affirmation or contemplation. Faith is only acquired in con-celebrating, in the conviviality of a gratuitous act, as exemplified by a meal of bread and wine . . ." (xi). He goes on to describe this celebration as "a gallows meal--every Mass we celebrate is a memory of such a last meal, the sort they give a condemned prisoner before execution" (160). This seems a fitting analogy to the kind of "con-celebrations" of collective grief that you give examples of to make your argument.
We can affect any possible future as a byproduct of celebrating and grieving together in a culturally sensitive way.
This brings me to an Illichian question, maybe. Can a society or community not professing Christianity--or without a "now and not yet" conception of the kingdom and of time (which would exclude many professing Christian churches)--conduct such celebrations? Illich, as I understand him so far, suggests that the Church in each distinct culture must both be faithful to its traditions and change. The tradition, in fact, seems to require the change to be total, requiring "a certain poverty of spirit on the part of the missionary," according to David Cayley in An Intellectual Journey, since "he/she does not know and cannot know what form the church will take in its new surroundings. The new church will be built up 'in the imagination and the wishes and dreams of the community' . . ." (69).
Maybe "the imagination and the wishes and dreams" dictate the form of the community's "gallows meal"--its forms of mourning its profound losses and sense of lostness. I'm wondering about these things as I think through my occasional entries in my street liturgy series.
A pastor in Arlington recently led people in her church as well as people outside of her church in a simple liturgy to witness the disappearance of their neighbors in ICE raids. The liturgy centered on the placement by the group of a "stumbling sticker," designed for the occasion by a Hindu friend of mine, where the neighbors were last seen. This liturgy, while not at all Mass or a Protestant celebration of the Lord's Supper, seems to address my questions very nicely.
A very long comment here. No need to respond. I'm using this space to work out my thinking about your essay and what I've read so far in Illich. Keep up the good work!
I believe America is in an endless argument 250 years old… we are like a few family whose initial conflict generations ago is forgotten paved over, but whatever gets left un resolved by one generation gets passed down to the next.
America did not begin from scratch. It was born with all of the pain, suffering growth, and challenge of our ancestors from all corners of the world. This is our inheritance.
Thank you for taking the time to name and explore our collective grief. Recognition and reconciliation are the key to healing and renewal.
We are in a dark place, but like the lotus flower, we strive for the light. Thank you for being a reflection of that light Elias Crim.
🙏
This is an extraordinarily beautiful and poignant reflection. Thank you Elias
Thanks, Rob--you're my perfect reader!
Marvelous!
I think of the pandemic mostly; thx for highlighting a whole continent of grief in our experience. Therein the utility of the blues, my friend. Suns gonna shine / in my back door someday. G Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo also has something to say about the peculiar American nature of grief.
Thank you Elias!
In my journeys I have had the good fortune to spend time with teachers like Joanna Macy, Malidoma Somé, John Seed, Desmond Tutu, Michael Meade, Thich Nhat Hanh, and others. All of them have spoken of the need for and healing power of shared grief rituals. I have benefited hugely from participating in such rituals led by many of these people.
Perhaps one of the most powerful responses to the unraveling of the social fabric we see going on is to create and participate the public sharing of grief. While Joanna is no longer with us, her Work That Reconnects is being carried on by many and offers trainings for people interested in helping to make that happen:
https://workthatreconnects.org
I look forward to your next post in this series!