Pastoral Prophetic Care Corner
By Rev. Michelle Walsh, November 28, 2023
The holidays often can bring a range of mixed feelings for an equally broad range of reasons. This quote, attributed to a female author named Francis Ward Weller, floated through Facebook recently and struck a chord with me: “The work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and to be stretched large by them. How much sorrow can I hold? That’s how much gratitude I can give. If I carry only grief, I’ll bend toward cynicism and despair. If I have only gratitude, I’ll become saccharine and won’t develop much compassion for other people’s suffering. Grief keeps the heart fluid and soft, which helps make compassion possible.”
The reason why I said “attributed” on Facebook to that author is because as I looked up more in relation to the quote, I came to believe it actually was authored by Francis Weller, similarly named but a male psychotherapist who wrote The Wild Edge of Sorrow. Regardless, the quote is a good one to sit with through the complexities of the holidays when family tensions or personal challenges, including recent losses, exist. I have felt a range of mixed feelings myself as my family and siblings are renavigating relationships in light of the loss of both of our parents this year. Yet this quote also points to how the pastoral and prophetic remain intertwined because Francis Weller points out in his book, which has a foreword by Rabbi Michael Lerner, that we need collective rituals for healing to metabolize our personal grief and to be freer to work toward a larger world of compassion, life, and active healing.
On December 20, Elizabeth Foster and I will host a Blue Holiday Gathering on Zoom with readings and music and opportunities for sharing to help each of us to hold the personal complexities of these times – registration will be required for a unique zoom link. And on January 7, we’ll host our annual Burning Bowl service to engage in another level of congregational healing as well. I look forward to engaging in practices together to expand our capacity for authentic and deep compassion as we continue to live into our faith values as a Unitarian Universalist people.
Rev. Michelle