LOVE BEYOND LOSS
HOLDING TIGHT through DEATH and GRIEF
Giovanni Castellano, O.P.
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Preface
This book is written by a courageous preacher. Our brother Giovanni has dared to talk openly about his grief on the sudden death of his father. He transforms this terrible experience into a word of faith, hope, and love. He wrote that ‘grief seems to have a natural tendency to remain in the darkness of the unspoken, rather than seeking comfort in the embrace of open-hearted conversations’. He refuses this flight from words, and so shows us that he is truly a preacher: ‘However, after much reflection, I have concluded that I have nothing more valuable or meaningful than this inner struggle to offer at the service of the mission I embraced by becoming a friar preacher in the family of St Dominic.’
This book will be a precious gift for all of us when we suffer the loss of those whom we love, and will help us too to transform our loss into gift. When Jesus was about to be handed over into the hands of His enemies, He made this loss a gift of Himself to His friends: ‘This is my body, given for you.’ Even our words can have a little of this creativity, transforming what seems just negative into the gift of life. This is the role of the preacher.
When a friend of mine, a French Dominican, endured terrible pain because, through no fault of his own, he was involved in a car accident that killed a child, he was lost for words. So together we translated into French the book with which Giovanni begins, A Grief Observed.1 Lewis’s words help to liberate him from the ‘unspoken’, as will Giovanni’s words surely help many others.
He insists that we must give ourselves the time for this to happen, invoking the example of Anna (Luke 2:36-38), who was widowed for decades, but to whom the Lord came at last in the unexpected form of a child. The loss of someone whom we love can become the door of God’s coming more deeply into our lives, in ways that we cannot anticipate.
Brother Giovanni shows how the loss of someone can even become a new and intense experience of their presence: ‘Even though it does seem otherwise, we are closer to them than we can imagine, held together in the same embrace. It is because of this invisible closeness that we may sometimes sense the presence of our loved ones in ways we never thought possible.’ They are caught up in that same love with which God loves us and which holds us in existence.
Even the pain of their absence is a sort of door for their presence in our lives. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great Lutheran theologian, was murdered by the Gestapo for his resistance to Hitler. A few months before his death he wrote:
There is nothing that can replace the absence of someone dear to us, and one should not even attempt to do so. One must simply hold out and endure it. At first that sounds very hard, but at the same time it is also a great comfort. For to the extent the emptiness truly remains unfilled one remains connected to the other person through it. It is wrong to say that God fills the emptiness. God in no way fills it but much more leaves it precisely unfilled and thus helps us preserve – even in pain – the authentic relationship.2
When someone whom we love dies, we shall probably be filled with remorse for the things that we never said or the deeds of kindness that we did not do. When my father died, I found myself asking, ‘Did I ever tell him how much I loved him?’ Giovanni was blessed to have done so. But if they are no longer present in our lives now, it is never too late. So, it is good that we talk to those who have died, believing that they listen to us.
Giovanni brings to word all of the wide range of emotions that we are likely to experience and suggests how to live with them fruitfully. Why did they die so soon when their lives had not reached completion? I am almost eighty years old. I used to think that this was very old, now I am tempted to think that it would be too young to die. As we say in England, ‘ninety is a good age to die, unless you are eighty-nine!’ But any life that has reached out to
others in love has a sort of plenitude: ‘A life offered in love – even if it ends seemingly too soon – is already a fulfilled life because it corresponds to the design God has inscribed in the universe.’
He captures brilliantly the sense of injustice we may feel when someone is taken from us. It is not fair! He makes an illuminating comparison of this sense of injustice with the Hebrews in exile in Egypt who are forced to make bricks and, to add to the burden, no longer are given the straw with which to make them. So, while those whom we love are alive, we must not waste time but live our love as fully as possible, since we do not know when we might lose them, or die ourselves. Carpe diem!
The encounter with death can give us a deeper sense of what it is to be alive. If we run away from death, we shall never know the joy of being alive, ‘to live more intensely and authentically, aware of how fragile and brief life is’. Otherwise, we shall not be able to rejoice truly in the Resurrection, the triumph of eternal life over death.
When I was Prior of Blackfriars, I was happy to receive brothers who were terminally ill, since accompanying them at the moment of their death would help our students to become preachers of the Resurrection. One of our Dominican students, who was trained as a nurse, was with one of the brethren when he died. He asked to lay out the body in preparation for burial and I offered to help him. Never had I experienced so powerfully the meaning of
death and so of our hope in the victory of Easter morning. This intimate contact with the dead is the role of the women in the Gospel who go to the tomb to anoint the body of their Lord. Rightly they are the first preachers of the Resurrection.
Nick Cave, the Australian rock star, wrote powerfully of the loss of his son Arthur and of how it deepened his sense of being alive and of the presence of God:
Since Arthur died I have been able to step beyond the full force of the grief and experience a kind of joy that is entirely new to me. It was as if the experience of grief enlarged my heart in some way. I have experienced periods of happiness more than I have ever felt before, even though it was the most devastating thing ever to happen to me. This is Arthur’s gift to me, one of the many. It is his munificence that’s made me a different person.3
St Dominic’s foundation of the Order of Friars Preachers was sparked by his encounter with the Albigensians in the south of France, who denied the goodness of our bodily existence. Salvation was seen by them as escape from the prison of our bodies. But so many of the Church’s teachings affirm the goodness of our bodily lives: Creation, Incarnation, Resurrection, the gift of Christ’s body in the Eucharist. So, as a preaching friar, Giovanni insists on our hope in bodily resurrection: ‘The tendency to neglect
the flesh has always been a temptation for Christianity throughout the centuries. On the contrary, the Christian faith is based on the resurrection of Christ in his true body and the promise for all of us of the resurrection of the flesh. Christ rose with his true flesh, still bearing the visible marks of his love.’
Finally, Brother Giovanni sees the role of beauty in transporting us beyond ourselves when grief may turn us inwards: ‘Whether it be art, music, literature, or poetry, we must remain avid seekers of these springs that have the power to lift us beyond ourselves.’ When Dominicans are dying, it is our tradition to gather around the bed and to sing the ‘Salve Regina’. We face death with music. Music stretches open our hearts and minds for that hope which cannot find full expression in words. When my father was dying, I asked him if there was anything that I could do for him. He asked to listen to Mozart’s ‘Requiem’ and Haydn’s Seven Last Words.
Thank you, Giovanni, for this courageous and hopeful preaching of the gospel. I shall reread it and there is no higher compliment that one can pay a book!
TimoThy Radcliffe o.P. Blackfriars, Oxford, Christmas Eve 2024
Introduction
This little book took shape in the wake of the unexpected and sudden irruption of Sister Death into my family’s life, as she took my father away. I imagine that my Dad must have seen her face to face when she came for him all of a sudden. My mother, coming from the adjacent room, may have caught a glimpse of her from behind as she carried away the companion of her days. As for me, arriving only the following day, I was left with nothing but the traces of her passing. The visits of Sister Death never leave anyone indifferent.
It is from this fleeting yet unforgettable encounter, and from the spiritual turmoil that followed, that the reflections contained in this book find their origin. In sharing these thoughts, I cannot help but include memories and personal references, sometimes more explicitly, sometimes less. I must admit that I had doubts about exposing to this extent such intimate aspects of my life and that of my family. Grief seems to have a natural tendency to remain in the darkness of the unspoken, rather than seeking comfort in the embrace of open-hearted conversations. However, after much reflection, I have concluded that I have nothing more valuable or meaningful than this inner struggle to
offer at the service of the mission I embraced by becoming a friar preacher in the family of St Dominic.
The reason for this book is therefore very simple: if God, as I firmly believe, has worked great things (cf. Luke 1:49) for me and my family through this grief, then why would I not share it with everyone? Why not, like Paul, try to do my part ‘to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God’ (2 Cor 1:4)?4
Of course, some may say that death is not the most cheerful subject for someone writing his first book… and who could blame them? And yet, death, with its air of dramatic irreversibility, is not so different from the overwhelming force of true love. As the Woman in the Song of Songs says: ‘Love is strong as death, jealousy is fierce as the grave’ (Cant 8:6). For when one truly loves, there is no going back. One can only move forwards, taking love to its ultimate consequences – which at times may even mean dying for the beloved. Literally.
Like death, true love is an irreversible process. Yes, death remains something final even if faith allows us to share in Paul’s certainty that ‘if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again’ (Rom 6:8-9). The Resurrection promised to us does not mean simply reversing the process and returning to life as before. It is not like pressing the rewind button when we
lose track of a film’s storyline. Death is too deep a wound to heal as easily as a child’s scraped knee.
Just as in true love one can only move forwards so too the remedy that God offers to overcome death is to move forwards – indeed, to move beyond. God calls us beyond our fragile and limited nature to embrace a life like His, a life that can no longer be wounded by the laceration of separation. Then, God ‘will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away’ (Rev 21:4).
It is from this faith in the Resurrection – without which our faith would have no reason to exist (cf. 1 Cor 15:17) – that I offer you the reflections that follow. In the light of the Risen Christ, even the night of doubt and the emptiness of grief can take on a new meaning. In this way, the lives of those who have lost a loved one need not be a mere struggle to carry on, but rather a true movement forwards. Or better yet, a journey beyond.
This does not mean, however, that faith should become a pious illusion to sugar-coat the bitterness of loss. On the contrary, the light of faith can truly touch our lives only if it takes as its starting point the raw reality of our suffering. Healing can begin only when we lay our pain before God with honest realism, through ‘prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears’ (Heb 5:7), just as Jesus did in the anguish He chose to share with us and for us. Allowing
this healing light to enter our lives does not stem from self-deception, pretending that everything will be fine, but from the radical transformation of our deepest despair.
To allow the God of salvation to act is to expose ourselves to paradoxes of this kind – decisive moments in which our lowest point becomes the very place where God lifts us to heights we never imagined. Paul lists a series of such paradoxes that he and his companions experienced – states of utter weakness that, through their belonging to Christ, were transfigured into sources of joyful strength. In one such contrast, the Apostle states that they are ‘struck down, but not destroyed’ (2 Cor 4:9). The promise of faith is that, however low we may be brought, however much we may be broken, our pain will never be able to annihilate our hope – that inner force that gives us the strength to embrace life anew each morning. Or at the very least, to believe that it is still possible to do so.
It is this salvific upheaval of our suffering that I will explore in the reflections that follow, shedding light on different aspects of this journey. For the many dark challenges that grief presents to us, I will attempt to offer ways of seeing and acting that can open our hearts to the peace God longs to give us. I will try to suggest paths through which we can allow hope to enter our mourning – the hope of continuing to love those we have lost, while at the same time allowing this love to give us the strength to open up to the new relationships we have yet to form.
Holding tight to those we have loved so dearly can give us the momentum to discover new and deeper ways of loving.
Most of these reflections arise directly from my experience of my father’s death. In this sense, this book is profoundly personal. My hope is that, through these pages, I might speak to those who read them with the same words of life that the Lord has whispered to me in these months –sometimes through the faces of friends, and at other times through overwhelming silence. Though I have attempted to arrange the chapters in a logical sequence, each section stands alone as an individual reflection – a small morsel for the journey of each day. Readers are free to move between chapters as they feel drawn. Ultimately, if I have managed to convey even a fraction of the hope that the Spirit has kindled within me in these months, I will rejoice in sharing with you the same gratitude to the Lord.
To all of us who will live this Jubilee Year centred on the ‘hope that does not disappoint’ (Rom 5:5), and especially to those who sit in the ashes of grief, may these words of St Paul reach your heart: ‘Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you’ (Eph 5:14). And may the words that follow reflect, however faintly, the light of Christ upon each of you.
November 8th 2024
Commemoration of All the Dead of the Order of Preachers
Allowing Time
Anyone who, like me, has been moved at least once while watching the film Shadowlands (1993) will not have forgotten the drama surrounding the unexpected love story between the English writer CS Lewis and the American poet Helen Joy Davidman. Their marriage was brief due to her sudden illness, and in many ways, it was a peculiar bond. However, those who know this story only through the film may not be aware of the immense pain Lewis experienced after his wife’s death. For the English author, it was a deep inner struggle that, only after a turbulent period, allowed him to recover a shred of peace within himself and with God following that tragic separation.
The author of The Chronicles of Narnia offers us a glimpse into this painful time in his book A Grief Observed. This text is nothing more than a collection of thoughts drawn from his personal journals of that period. Many valuable insights can be found in the author’s sharp and deeply personal reflections. What I would like to focus on, however, is Lewis’s gradual journey from an inner landscape dominated by the deafening absence of his beloved – so much so that even God seemed absent – to a state infused with hope and consolation.
I must admit that I read with some surprise the radical doubts about God that Lewis expresses in these pages, born out of his deeply sharp grief. For those who know him as the great apologist who defended the faith with simplicity and clarity – even tackling the mystery of evil with remarkable ease during the dark years of World War II – statements such as the following may come as a shock: ‘The conclusion I dread is not “So there’s no God after all,” but “So this is what God’s really like. Deceive yourself no longer.”’5
Suffering can test us and wear us down to the point where we begin to doubt even those things that, until recently, were our absolute certainties. Lewis had come to faith after a joyful conversion from atheism, aided by conversations with good friends like JRR Tolkien, as he recounts in his compelling autobiography Surprised by Joy. Following that, he dedicated much of his creativity and intellectual agility to defending and spreading the Christian faith in a fresh and engaging manner. Yet now, in the face of grief, this same man confesses that his doubt is not so much about whether God exists, but whether He might be a cruel or even “sadistic” deity, as he explicitly suggests multiple times.
However, it must be said clearly that there is nothing wrong with expressing the doubts that tear us apart at certain moments in our lives. Lewis should not be considered less of a believer or less of a Christian thinker because of this –