We have all grieved. My own initiation into overwhelming grief came with the death of my father. The shock unmoored me and I understood that grief is a land onto itself, desolate and nearly midnight dark. But not quite pitch, for over time flashes of light appeared that revealed gratitude for my father having lived and having loved me.
Many of the contributors to this Winter 2024-2025 issue of Parabola have shared the miraculous experience of grief transfigured by gratitude. Is there any sorrow greater than the loss of a child? Witness the heartbreaking yet profoundly hopeful account by Myra Sacks of what followed upon her young daughter’s death, or the extraordinary Fra Angelico painting of Mother Mary on the cover of this issue. Mary’s passion for her son shines elsewhere too, in Mary A. Osborne’s elegiac opening essay on Michelangelo’s Pietà and in Val Thorpe’s closing meditation on German artist Käthe Kollwitz.
Grief and gratitude are expressed here for our planet and all its creatures, beginning with Trebbe Johnson’s stirring “Lament and Praise for the Earth.” Do animals grieve? Perhaps even insects do, as we learn in Karen Adams’s charming “Telling the Bees” how the Royal Beekeeper broke the news of Elizabeth II’s death to her many hives. Certainly humans grieve for animals; Sarah Bowen illustrates in her eye-opening “Sacred Sendoffs” the rich history of animal burial, and we can even grieve a rodent, as portrayed winsomely in Rafe Martin’s “Lenny the Rat.”
The Buddha said that all life is suffering. Grief contributes to that suffering. Yet as these pages show, grief can open the door to new understanding and a new way of living. There is, writes Brother David Steindl-rast here, a path of grateful living that “can build the kind of world for which every human heart is longing,” for its life force is “the force of Life itself—the power of Mystery.” It is this sacred Mystery that is celebrated on this issue’s final page, an excerpt from the Mohawk Thanksgiving Prayer: “Now our minds are one.”
—Jeff Zaleski
