​Process Theology
​and Grieving


This page offers springboards for reflection for individuals
and groups considering process theology and grieving. 

Its aim is to be honest to the pain of grief and offer hope
that, within the journey of grief, an unexpected kind of wholeness

can emerge in the experience of the griever, which is itself a window into 
a hidden wholeness that includes both pain and love and  beauty.

This hidden wholeness is God.
​

The Journey of Grief ,
Creative Transformation
Mourning the Loss of a Way of Living,
Whitehead on Perpetual Perishing 
The Metaphysics of Grief
Mourning the Loss of Yourself
Objective and Subjective Immortality
​

​The Journey of Grief

​Grief Takes a Road Trip
by
​Patricia Adams Farmer
​

My mother died.  Those three words are hard to write, let alone process.  For me, the finality of never hearing my mother’s voice again or having the chance to talk over old issues or discover something new about her childhood—are all swallowed up in a black hole of mystery that is beyond me now.  Game’s up.  No more chances.  It feels kind of brutal and unfair.

But she was elderly and ready to go and died peacefully in the night, the way we all wish to go.  So I did not anticipate any earth-shaking emotions.  How wrong I was!  A parent’s passing under any condition is never anything but earth-shaking.

Who was I to know that a whole plethora of feelings would suddenly rise up like a chaotic music video filled with intense images and colors and rhythms, a kind of hodgepodge of noisy regrets and bittersweet memories and intense sadness and forgotten angers and irrational bouts of guilt.

I would prefer to turn off the whole grief experience, or at least decide how it goes.

But that’s the weird thing about grief:  it just does its thing regardless of our preferences.  While I would prefer a quiet, gentle Samuel Barber Adagio for Strings kind of grief experience, I get rap instead.  The quiet sadness is punctuated by the rude and repetitive bursts of “If Onlys” and “Should haves.”  So, for me, grief at this point in the journey is a jumble, a mashup of emotional tonalities that have a mind of their own.

This lack of control is, in itself, discomforting.

Richard Rohr defines suffering as "whenever you are not in control."  Mourning our loved ones feels like this, a humbling of all our attempts at control.  We hear, too, the ancient whisper in our ears:  Memento Mori(Remember, you shall die.)  Just as death comes when it comes, so the grief process is something we cannot control.  But we can be partners with it.  And herein lies the good news.

Grief is a journey, I think, a road trip into unknown territory, with a mélange of ever-changing feelings as traveling companions.  So yes, that includes the negative emotions, too.  As for my own road trip, I’ve got my regrets rapping in the backseat, pelting out words that grate and disturb and cover up the orchestral strings I’m playing on the radio.  I can tell the backseat regret-rappers to shut up, but they can’t hear me for all their shouting, “If only, If only” and “You should have, You should have” in maddening repetition to a beat which gives me a headache.  I wish I could dump them on the side of the road and speed off with tires screeching; but alas, for the grief journey to work, I must make room for them and offer them a little compassion.  So I muster my patience:  Okay, you guys, I’ll listen for a little while and then you really do need to shut up.

But my other traveling companions—gratitude and forgiveness and loving memories—get to sit in the front seat and read the map and choose the radio station.  I can work with these guys.  I’m not sure where we’re going, but I just keep driving because it feels like the thing to do because movement helps.  I want to be open and engaged to whatever healing might emerge in the journey.**

Mourning can be a kind of creative, open-ended movement toward transformation, that is if we are willing to let all our feelings ride along with us in honesty and acceptance.  My friend, theologian and pastor Bruce Epperly, affirms this in a beautifully honest passage from his book, From Here to Eternity: Preparing for the Next Adventure.  He describes his own experience of finding his brother dead.  How shocking that must have been!  As his friend, I know that Bruce’s dedicated care for his brother was evident to all who knew him.  Still, his journey of grief included these honest feelings:

“I still vividly recall finding my brother’s lifeless body in the mobile home we purchased for him in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.  I still go over our relationship, lamenting missed opportunities to be more supportive of him in facing the challenges of mental illness and loneliness.  I had been a supportive brother, yet I still experience a sense of guilt at sins of omission that might—although in reality probably wouldn’t—have made a difference in his quality of life.”

I found great relief in this story because it reminds me that regret and guilt—irrational though they may be—are universal, perfectly normal in times of grief, not something cooked up just for me.  They are part of the journey.

And the journey is hard.

But the journey can also take us to places we didn’t even know were on the map—unexpected landscapes of mystery and awe and beauty.  This happened to me.  Although I was not present at my mother’s death, I was told that shortly before Mother passed in the wee hours, her hospice roommate heard her talking to someone, but no one was there.  My mother spoke these words into the darkness:  “Okay, Mother, you can come in now.”  She died shortly after.

It was as if her own mother—long passed—had been standing at the door of another existence with outstretched arms, so eager to usher her daughter into the loving embrace of eternity!

This news touched me deeply, jolting me out of myself.  I quickly changed gears and drove my car named Grief, packed with a motley crew of emotions, up to a high peak.  There, overlooking the unfathomable ocean of eternity, I paused and looked into that Great Mystery with humility and awe, contemplating the hope of connection and healing and reunion and further adventure inside the heart of God’s embracing love.

I like to think of death as a widening of the soul, like spreading wings, where the self is not extinguished but rather enlarged:  a spectacular transformation which breaks through the walls of the chrysalis-like ego, ushering us into a spacious, interconnected, transcendent Beauty.  Perhaps, then, death itself is the Great Journey.

As my friend Bruce says, in Process Theology: A Guide for the Perplexed,“The God who was present in the energy of conception is equally present at the moment of death, luring us forward as God has done from the beginning toward the next adventure in partnership with God and the world.”

My present adventure, this journey in grief—chock full of ever-changing emotions—is just beginning, but I know it will continue to transform me and teach me about love and life and eternity.  Just as heaven, in my mind, enlarges the contours of our souls in relational healing, so grief will stretch my earthly soul with its new landscapes carved out of sorrow and beauty.  And I will learn something of my own mortality, too, and of savoring wild flowers and sunny days.  Perhaps, then, I can snatch glimpses of heaven, and of that Great Love that embraces us in life and death.
​
Perhaps, when the time comes, my own mother will be waiting at the door, eager and ready to usher me into that “next adventure.”  

​I hope so.

​**The metaphor of the "road trip" used in this essay was inspired by writer Elizabeth Gilbert, who used a similar idea  in her wonderful book, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, as a way of understanding fear in the creative journey.
 ​​

An Unexpected Wholeness:
​Creative Transformation

​Land

Directed by Robin Wright
​
A soulful and empowering portrait of grief.

A film review by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat
Reposted from Spirituality and Practice
​

"Grief and pain are dreadful, and to live free from them is to be truly blessed. But the truth is, we usually have no choice when it comes to loss. Eventually, it visits every one of us. And there is no magic or blessing that is found in this curse. There is no cosmic trick. But there is a different approach to facing our suffering — one that can lead not only to respite and relief from our pain and anguish, but also to an unexpected sort of wholeness." These wise words come to us from Matthew Gewirtz, the Senior Rabbi of Congregation B'nai Jeshurun in his book The Gift of Grief. They capture the essence of this simple yet deeply felt film.

In her feature directing debut Robin Wright plays Edee, a depressed woman who is carrying a heavy burden of grief and pain. Being around people only adds to her anguish and so she purchases a ramshackle cabin in the mountains of Wyoming. She stocks up on supplies and gets rid of her rental car, U-Haul, and cell phone. Although she has unobstructed views of the majestic mountains, she doesn't have time to really enjoy the place. Instead she finds herself busy doing repairs on the cabin, chopping wood for the stove, and lugging water from a local river. When a bear wrecks havoc on her possessions and food stocks, she is devastated.

As the seasons pass by, Edee is troubled by apparitions of her dead husband and son. Her unrelenting grief has a dire cumulative effect on her body and she suffers a physical breakdown. She is brought back into the land of the living by Miguel (Demian Bichir), a local hunter. When she regains consciousness, she asks him, "Why are you helping me?" He responds, "You were in my path."
​
Miguel is a healing presence in Edee's shattered life and so he listens carefully when she says, "I'm here in this place because I don't want to be around people." With empathy and insight, he tells her, "Only a person who has never been hungry thinks that starving is a good way to die."

Since she refuses to go to the hospital, he nurses her back to health and teaches her how to trap and hunt. A quiet and pensive man, his favorite song is "Everybody Wants to Rule the World." Miguel's jaunty manner of singing amuses Edee. In a very touching way these two souls, who have both been wounded by loss, reveal their secrets and, in so doing, empower each other. He helps her with her chief aspiration: "I want to notice everything around me more."
​
This emotionally engaging film confirms what all the spiritual traditions teach: there is no rigid pattern in grief's stages and phases. It also shows us how the experience of loss brings us into a direct and often painful encounter with the fragility of the body, the poisons that suck the life out of us, and the isolation which often keeps us from accepting the kindness, compassion, and restorative gifts of others.

​All Those Little Deaths:
​
​Whitehead on Perpetual Perishing
(and how it may not be the whole story)

​"The ultimate evil. . . .lies in the fact that the past fades, that time is a ‘perpetual perishing.’ Objectification involves elimination. The present fact has not the past fact with it in any full immediacy. The process of time veils the past below distinctive feeling. There is a unison of becoming among things in the present. Why should there not be novelty without loss of this direct unison of immediacy among things? In the temporal world, it is the empirical fact that process entails loss: the past is present under an abstraction. But there is no reason, of any ultimate metaphysical generality, why this should be the whole story."

Whitehead, Process and Reality, Corrected Edition, ed. Griffin & Sherburne, New York: The Free Press, 1978, 340)

​The Metaphysics of Grief:
​The Loss of Immediacy

​
The many become one and are increased by one.

                                                           - AN Whitehead

At every moment of our lives, the past actual world becomes one in the immediacy of the present.  So say the process philosophers and theologians.  The past actual world consists of remembered events, persons, and circumstances that have passed away: friends and family members, landscapes and waterways, feelings and stories, soundscapes and moods, places and poems.  Everything that has been, in any mode of having been, is part of the many that becomer one in our immediate experience, through our memories of them. 

These memories can be concious or unconscious, or somewhere in between.  The things that are remembered can be part of our own personal past (the personal unconcious) or part of a more collective past (the collective unconscious).  We can remember historical events that we were not a part of, for example, but that are important to us: a war, a natural disaster, a loss of life, the decline of a way of living, the loss of a language, a culture, a species, a biotic community.

Our memories of these past actualities, whether concious or unconscious, are clothed by moods and emotions.  Process philosophers and theologians call them "subjective forms."  Other people may not be able to see them directly, but they can feel them through our present actions: the smile, the frown, the furrowed brow, the laugh, the gleam in the eye, or the sadness.  These subjective forms are how we feel (or prehend) the past.  They are our emotions. 

One such emotion, immensely complex, is grief. This grief can be about a trauma we or someone we love has undergone, or about a loss in life: a death, a misfortune, a disease, a sadness.  We grieve it. We wish it had not happened, and we can't quite get over the fact that it did.

An Unexpected Sort of Wholeness

Amid our grief, say the process philosophers and theologies, there is something else happening in our experience. We carry within ourselves, moment by moment, a 'creativity' by which we interpret and respond to what has happened, seeking to weave it into the rest of our experience in a constructive way, as best we can.  The past has a say, but not a final say, because how we interpret it adds to the history of our own life and the future.  The many become one and are increased by one.

Additionally, amid this interpretive act, there is also a possibility for creative transformation: that is, for emergence in our own life of something new and beautiful in its own way.  Rabbi Matthew Gewirtz, the Senior Rabbi of Congregation B'nai Jeshurun, calls it an unexpected sort of wholeness:

"Grief and pain are dreadful, and to live free from them is to be truly blessed. But the truth is, we usually have no choice when it comes to loss. Eventually, it visits every one of us. And there is no magic or blessing that is found in this curse. There is no cosmic trick. But there is a different approach to facing our suffering — one that can lead not only to respite and relief from our pain and anguish, but also to an unexpected sort of wholeness." 

​This possibility for creative transformation, for an unexpected wholeness, does not change the past, but it does affect the future.  For process philosophers and theologians, the possibiliy of this unexpected wholeness come from the universe, not just from us; and, more specifically, it comes from the living unity of the universe that many address as "God."  If the universe is imagined as an embryo, then this living unity is the sky-like Womb in whom the embryo unfolds, moment by moment. The Womb is not all-powerful; it requires our participation for its aims to be realized.  And yet is it all-loving, all whole-making, all redemptive, all tender.  Indeed, it is also, in its way, a companion to our grief and suffering: "a fellow sufferer who understands."

The fellow sufferer with its lures toward wholeness cannot erase the past, but it can invite each of us, in our own way, to undertake a road trip into the future, and it takes the road trip along with us.  In this sense it is a harmony that includes our life.  And there is the hope, which Whitehead supports, that the wholeness we feel might prefigure, or reveal, a deeper Wholeness which is a harmony of harmonies, a weaving together of each and all in a life everlasting, the sky-like Womb itself, in which all is preserved, even as it has passed away. 

​Mourning the Loss of a Way of Life

A story about cooking from scratch, the passing of a food maker, and a family left behind. This story was made in a workshop facilitated by the Center for Digital Storytelling.  It illustrates a kind of grief in which God shares, even if no wholeness emerges from it.

https://unsplash.com/s/photos/loss

​Mourning the Loss of Yourself

​​Spring and Fall

by Gerard Manley Hopkins
​
to a young child
​

Márgarét, áre you gríeving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Leáves like the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Ah! ás the heart grows older

It will come to such sights colder

By and by, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

And yet you wíll weep and know why.

Now no matter, child, the name:

Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It ís the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.

​Objective and Subjective Immortality

excerpts from What is Process Theology
by Robert Mellert: Chapter 11: Immortality

The perishing of an actual occasion, therefore, need not be its extinction. Rather, it can be understood as a kind of switching of modes. Whereas in the emerging of an actual occasion God’s immanence is felt in the incorporation of value, in its perishing that actual occasion is felt immanently in God as a fuller realization of the divinity. In this way the occasion continues to be felt in the formation of the future. Death, then, is emphatically not a passing into nothingness. Instead, it is immanent incorporation into God, in whom each actuality is experienced everlastingly for its own uniqueness and individuality. In dying, one "gets out of the way" of the present in order to be available to the future in a new way.

Does this doctrine of immortality, which Whitehead calls "objective immortality," correspond to the faith expectations of those who seek the reassurance of an afterlife, a place of eternal happiness, or a heaven? In some fundamental ways, at least, I think that it does. The basis for their belief is the impossibility of man’s conceiving of himself as not being. The one absolute and certain experience that endures throughout his entire life is the experience of being in the present, recalling the past, and anticipating a future. One experiences a profound continuity with oneself in space and time.
​
*

One can also argue for the possibility of "subjective immortality" using the thought of Whitehead.2 In this interpretation the series of actual occasions that constitutes the continuity of the self is not interrupted or terminated by death; it only changes the environment in which it does its experiencing. The ordinary environment for the experiencing self is the body. However, there is no necessary reason why the series of actual occasions that constitutes the self cannot continue in some other non-material environment. Hence, death can be understood as the detachment of that dominant series of actual occasions we recognize as the self from the many supportive material series which constitute the human body. The new environment is the consequent nature of God, where the serial reality of the self continues to experience and to change, but without any direct attachment to the material world.

- Robert Mellert, What is Process Theology?