An Advent Calendar for my Friends – December 12

The picture at the center is a photograph taken by lovetheson at stock.XCHANG

The Angel of Mourning

by Anselm Grün

“Mourning” makes us think at once of “mourning about someone who has passed away”. This is surely the worst case of mourning, and the most important. Who misses out on mourning for a loved one, a departed father or mother, blocks her or his life force. They don’t know why they cannot really be glad about anything, what it is that weighs down their souls, that keeps them from living. Often it is unexpressed grief. Mourning, we consciously come to terms with the bereavement the death of this person has left in our lives. And we take a look at our relationship with that person again. We remember what we have experienced with them, what they have meant to us. But we also don’t close our eyes for the problems we have had with them, the pain they may have caused us, things unsettled and left unspoken. Some people are surprised that with their grief anger comes back to them. But this anger is also admissible. Mourning clarifies a relationship and places it on a new foundation. Once we have lived through our grief we can build a new relationship with the departed, and they will become inner companions. They are not simply gone. Sometimes we meet them in dreams. Then they can offer us words of guidance. Or they simply remind us that we need an element of what they signified for us in life. By mourning we discover who the other person really was. During their lives we have only ever seen a part of them. The other part was hidden behind a mask. Now we know what they really wanted to express with their lives, what the deepest desire of their hearts was, which message they wanted to convey with their lives.

But the Angel of Mourning does not only want to teach you how to cope with grieving about the departed. There are many occasions in which he wants to introduce you to the art of coming to terms with the past or things unsettled and to leave all that behind you. I meet many people who suddenly experience the feeling that they have been cheated out of their lives. They were never really allowed to live the way they wanted to. They were pushed into directions that were not good for them by parents and teachers. Or they had to come to the painful realization of how their childhood really was, that they never really experienced a feeling of belonging. Such realizations are very painful. They have to be mourned. Or they will keep controlling us and sneaking secretly into everything we think or do. We don’t notice in that case why we react so touchily in certain situations or simply freeze up. It is unexpressed grief about disappointments of life.

But it’s not only the disappointments of childhood. Again and again we experience how a relationship shatters, how we have to sit down faced with the wreckage of our lives. We have failed. All the ideals we wanted to live have turned out to be illusions. Now we are sitting there, disappointed, disillusioned, powerless. A man once said after another failed relationship that he felt as if someone had cut off his wings. The Angel of Mourning wants to keep you from having to walk through life without wings. He wants to give you new wings so you can rise up to the sky and look upon all those failures from high above. He wants to give you new power to face the challenges you have to meet. But the Angel of Mourning cannot keep you from the pain that grieving is for every one of us. You have to face that pain. But you may trust that you are not alone in your pain and that the Angel of Mourning will be with you in this pain and that he will transform this pain into new vitality. Maybe the Angel of Mourning will also send you persons to support you in your grief, who understand you, who feel with you and who open your eyes for the new possibilities that open up within you now.

© by Anselm Grün, 50 Engel für das Jahr, 1997;
 translation by JunoMagic.