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At a recent exhibit at The Museum of Russian Art, I saw a serigraph by American artist Ben Shahn (1898-1969) entitled “Alphabet of Creation.” In it he depicts the Hebrew alphabet as stylized, interlinking shapes, stark black on a white background. As a writer, I was intrigued. Words are my tools, and letters the building blocks for how we communicate. We cannot tell or hear a story without them.

Shahn saw beyond the alphabet’s functional purpose. He believed that letters hold a spiritual meaning as well. The alphabet represents nothing less than Creation itself, a way to feel intimately connected to God.

John makes that same connection when he opens his Gospel with “In the beginning was the Word.” God is the source of all creation. We cannot speak without calling forth God’s name. When we tell stories, we often start with “Once upon a time . . .” and use 26 letters in endless combination. This first verse of John uses a mere 13 letters to announce the only story that matters in our lives.

All year we long for this story of love, and Advent prepares us for its Incarnation. Jesus’s birth marks our own beginning in a fundamental way. Beyond daily injustices, beyond a dying world, beyond our broken hearts and fractured language, a New Creation awaits.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The story of Jesus’ coming is the one Word we desperately need.

For those of you who read my blog, you know that periodically I go for a stretch without posting. It’s not that there’s nothing to write about. If I’m deep into work on my memoir, I’m less inclined to write here. Lately, life has been pulling me in many directions, and it feels as if there’s almost too much to reflect on. What follows is more patchwork than whole cloth.

The Zen of the Y

This past summer, I trained for my hiking trip to the Canadian Rockies. I went regularly and worked a plan. My goal was to be physically able to hike each day and enjoy it. I didn’t look beyond the trip. But when I returned, I realized I missed going to the Y. Not the getting up and out the door at 5:30 a.m. part, but how I felt during and after a workout. Without realizing it, going to the Y has become a life habit, which for me means moving and staying flexible so as to meet aging on somewhat even terms.

Besides learning about the Bosu, kettlebells, and the TRX, I look forward to seeing the “regulars.” Margaret (we’re Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday gals) gives me her latest movie recommendation and chides me for being lazy if I miss a day or arrive after 6 a.m. Tony, a Monday through Friday guy, cracks jokes as he alternates between machines and weights. Chris seems to live there, and is determined to keep off the 60 pounds he lost a year ago. And if I’m lucky, I see someone from church or the neighborhood.

At the Y we put our earbuds in and do our own thing. There’s no competition, no judgment, mostly encouragement and admiration, along with gentle teasing.

In a recent article on weight lifting that I happened upon: “The perennial wisdom traditions and decades of psychological research point to three basic needs that, when fulfilled, allow people to thrive.” They are autonomy, mastery, and belonging. So I keep going to the Y, where it is all about showing up.

Wisdom Ways

I just finished a four-session class on contemplative prayer offered at Wisdom Ways, a center for spirituality at St. Catherine University. Over the years I’ve dipped in and out of contemplative prayer, knowing just enough to be dangerous (as in falsely believing I “get” it and could do it anytime I want but am a bit busy now so check with me later), but not enough to make it a regular practice, like the Y.

The instructor, a former Episcopal priest, used passages from three Gnostic Gospels,  Philip, Thomas, and Mary Magdalene. Again and again they invited us to participate (practice) in the search for truth, and to do so with the heart. I wasn’t the only one who came each week with an excuse why I didn’t have time to sit quietly for 30 minutes each day.

In Mary Magdalene: “The Son of Humanity already exists within you. Follow him there, for those who seek him there will find him.” In other words, we keep seeking what we already have, something it’s taken me more than 60 years to recognize.

Art for More Than Art’s Sake

As thirsty as I’ve been for physical and spiritual exercise, my mind has been challenged by various art forms. This fall the Pillsbury House Theatre presented “Jimmy and Lorraine: A Musing.” The playbill described it as a meditation on the American political climate of the late 50’s and early 60’s through the lens of two significant artists of the time, James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry. Both came to the Civil Rights movement through their art, but ultimately, politics and the black experience informed their writing. Can the two ever be separated?

I’ve discovered Kate Walbert’s novels (A Short History of Women) and short stories (She Was Like That), in which she explores the real lives of contemporary women and the struggles they face around work-life choices, having children, and relationships in painfully honest ways. Her bravery in naming women’s reality and avoiding predetermined narratives inspires me in my own cross-generational look at the women in my family.

A current exhibit of the work of Theaster Gates at the Walker reveals a man of broad artistic abilities who strives not only to reclaim and repurpose found objects that might otherwise be destroyed but also to salvage from history the stories that haven’t been told. (For a recent example, see the movie The Report.)

Two days earlier I heard Esi Edugyan, author of Washington Black, talk about how her own experience shaped the creation of her title character. Questions of displacement, identity, and belonging become more potent when looked at from the perspective of a young black boy who has only understood himself as a slave.

What does it mean to be at odds with the history before you, she asked, a history in which you aren’t represented and didn’t write the laws? “True agency,” Edugyan said, “is as urgent as love—and just as elusive.” Think about that, as I still am.

A Walk

When it warmed up enough this week to venture out for a walk, I headed down to the Mississippi River. I enjoy the view from along the bluff, where recently I’d seen a coyote at dusk. Already the river is frozen, locked down for the season. I’ve been feeling this same inertia, even stuckness as winter sets in.

I stopped and took in the vista, sensing there was something else to see, something I could only see with my heart. Beneath the white sheet of ice a river moved, living water, in perpetual transformation.

Yesterday I spoke with a group of about 30 women and 2 men about how writing has helped me grieve. Then I asked them to think about how they learned about grief.

The stories they shared were heartbreaking. One woman’s first child died at 6 months. When she told her father, he replied, “That’s water over the dam. Just have another one.” Another woman admitted, “I stuffed my pain; I simply couldn’t face it.” A few of us recounted how a grandparent’s suicide was kept a secret for years, as if not talking about the loss would somehow make grief go away. Many shared platitudes they’d heard, like “we shouldn’t be sad because our loved one was in heaven,” that became excuses not to take time to honor the pain of loss.

Most of us admitted that these former models reflect a different, unhelpful attitude about death. Now our generation has been left the hard work of trying to dismantle these lessons in order to arrive at a healthier way of grieving.

When poet Gregory Orr was 12 years old, he went hunting with his father and younger brother. Orr accidentally shot and killed his brother. He became a writer in large part because language gave him a way to grieve. “Words don’t change the disorder,” he said, “but hold the chaos.”

Like Orr, I’ve discovered that when I write about loss, I bring my chaos to words and language meets me with a container to help reorder the chaos. Talking with a grief counselor—or anyone who understands grief as necessary—can serve the same purpose. Those conversations can be the vessel into which we pour the emotions, the tears, whatever we can’t make sense of about our loss.

The loss of a loved one touches us all, so why do we have so few examples from our own lives of healthy grieving? “Death is scary, ” says writer Meghan O’Rourke, “and people don’t know what to say.”

I agree with O’Rourke, but I also think her response is too often used as an excuse, not an opportunity to change how we view death and our response to it. We need to learn a new vocabulary for loss and grief.

Each of us faces loss differently. Any feeling we might have is legitimate, not “abnormal” as we may be inclined to think when the world is moving to 4:4 time and our tempo keeps changing as we stumble through grief. We desperately want to fall into step with everyone else, to prove that we’re coping and will soon be fine. But what about the questions and anguish that haunt us at night? Aren’t they worth our attention?

Death is part of life, and nature is our best teacher. The seasons cycle through birth, growth, and dying year after year. Why, then, is it so hard to grieve?

I think it’s fear that stops us. Fear that if we unlock our heart, our pain and vulnerability, our own mortality, will stare us in the face. Fear that our faith is insufficient for the sorrow we feel. Fear that this natural cycle will stop with us and the end will be THE END.

We avoid grief at our own peril. And that peril is this: if we can’t confront our own pain, we can’t be present for others. We perpetuate the sense of being all alone with grief, instead of recognizing that honestly facing the inevitability of loss in our life connects us as humans.

Writer Gail Caldwell may have made the best case for why we should grieve. Near the end of her memoir Let’s Take the Long Way Home, about losing a dear friend, she writes, “I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures.”

Grieving is a holy way to feel the ongoing presence of a loved one who has died. Who doesn’t want that for themselves?