Loss as necessary to life

In September 2003, I was working through Margaret Silf's book The Inner Compass. I wrote that I was disturbed by the following reading.

"Each breath [is] a stepping stone to God. ... As time passes I learn to recognize God's ways and to trust when I stand in the middle of the fast-moving water, that he will always bring me one more stone ... he is a little late today, still there on the river bank searching out the right stone. And only now I see how he is doing it. He is taking the stones away, one by one, from my cottage on the riverbank. Already it is half demolished. He is dismantling my kingdom [my home], bit by bit, to provide me with ways to discover his."

Days later I added a second quotation "as we have noticed in our painful experience, getting unhooked can be devastating. It feels like losing so much of what we must value. Freedom is costly - we pay with the currency of our hearts."

This sequence of images constitutes my adult spiritual journey and thematically records transitions and losses. During September I recorded that I dreamt I was trying to chew up fried pieces of Tofu with discomfort and difficulty. Furthermore I kept finding more pieces I must eat and they were too big to swallow. Things happening in my life were difficult to understand and digest.

Necessary Losses, by Judith Viorst, is one of those books that made clear that loss is essentially part of what it is to be human. I find that this is countercultural to our consumer capitalist worldview which suggests to be human is to have, to want, to collect, to accumulate.

I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received. Be completely humble and gentle: be patient, bearing with one another in love. Eph 4:1