By Lilli Segre
Today in Meeting for Worship, the words grief, despair, and hope kept jostling for my attention. The vocal ministry danced around those words within the context of feelings aroused by current events, but my context was deeply personal. The crushing personal loss that I recently experienced still holds me inside a stunted, circumscribed sphere of intensely personal pain.
As a writer and editor by trade, I find myself exploring my feelings and my leadings through words. For me, words illuminate the inchoate, giving it recognizable shape through the painful process of describing it with exactly the right words strung together to expose meaning clarified by syntax. What I am meant to hear and contemplate frequently comes to me as individual words jostling each other in the stillness of worship, until sometimes they begin to fall into meaning.
Hope, despair, grief. Hope is desire accompanied by the expectation of fulfillment, despair is the loss of hope, and grief is distress caused by loss—short form definitions that begin to clarify in my analytical mind why those three words kept swirling into my awareness, seeking connection.
Death has obliterated any hope that my journey into old age would be tempered by the companionship of my beloved. Now I must learn to navigate an unexpected reality in which I am old and widowed and grieving. Despair seems like it must logically follow the loss of hope, but grief does not always follow logic.
Grief rolls over me like an ocean, sometimes in chuckling ripples of affectionate memories, sometimes as a storm-dark tsunami of emptiness. Yet even when my conscious awareness is engulfed in the void, I recoil from embracing despair. All the synonyms of despair but one have visited me in recent weeks—misery, desolation, anguish, gloom, and dejection have each sat beside me in front of the fireplace in the evening as he once did. But hopelessness has somehow never come to stay.
The dictionary antonyms of despair and hopelessness include terms like joy, mirth, gladness, gaiety, etc. I do not feel those things right now, but neither do I feel despair and hopelessness. The hope that I have lost, as all-encompassing as it was in my life, is not the only one I had. I still desire and expect to see and connect with other people I love—there is one hope that is not lost to me.
Today’s ministry spoke to the perseverance of hope in the face of societal and historical adversity. If I believe that there is that of God in everyone, then it follows (to me) that everyone is also part of God, by whatever name or concept we conceive of that which binds us together into a gathered meeting. And that, that is what holds despair at bay for me. I grieve, and grief will remain with me always—and yet I am still called to believe that hope is possible.
