Grief as Spiritual Formation: Lean In and Breathe

by Pinnacle Associate Peggy Haymes

(Originally published by Good Faith Media)

Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of columns on grief as spiritual formation.

She wasn’t happy about it in her later years.

 First working with dying patients in the hospital and then working with thousands of grieving people all over the world, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross gave us vocabulary for some of the feelings we experience when dealing with grief. In popular culture, that collection of feelings evolved into rigid, sequential steps that one was expected to navigate.

 “The five stages… are a part of the framework that makes up our learning to live with the one(s) we lost,” she said later in her life. “They are tools to help us frame and identify what we may be feeling. But they are not stops on some linear timeline in grief.”

 Something else happened as we built that linear timeline. The goal of our grieving became closure, that time when our grief would be all bundled up and done, and we could get back to living our lives without its inconvenience. 

Once we reached acceptance, we were done. Move on.

 Of course, grief is nothing like that. “Closure is a word that is used,” Anderson Cooper once said in a radio interview, “by those who have never experienced great loss.”

 While grief work is a true thing (and it may be some of the most challenging work we ever do), it is work that’s never really finished. We may move beyond the most acute phase of it and begin writing the next chapter of our lives, but we are never done with it. There are moments when it rises within us without warning or provocation. 

It may be tender, like my mother musing aloud, “I miss my father,” nearly sixty years after his death. Or it may be a rogue wave that knocks us to our knees.

 Grief is woven into our lives. The only way to escape it is to have no heart connections with anything or anyone, an absence which, ironically, becomes a loss in and of itself. 



We grieve the loss of homes and trees, dreams and friends. We grieve the loss of faith communities and physical abilities. We grieve the loss of family, both four-legged and two-legged, whether they have died or simply (and it is seldom simple) disappeared from our lives. 

If grief is such a given in our lives, should it not be a given in our lifelong journey of spiritual formation?

 Grief can come hand in hand with judgment. “I shouldn’t be feeling this.” (Whether “this” is feeling devastated by the death of a beloved pet or feeling relieved that a long and challenging chapter of caregiving is over.) 

“I should be doing better.” (It reminds me of the dreaded comment from my teachers on my report card: “Peggy is not working up to her potential.” But what is our potential in grief anyway?) 

“If I had more faith, I wouldn’t be so sad.” (When Jesus wept by his friend’s grave, he wasn’t constrained by such a notion.)

Grief is hard enough without worrying about whether we’re doing it right.

 When our loss is a part of an ongoing dialogue with Spirit, we need not hide any part of our grief from God (as if we could). In the presence of God’s love, our judgment melts. 

We may feel bewildered and lost, but we are held in God’s heart. Our grief becomes an agent in our growth and transformation. 

I wouldn’t suggest for a minute that God sends loss to us as part of some spiritual syllabus. We must, however, decide what to do with the losses we would not have chosen.

 A friend navigating deep grief messaged me that she was having a hard time. My response was three words: “Lean in,” and “breathe.” Those three words became her mantra. 

Lean in, not as if we are picking at a wound, but rather, facing the reality of the wound that is here. And breathe.

 When I did as the physical therapist directed, my body protested in pain. The muscles around the affected area clenched in protection. 

“Breathe,” she said. “Just breathe.” 

As I took a long, slow breath, the muscles began to relax. Facing grief, our soul wants to tighten up in defense, but our protection only keeps us locked in the pain. 

When we allow ourselves to breathe, when we allow Spirit to breathe through us, our defenses relax. It may be frightening at first, but in the end, that breath allows us to move and begin to have something of a life.

 We find ourselves walking on roads we wouldn’t have chosen and never dreamed we’d face. Spiritual formation opens the door to the possibility that we don’t walk them alone.