A healing grace
Diana Lampen reviews a moving account of loss, grief and forgiveness
When Elaine Pryce was sixteen her four-year-old brother drowned. She blamed herself for this and so did her family. Her Pendle Hill pamphlet, Grief, forgiveness and redemption as a way of transformation, gives a most moving account of her journey ‘through a labyrinth of learnings… to forgiveness and acceptance’.
It was very, very hard. ‘Guilt sits in every silent space, every splintered cranny, between every family member, like a grenade threatening to explode.’ Life was divided forever into ‘the before’ and ‘the after’. But, gradually, she learnt to forgive herself and discuss the event with family members, discovering that all of them blamed themselves. Only after she and her sister had found courage to talk to each other could she speak with her mother too and discover she was forgiven.
The trauma of her immense loss was not an end, but brought a restoration of hope. Solitude and silence were ‘transformed from depression and despair to a healing grace which… lets in life again.’
Sometimes people urge forgiveness as though it were simple and easy, but Elaine rightly calls it ‘a hero’s journey’. Travelling with guides in Papua New Guinea she came to a deep ravine, crossed by a precarious bridge of vines and bamboo, with a turbulent river below. Almost paralysed with fear, she made her painful way across, step by step. In facing and overcoming that terror, she discovered there was a meaning at the heart of her life: ‘The grief experience, if only we see it through to acceptance, is a harsh but utterly profound way of bringing us to a recognition of the source of our being.’
But one of the terrible things about grief, she says, is that, just when we suppose the task is done, we are submerged by the storming waves again. We must be heroes and not give up. Then ‘it makes us aware, if we pay attention, of recurring sacred moments… calling us to a fuller discussion of being.’ She links this to Jesus’ emergence from his embattled sojourn in the wilderness, the prodigal son, the disciples after the resurrection and the early Quaker experience.
‘In its drawing back of the veil between life and death, the journey of grief can bestow upon us intense moments of awareness of the eternal dimensions of human experience.’
Grief, forgiveness and redemption as a way of transformation, Elaine Pryce, Pendle Hill Pamphlet 416.
