The following excerpt is from the popular book, A Pilgrimage Through Grief: Healing the Soul’s Hurt After Loss, which leads the reader on a pilgrimage, taking her or him through four separate experiences that grief often holds. This excerpt is near the beginning of the book, after the idea of pilgrimage has been explained.

The Experience of Absence

My eyes fill with tears.
What shall I do?
Where shall I go?
Who can quench my pain?
My body has been bitten
By the snake of “absence,”
And my life is ebbing away
With every beat of the heart.
                    Mirabai

The words composed by this fifteenth century Indian poet
     reach across years and continents to touch us.
We too can be stung by absence.
We too can be plagued by emptiness.
What we had is gone.
What we took for granted is missing.
What we presumed would be will not come to be.
Around us we feel only barrenness.
And the poet's questions from another era
     become our questions today.
“Where shall I go?”
“What shall I do?”
Even more difficult,
    “Why must I face this absence, this emptiness?”
Whether it is the absence of meaning or of hope,
     the absence of someone we have loved or of something we have held dear,
          the question “Why?” surfaces ever so easily.

Why has thou forsaken me?
Why art thou so far from helping me?
                    Psalm 22:1

The emptiness around us reminds us of that other emptiness:
     the one within.
Both ask for some sort of response.
Both call for something to be done.
It may well be the best response is the simplest.
And the most difficult:
Acceptance.
We must accept the absence.
We must feel the wideness by our side,
     the openness that stretches out all around us,
          the hollowness within.
And we must let that absence be.
We must allow it time.
Rather than push it away, as we all want to do,
     we would do well to draw it near.
We would do well to befriend it,
     asking of it not questions that demand,
          but queries that may open possibilities.
“What does this emptiness most want to say to me?”
“What does this absence have to teach me?”
“What is there in this uninterrupted expanse
     that wants to interrupt me and expand my vision?”
“What am I being given the opportunity to learn
     about myself, about this world, about this life?”

This excerpt is from Jim Miller’s book, A Pilgrimage Through Grief: Healing the Soul’s Hurt After Loss. It is one of the several books he has written about loss and grief. A video version of this book can be found in his videotape By the Waters of Babylon: A Spiritual Pilgrimage for Those Who Feel Dislocated.

Back To Top