Reflecting on Lost Friends and Difficult Relationships

Grief has a way of taking over your life: impacting your thoughts, your decisions, the way you feel when you get up in the morning, the way you organize your day. Sometimes I can't think. And so I do some mindless task: dusting, cleaning the bathroom, sweeping the front porch. But I can't help, in the midst of these mindless chores, thinking about and remembering past losses and griefs.

The Universal Call to Suffering

"A voice was heard in Ramah...Rachel weeping for her children."
 Massacre of the Innocents by Rubens

If there is one vocation shared by everyone (in addition to the call to holiness) it must be the call to accept and embrace suffering. I have been thinking about that almost daily for many months. When we started attending Grief Share two weeks ago, I remembered all the people I know touched by tragedy and loss. No one gets out of life without paying a price in suffering, often a high price.