Deep company
Offering for July 21, 2026
Dear Reader,
In a recent Guardian article on ecological grief, Megan Mayhew-Bergman wrote about how the herons she sees every spring in Vermont have diminished so much that this spring she only saw one. “No one held a memorial service,” she wrote, “There was no public acknowledgment that something beloved or integral to the landscape had diminished…I feel an ache that does not seem entirely polite to share. It feels like a contradiction at the center of modern life: we experience profound environmental loss and largely pretend nothing is happening.”
Last week I re-read portions of Shelly Rambo’s Spirit and Trauma, which I return to often. This time, it was because I was preparing for Sunday’s meeting on the Death card in the major arcana. In Meditations on the Tarot, Anonymous writes that the card has to do with “the principle of subtraction.” However, they devote much of the letter to immortality, and different ways to achieve knowledge of one’s immortality. This is not surprising, since Meditations is a Christian text. Resurrection is the “good news” of that religion, and more specifically, as Rambo describes it, the good news is that “life conquers death…is victorious over it.”
Rambo worries, however, and I also worry, that something is lost in the rush to escape or outsmart or transcend death. Her book looks at the Christian Resurrection narrative, which she thinks too eagerly jumps from crucifixion to Easter Sunday. Or, put in a more secular manner, hurries too quickly to new life after loss, or total recovery after a significant fall. All week, my eyes burned from wildfire smoke that shrouded our region for days. Nearby, a strange weather event had torn down hundreds of decades-old trees in a matter of minutes. I’m worried about all this as well.
I was raised Catholic, but before reading Spirit and Trauma I had no idea what happened on the day between Good Friday and Easter. I don’t recall ever learning that before he resurrected, Jesus went to hell. Theologizing that “middle” space between death and life is important for Rambo, because something happens in that place where death and life swirl together that gets elided when we rush through it.
Rambo draws heavily on the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar and his theological partner Adrienne von Speyr. Von Speyr was a medical doctor who had mystical experiences related to the events of Easter weekend each year. She’d get terrible headaches, drops of blood would appear on her bedsheets, and she’d encounter various figures from those events, including Jesus himself. After the physical and emotional pain of Good Friday, on Saturday she’d enter into “a more inexplicable form of suffering…that extended beyond death…extreme loneliness, forsakenness, and abandonment…completely cut off from all forms of relationship1.”
I’ve given talks on the Death card several times these last years. As with all the cards, I try not to let ideas get in the way of a real encounter with what each card depicts. I do my best to follow Anonymous’ understanding of each arcanum as a spiritual exercise, or an encounter with what philosopher Cora Diamond calls a “difficulty of reality…of the mind’s not being able to encompass something which it encounters…in which we take something in reality to be resistant to our thinking it or possibly to be painful in its inexplicability, difficult in that way, or perhaps awesome and astonishing in its inexplicability2.”
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