Offering: December 24, 2023

The world-building kernel in grieving

Knight of Pentacles by Pamela Colman Smith for the Rider-Waite-Smith deck. In my first Tarot notebook I wrote at the top of the page “The Builder” to signify this card’s meaning.

I didn’t finish many books in 2023, but I did finish one that changed my life and it was Grace Jantzen’s Becoming Divine. There’s a chapter in it called “Trustworthy Community” that I’ve been recalling almost daily since October 7.

Jantzen works from the perspective that all knowledge is situated. This means no one has an objective “view from nowhere,” despite authoritative truth claims to the contrary. It also means that as social beings, what we can readily see is determined by our social locations.

But even though all knowledge is incomplete and fair game to be scrutinized, Jantzen asserts that “there are basic requirements of justice which are not relative to preference.” 

She continues: 

“…and although there is of course room for debate about how justice and flourishing should be theorized, such a debate could not even get under way unless the participants shared basic commitments to moral truths.

For example, if someone wished to offer arguments for the justice of torturing infants, the appropriate response would not be to set up a philosophical forum but to ensure quickly that that person had no access to small children, and then to try to arrange psychiatric help.

Again, in the face of the massively unequal distribution of resources and privileges, so that millions starve, are made refugees, are denied not only the pleasures of life but even its basic necessities, it is hideous to pretend that we do not have adequate criteria of justice and flourishing.¹”

The northern hemisphere had its longest night of the year last week, and the day after it was reported that 20,000 Palestinians have been killed with nearly 85% of the population of Gaza displaced since October 7.

A few days ago, the BBC reported that of those killed in Gaza, more than 8000 of them were children. A report released Thursday by the United Nations and other agencies said that one in four people in Gaza are starving. The United States continues to block international efforts toward ceasefire. 

One of my favorite passages from Jantzen’s book comes after the passage above, and I’ve shared it before and will continue to. For me it’s an invocation toward becoming divine. Not because I want to be God-like, but because I want to stay human. 

“We do not know everything. Certainly there are ambiguities. But we know enough to join the struggle; and if we joined it more, we would know more. Criteria, insight, are gained within engagement, not as neutral spectators from an objective vantage-point.” 

I’ve been thinking a lot about integrity and about how to get super clear on what it is that I want to give and receive in this world. Years of writing publicly through uprisings and collective traumas has taught me the importance of staying engaged in a way that feels true to who I am and what I can reasonably offer so that I can remain sustainably in struggle. In this time, what’s felt best has been writing on grief. 

My sense of the need for grief literacy and good language on mourning is a response to my own intense struggles with loss. I’ve become particularly interested in the idea that the disorientation that occurs after significant loss is a critical moment in grieving. There is a kernel of transformation here, with a world-building capacity inside.

At the risk of being too formulaic, I have a feeling that those who can endure the confusion of loss gain access to new worlds having done so. Though loss of meaning in particular can be terrifying, it really can change the ground if you let it. And this is why I think it’s true that “blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.²”