Offering: January 2024

Grieving, hoping, world-building

To listen to me read this Offering aloud, click here.

Last January I wrote about values clarification as a way to find a way forward when you're not sure what’s right. I drew on the metaphor of values-as-compass that I’ve encountered in acceptance and commitment therapy, and the practice of values clarification as a navigation device. 

I wrote about how getting clear on values can make choices more intrinsically rewarding, and minimize the amount of time we spend doing things because we feel like we have to or are scared or whatever else. I even thought about how engaging in values-clarification work reveals a hidden upshot of uncertainty, since if you were sure about things you wouldn’t be doing it to begin with.

Not long after that Offering, grief claimed me. Writing in acute grief is tricky because nothing makes sense at that point, but I write every week so I wrote my way through it. I’ve decided to call my commitment to making Offerings through grief—despite how vulnerable it felt at times—as a practice of hope. Hope in the sense that philosopher Line Ryberg Ingerslev describes it, as a way to “uphold or reinterpret the world so that sense can come.¹” 

By October when Israel began its genocidal campaign on the Palestinian people in Gaza I was already down to the studs in terms of my values. Loss will do that to you if you can figure out how to withstand it, and for the first time in thirty-seven years, I really had. I am still grappling with what the genocide in Gaza means to me but what I can say is I am entering 2024 with new ideas on values and hope. 

In last year’s Offering on values, I shared philosopher Brian Massumi’s idea about hope as being less to do with some projected idea of the future and more about a “next experimental step.²” This year I’m also considering hope as a practice of staying engaged and committed in a world that relentlessly undermines what is precious.

For example, the Biden administration just bypassed the congressional review process to approve a $147.5 million weapons sale to Israel who is now attacking refugee camps in Gaza. A recent PBS article named Israel’s offensive as “one of the most devastating military campaigns in recent history,” having killed more than 20,900 Palestinians including more than 8000 infants and children.

What is hope in this world? For starters, not all hope’s the same. Ingerslev writes that sometimes we know what we hope for and sometimes we don’t. And this becomes really significant in a context of grieving because of how loss takes out meaning. I might be unsure what to hope for in an upside down world, and yet something keeps pulling me forward.

The good news is that not all hope is dependent on certainty or the world making sense. Ingerslev writes that with this kind of hope, “we find ourselves taking up a situation that we are not in control of and that we experience ourselves as not being sufficient to handle.” 

Hope is a process in which:

“…we engage in and take up situations we do not master. We engage in doings and praxes that might not have any meaning in the moment but are constitutive of meaning to come. In practicing hope this way…we creatively survive…we remain responsible for a sense to come and for a community to come.”

A couple weeks after last year’s values Offering I started reading and writing about philosopher L.A. Paul’s ideas about transformative experiences. For Paul, transformative experiences are ones that change us in deep and fundamental ways. If there’s a choice to be made, a transformative experience is often tough to decide on because the choice itself is going to change what you value. 

In a paper on grief and meaningfulness, philosopher Jennifer Matey considers how grief in some ways meets Paul’s criteria of a transformative experience but in other ways, doesn’t. While experiences like having a kid or moving to a new country tend to yield transformation by producing new values, grief has a tendency to destroy the sense of what’s precious in the person experiencing it, at least at first. This may partially explain why so many grievers describe the early stages post-loss as disorienting. 

But the destruction of values is transformative, too. It creates an absence that we are drawn in our grief to respond to. This is central to Ingerslev’s work, who writes that “By letting grief take place, we allow for grief to accompany us and come over us in such a way that we have to respond…we are delivered over to and exposed by grief by its calling us into question.”

A year ago I really had not considered how grief affects values. I was grieving at the time though I didn’t yet know it, and naively assumed one can always discern what is precious. I didn’t appreciate how hard it can be when you’re mourning, and grief’s claimed you, and everything’s changed, and nothing makes sense.

As I mentioned, Ingerslev thinks about grieving as a process in which we are invited to act in ways that are responsive to absence. Drawing on the work of philosopher Samuel Scheffler³, she calls this experience the afterlife. This afterlife is not to be confused with the disembodied, post-earth promise of paradise or damnation after death. Rather, it’s “the life we continue to commit ourselves to in the act of remembering the dead” and “a shared life with others as we articulate our losses.” 

What’s so precious to me about this idea of grieving is that it rejects the fantasies of individual healing and complete recovery in favor of a grief that is relational and ongoing. What’s also important about it is that instead of emphasizing the individual project of values-clarification as a starting point, it considers grief as a starting point. And it assumes grief to be both an interpersonal process and a “condition for human valuing.⁴”

What’s useful about values is that they’re not goals. They’re not contingent on achievement, which is useful when outcomes aren’t promised. Aside from rigorous mourning, the best thing I did this year was start and finish Grace Jantzen’s Becoming Divine.

In it, she notes the work of scholar Sharon Welch who asserts the importance of “commitment to the risk of action without the assurance of definitive solutions.⁵” The ability to take this risk depends on “the rejection of the idea that one individual can solve the problems of others…and commitment instead to communal thought and action, a ‘communal matrix of resistance.⁶’ 

If we think about responsiveness and responsibility as being related qualities, Ingerslev’s idea of grief as responding to absence and Welch’s description of responsible action illuminate a link between grief and community.

Like Ingerslev’s afterlife, Welsh’s idea of responsible action is inherently interpersonal. It is “participation in communal work, laying the groundwork for the creative response of people in the present and future…[providing] for partial resolutions and the inspiration and conditions of further partial resolutions by others.⁷” 

And similar to the way Ingerslev understands afterlife in contrast to an individualized and disembodied post-earth promise, Welch views responsible action not as individually redemptive but as the way one enters into “beloved community,” in which “life is celebrated, love is worshipped, and partial victories over injustice lay the groundwork for further acts of criticism and courageous defiance.⁸” 

I’ve been overly verbose again and overzealous to boot but this is good, because I spent most of the year in depression. I mourned hard and am thankful to be moving into 2024 with a new understanding of hope, world-building, and responsibility. I will leave you with these igniting words from Line Ryberg Ingerslev: 

“The world of those who died is our world…Surviving the death of others constitutes our shared vulnerability as we keep being engaged in an existential hope. Hope understood in this way does not consist in a set of happy beliefs that things will someday be better; rather, it takes on the life form of an active response to loss and to losing.”

Wishing everyone hope, a sense of world-building, and the capacity for active response to and responsibility for our shared losses. 

To listen to me read this Offering aloud, click here.

1. All of the quotes from Line Ryberg Ingerslev in this Offering are from her paper “What the experience of transience tells us about the afterlife” from TheoLogica, An International Journal for Philosophy of Religion and Philosophical Theology

2. Brian Massumi said this in an interview with Mary Zournazi, which you can read here

3. I have read part of this talk on this topic by Samuel Scheffler which you can read too if you’re interested

4. This is a Scheffler quote within Ingerslev’s paper

5. These are Grace Jantzen’s words on Sharon Welch’s work in Becoming Divine

6. This phrase is attributed to Sharon Welch

7. This quote is attributed to Sharon Welch

8. This is also attributed to Sharon Welch