Offering: November 2024

Making meaning in lost times

“I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend—to grasp what was happening around and within me. Most importantly, I wanted to make the hurt go away. I saw in theory then a location for healing.” 

bell hooks, from “Theory as liberatory practice.” 

I have openings for one-on-one sessions in November. Sessions are ninety-minute discussions between me, you, and ten tarot cards. You will bring an area of life or query that you’d like to explore, and I will listen as closely as I can, offer ideas and facilitate a process of collaborative interpretation that I hope will be useful for you. To book a session, click here.

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About two years ago I began to think a lot about grief, primarily through images from Chretien de Troyes’ telling of the Arthurian Grail Legend Perceval, and James Stephens’ telling of the legendary Tuan Mac Cairill from his collection Irish Fairy Tales. About a year later, I stumbled upon a field called philosophy of emotion, which is an area of study that despite nearly fifteen years in the mental health field I had not known existed.

I was grieving when I found and began to read bits of Matthew Ratcliffe’s Grief Worlds (including a link here because the book is free to download, which is amazing). I’m currently reading it in full, and have been thinking about how one might know they’re done grieving. I have no doubt there are some losses one could or even must grieve forever, but those were not the kinds of losses I was most curious about when I came across Grief Worlds. And when I say grief, I’m thinking of something pretty specific. 

For Ratcliffe, grief is “inherently puzzling,” involves “a profound alteration in the experience of self, world, and other people,” entails a negotiation of tension between being on one hand explicitly aware of a loss, while on the other existing inside “an experiential world that continues to implicate” those who’ve been lost.

I am a person whose job it is to make meaning. I wrote a book about tarot cards, for instance. I facilitate groups and one-on-one sessions in which we make meaning with images, symbols and stories. I’m not currently working as a psychotherapist, but when I do a big part of that job is to listen closely and support sense-making with what is disclosed.

It’s important to me to think about meaning-making specifically in terms of interpretation, because to consider interpretation is to think about who gets to interpret, about what interpretations can do, and about power. 

In Disorientation and Moral Life, philosopher Ami Harbin draws on the work of a number of feminist philosophers to suggest that the ways our experiences are interpreted by those around us have a profound impact not only on the meanings we make of those experiences, but what we actually go through.

When others bear adequate witness to us, interpreting what we are going through with a degree of accuracy or fidelity, such experiences can offer what Harbin calls “toeholds.” The function of a toehold is not to re-orient us, but to make disorientations “more livable.”

To be a toehold, she writes, is “to stay in relationship with a disoriented person, without the expectation that there ought to be reorientation, with a willingness to ask questions and offer help in ways that maintain the possibility of the disoriented person continuing in everyday life.” 

I read to find language that might help procure witness for those things that are hard to describe. Good language can actually alter experiences with old and stale names, and can even work as a toehold to make hard times more livable. I write publicly about the things that I read because when I find something that’s said in a good or new way, I know how much that kind of language can help.

The ways our experiences are interpreted can make way for or inhibit what we’re able to feel. More than walled-off, autonomous events, Harbin suggests that “feelings are politically salient personal experiences allowed for or prevented by those who interpret a person’s expression of those feelings.” Without interpreters who allow us to feel what we’re feeling, we may be “more likely to doubt, question, or dismiss” those experiences.

And while she repeatedly affirms it’s not always the case, Harbin believes that disorientations in particular—which often occur in acute grief, and in fact I came to her work through Ratcliffe’s—can be morally beneficial. They can have what she calls “tenderizing effects.” Disorientations can show us what it is to live unprepared, make us aware of the ways norms are contingent, and support us in cultivating humility around both what we know and can know.

Here is one of my favorite descriptions of disorientation in acute grief, from Grief Worlds:

“Sometimes, we face a situation where the paths are gone, where things lack the kinds of significance they previously had and no longer relate to one another in the ways they once did. With this, experienced situations cease to specify or guide actions…A nonlocalized sense of confidence or certainty regarding what is likely to happen and what one could and should do is replaced by a quite different anticipatory style: “I feel like a rudderless boat in a stormy sea with endless time to endure it (#81)¹.” 

In lost, mixed-up times toeholds become very important. Feeling seen and interpreted well—whether that be through being listened to closely by others, or reading theory that makes us feel seen through accurate naming of complex experiences—can go a long way toward helping us through. Or at least that’s been the case for me. Reading has always been a way to not only make sense of but actually feel less alone through hard times, which in turn helps me stay present.

Some of my favorite interpreters this past year have included:

Line Ryberg Ingerslev whose words about hope in a context of loss as “a paradoxical practice that commits us to the world despite the losses we suffer” have kept me engaged;

Ami Harbin, whose descriptions of the potential “tenderizing effects” of disorientations² which have helped me find meaning;

Kathleen Higgins’ ideas on beauty in mourning which have offered recourse and relief;

Catherine Keller’s ideas on chaos, creation, and indeterminacy³ which have kept me perplexed and excited;

and Matthew Ratcliffe and Eleanor Byrne’s ideas on how narrative can function as scaffolding in grief, which have kept me inspired. 

I’ve found footing in each of these writings, a ground to stand on for hard, vibrant, tense, and eventually generative negotiations that made way for acknowledging, and moving, and very slowly discerning what a life lived well can look like with losses in tow.

Offerings has changed shape a lot through the years. This season of Offerings will be geared toward relaying to you what I’m learning about grief and uncertainty and transition specifically.

My hope is that if you are like me and so many others who’ve found toeholds and shelter and sustenance in good language through difficult times—language that not only affirms but gives life, thickens, opens possibilities, suggests, invites, entices—you’ll find something of use for you here. 

It is not only a matter of sharing ideas that I think are good, though that’s certainly part of it. It’s also that I hope good language can enhance what you as a reader are able to see and make room for in the things that you go through and, as ever, with prayers we all feel less alone. In any case, thank you for coming along for the ride.

Hi, hitting like button is a great and free way to support these Offerings. <3

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

I have openings for one-on-one sessions in November. Sessions are ninety-minute discussions between me, you, and ten tarot cards. You will bring an area of life or query that you’d like to explore, and I will listen as closely as possible, offer ideas, and facilitate a process of collaborative interpretation that I hope will be useful for you. To book a session, click here.

1. Grief Worlds includes a number of quotes from grievers who responded to a survey as part of a qualitiative study on grief completed by Ratcliffe and colleagues. This quote is from respondent #81.

2. As expressed in Ami Harbin’s Disorientation in Moral Life

3. As expressed in Catherine Keller’s Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming