loss on Mourning

Lament is the practice of mourning what is wrong in the world and calling on God to repair it. We lament the sins for which we are responsible, the sins for which we are only indirectly responsible, a...

In his thoughtful book, Our Good Crisis: Overcoming Moral Chaos with the Beatitudes , Jonathan K. Dodson asks an important question: how do you mourn the losses in your life: How do you mourn? ...

Writer Harriet Sarnoff Schiff has distilled her pain and tragedy in a book called The Bereaved Parent. When her young son died during an operation to correct a congenital heart malfunction, her clergy...

We bring before you, O Lord, the troubles and perils of people and nations, the sighing of prisoners and captives, the sorrows of the bereaved, the necessities of strangers, the helplessness of the we...

A preaching professor at Harvard University tells the story of the year his 5-year-old son was working on an art project in his kindergarten class. It was made of plaster, resembled nothing in particu...

James “Jim” Moore owned a famous midtown (New York City) eatery that was known as “Dinty Moore’s.” The restaurant attracted a lot of actors from the theater industry due to the quality of its food and...

The marriage of Queen Victoria and Albert (otherwise known as Francis Albert Augustus Charles Emmanuel — quite a mouthful!) was one for the ages. Their love and devotion to each other was remarkable, ...

As we feel the pain of our own losses, our grieving hearts open our inner eye to a world in which losses are suffered far beyond our own little world of family, friends, and colleagues. It is the worl...

Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break.

After the adrenalin rush of the death and funeral, bereaved people often feel deserted and overwhelmed with loneliness.

…I put down these memorandums of my affections In honor of tenderness, In honor of all of those who have been Conscripted into the brotherhood Of loss…

Jerry Sittser, who experienced the terrible tragedy of losing a mother, a wife, and a daughter in the same car accident, wrote these poignant words on loss: Loss creates a barren present, as if on...

No sorrowful tears, no beating of the breast For a safe repose has taken me. I dance Ring dances with the blessed saints In the beautiful fields of the righteous.

There is a haunting line in the musical Les Misérables: There’s a grief that can’t be spoken. There’s a pain goes on and on. It’s true. There is a grief that seems all-encompassing. It seems like it ...

When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time—the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pil...

I shall look at the world through tears. Perhaps I shall see things that dry-eyed I could not see.

Gracious God, we are called to be a joyful people, giving thanks for You and Your good gifts. There are times, however, when sin and sorrow grow, pushing joy to the side. We lose sight of Your grace, ...

I know well there is no comfort for this pain of parting: the wound always remains, but one learns to bear the pain, and learns to thank God for what He gave, for the beautiful memories of the past, a...

Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child's loss of a doll and a king's loss of a crown are events of the same size.

How shall my heart be reconciled to its feast of losses?

I think I am beginning to understand why grief feels so much like suspense. It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that have become habitual…I keep on through habit fitting an arrow to the ...

Live to the point of tears.

In an interview discussing her most recent book Hamnet, the novelist Maggie O’Farrell shares a great analogy on grief. It started with research she needed to do on embroidery, an area in which she was...

And can it be that in a world so full and busy, the loss of one weak creature makes a void in any heart, so wide and deep that nothing but the width and depth of eternity can fill it up!

Some kind of loss is usually necessary to turn the mind toward faith. If you’re satisfied with want you’ve got, you’re hardly going to look for anything better.

The mind has a dumb sense of vast loss—that is all. It will take mind and memory months and possibly years to gather the details and thus learn and know the whole extent of the loss.

Change invariably leads to loss, loss to grief, grief to anxiety and, finally, anxiety to hostility. We need therefore, to acknowledge grief. We need to understand and choose to walk with the grieving...

The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.

I once asked my New York Times readers whether they had found purpose in their lives. Thousands wrote back to describe their experiences. One in particular sticks out and illustrates Rohr’s concept of...

Weeping is perhaps the most human and universal of all relief measures.