Dr. Ray Mitsch explores the complexities of grief and the significance of anniversaries in this thought-provoking episode. He emphasizes that facing loss and sorrow, rather than avoiding it, can lead to a deeper understanding of life and its meaning. Throughout the discussion, Dr. Mitsch highlights the difference between mere knowledge about grief and the wisdom gained from truly experiencing it. He challenges the notion that happiness is the ultimate goal, advocating instead for acceptance of life's realities, including its inevitable sorrows. By embracing our human experiences, including the pain of loss, we can cultivate genuine connections and a more profound appreciation for the moments that shape our lives.

Takeaways:

• Facing sorrow fully can deepen our understanding of life and enrich our relationships.
• Acceptance of loss does not mean that we find it okay; it acknowledges reality.
• Holidays can trigger anniversary reactions, reminding us of our losses and grief.
• Wisdom often comes from experiencing sorrow rather than from mere knowledge accumulation.
• Living with loss requires us to confront the reality of our human experiences.
• Recognizing the difference between acceptance and settling for the status quo is crucial.

Links referenced in this episode:

• sgi-net.org

Well, greetings and welcome, everybody, to another episode of Unscripted, the collected wisdom of life Living in sorrow.

I am Dr.

Ray Mitch, your humble host.

And we are meeting and doing this probably once a month.

I think that's probably a reasonable amount of time to give to it, I suppose.

But what is it?

Unscripted is really an opportunity to reflect on the events and developments of living life and living in relationship.

And that also means living in the midst of sorrow.

Now, obviously, that is not all the time, but when it comes, it is usually a topic that we don't usually talk about, or even want to talk about, for that matter, because we think that somehow we are ruining life.

And the reality is that by facing sorrow fully in its face, we are actually deepening life and embracing it entirely.

And so I wanted to spend some time talking tonight about what I call anniversaries and the problem of living, although I think this will probably branch out into other areas.

Of course, that is why I have called it Unscripted, because I never entirely know in what direction I might go.

But the thing I want to impress upon you, even as we get going here, is that ultimately there is wisdom in facing the very thing that we don't want to face or accept, for that matter.

Well, it's one thing to face it, it's another thing to accept it.

And the thing that I'm talking about when I say that is loss or sorrow.

Now, the holidays present a unique point in time.

That is what in the world of grief counseling and that whole area of loss is that we refer to it as anniversary.

And the technical term is the anniversary reactions.

And I have been living and walking this journey for the last year of having a friend die in March and walking through the year.

And as I reflected on the year, I began to realize that it's during this point in the year that I tended to talk the most, oftentimes with my friend who was a retired professor, and he knew the rhythms of my semester.

And so oftentimes we would spend more time talking over the holidays simply because I would have more time and my schedule would open up and I was really feeling it.

I was feeling the lack.

And then I went back and took a look at some of our interactions by text, which is really how we went about scheduling our time to talk face to face by facetime or zoom or whatever.

And I began to realize that I was not we, but I was moving toward really the pivot point and the inflection point of his health that I, at this time, last Year I had no idea.

And that's really how this goes.

And that's a lot of times what anniversaries feel like is that if I had only known.

And then we get into the if onlys and a lot of the other things that go into it.

But I guess my point is that there is wisdom in facing the very thing we don't want to face.

There is wisdom in facing loss and sorrow because it deepens the meaning of life and living.

And we somehow have gotten the notion that if I don't face it, I just put my nose down, I keep moving, I keep plugging along, then everything will be fine.

And that ultimately, in the purest sense of the term, is not acceptance.

Acceptance is actually allowing it to exist without pushing it away.

Actually, now we think somehow we've gotten the notion that acceptance is saying that whatever it is, is okay.

And the loss of a friend or a family member or a parent or whomever, it's not okay.

It is a reality of our lives.

No one's going to debate that point, but we'll debate.

We won't debate the fact, but we will debate the meaning.

Because people exist on two different levels in our worlds.

They exist on the fact base, the knowledge base.

I know who they are.

I recognize them.

I.

I have a sense of familiarity when I hear their voice.

And the meaning level, which provides the depth and provides the impact of having those interactions.

And the holidays are a particularly difficult time for people that are facing loss and for anybody out there that might be listening to this.

And you have someone in your life who has experienced a loss of some sort.

And that doesn't have to be a death.

It can be a significant change in job or a loss of a job or any number of things along those lines.

And our temptation and our tendency is to try to rationalize it away.

Now, that's not.

It's not an intentional thing on most of our parts, but either will shy away altogether because we're afraid we'll say the wrong thing and the wrong thing will lead them down a path that we don't want them to go down.

The dirty little secret in all that is, they're already down that road.

You're not going to save them from saying the right thing as if there really is a right thing, because there isn't.

The only empathic thing to be said is to check in on how they're doing.

Not.

Not to be.

Not to hear I'm doing okay or I'm fine or as long as I keep my head down.

I'm doing okay.

I would challenge anyone who's listening to me to actually move beyond that and say, so what does that really mean?

What does the loss mean in your life to this point in time?

And however long it has been or however fresh it has been, that meaning tends to change over time because we begin to gain a greater and greater clarity and understanding of just how profound it has impacted us in some fashion or another.

Now, again, we can easily loop back around and say, well, if it isn't impacting me, then it really wasn't that big of a deal.

Well, maybe.

I think we tend to really underestimate our tremendous ability to minimize and distort and dilute and redefine and do all sorts of things, really, just to box it up and put it away until the next time.

And the next time usually is the next loss.

And at least for me, in my experiences over the last five to six years, maybe more.

Seven years.

Yeah, more than that.

Eight years.

I have had three, and if you count my golden retriever, four significant losses over that period of time.

So every couple of years, someone has died.

And it takes a toll on our ability.

Now, it doesn't mean it takes a toll on our functioning because we can function.

Most of us can in the midst of that.

And I don't know that that's good or bad.

Actually, sometimes it is a quote unquote bad thing simply because it gets in the way of processing and allowing ourselves to feel what we feel.

And in a lot of cases, we end up saying that those feelings.

I don't have the luxury of those feelings because they will slow me down.

And by doing that, I'm saying I don't have the luxury of being human because being human slows me down.

Now, if you really push hard, I think a lot of people would agree with that statement, as a matter of fact, to the point of denying their humanity, which fundamentally, part of being human is experiencing loss, and we all experience it.

And so I said a minute ago that there's wisdom in facing the thing that we don't want to face.

And quite honestly, if I draw a bigger picture here, I'm not sure we want that wisdom.

We want wisdom like that that bad.

We would rather settle for just knowing stuff and knowing things about grief or about anything else.

And that's really ultimately the biggest challenge in the world of loss, grief and loss, is that people know a lot about it, but never really truly experience it or give it its due in terms of its meaning, because we can experience denial and denial isn't.

This isn't happening.

It is also the denial of the meaning of what has happened, the denial of its impact on us.

We can diminish and deny the importance of the person.

And so we will do anything, really, to not face the reality of being human and the fact that the people that we love in our lives are also human and sooner or later will go away, otherwise known as death, or go away in terms of change in relationship.

And that's for anybody listening to me, that's younger.

That's what's happening oftentimes in relationships is that sometimes we don't know that we have friends who are for a season.

We think they're forever, you know, the BFF thing, best friends forever.

But that's not true.

Humans, in the nature of our lives, particularly when we're younger, there's a lot of turnover and change in life and friends and things like that.

And they are close to us for a season and then they move on.

And it isn't because they want to.

It's just the nature of the seasons of our lives, which matches entirely the seasons of our grief.

And so there are a number of obstacles that I wanted to take a little time to talk about that really get in the way of embracing the wisdom of looking at and accepting the changes in our lives.

And one of the first obstacles I see is the difference between knowing and living out the things we know, otherwise known as wisdom.

And I was just thinking about this because I heard a sermon a couple days ago.

Actually, it was last night, but that tells you what my days are like.

And the sermon was set up in such a way that it was almost presumed that accepting grace is an easy thing to do.

And I think sometimes what we do is we settle to know about grace rather than accepting it enough to live out grace.

Because the vast majority of Christians, I have this sinking suspicion.

I have no basis for it other than the small sample of young people that I talk to.

I have a sneaky and a sinking suspicion that people really don't know very much about grace at all, actually.

And part of that is they think that there's enough grace to save them.

But then you have to work your butt off the rest of your life to prove that you're worthy of the grace that was used to save you.

So we lapse into a mindset of scarcity.

It's a scarce resource grace is.

And so therefore I have to work hard to get it and to experience it.

And the same thing is how wisdom works.

And I don't think it's any surprise that Solomon, who wrote many of the Proverbs, spent a lot of time talking about wisdom.

And we oftentimes mistake thinking that knowing is the same as wisdom, and it is not.

CS Lewis once said that actually knowing is relatively easy, but finding wisdom takes sacrifice.

And that's one of the biggest obstacles we have.

We actually think and equate that knowing a lot of stuff, which we can do.

I wouldn't say that it's not tough, but it's not that hard.

But just because I know something doesn't mean that it translates into wisdom in terms of living out wisdom and being able to even communicate that.

See, wisdom is a matter of observation.

Knowing is a matter of accumulation.

And so our first obstacle is the distortion we have about knowing versus living.

And I can know all about grace, I can know all about love, I can know about a lot of things, but if it doesn't show in my behavior and how I think and the things that even I believe.

And the problem with belief is that rarely trans, sometimes, no, I shouldn't say rarely, but it oftentimes doesn't translate into behavior.

I can have a belief, but if it doesn't show up in how I relate or how I see myself or how I see God, then it's little more than a piece of knowledge that I've accumulated rather than a reality that I live out.

So that's kind of the first obstacle.

The second obstacle is the difference between acceptance and settling for the status quo.

Now, one of the things that we have to contend with when we're talking about sorrow and loss and even just living life, forget about the heavy hitters like grief and loss, even just living life, somewhere we have gotten.

We have lapsed into the assumption that the normal state of life is seeking, pursuing, and finding happiness.

That's the normal state.

So therefore, then when I experience everything that's related to loss or difficulty or adversity or suffering or any of those, something's dramatically wrong.

And we actually think that God has it in for us because of those very things.

And so the second obstacle I think we face in trying to learn about living out wisdom, about translating our knowledge into seeing life differently, is our willingness to settle for the status quo, defining that as happiness and thinking that that's as good as it gets.

Now, sooner or later we're going to get tired of it and say, is this as good as it gets?

And then start searching for something to fill that gap.

And when we go searching, oh, we'll find it.

We'll find plenty of things to medicate the gap.

We won't find much to fill it because there isn't something to fill it.

It really is a big part of being human is our deficits, what we are without.

And I think ultimately we long for the very thing that we were designed for, and that is a fullness of being in relationship with God, which was the original intent.

And now that that relationship is broken and we're broken along with it, then we're always going to be experiencing the deficit.

And then we.

We set our sights on trying to fill that deficit instead.

And you can say with addict, you can point to addictions, you can point to even what we have with social media today.

It's startling.

Not startling.

I'm so immune to it and cynical about it now that I'm not really startled anymore.

But how often I am teaching and how many of my students oftentimes are glued to their phones more than listening to me, because it is an ingrained habit to fill the deficit with comparisons and comments and other things that social media, quote unquote, provides for us.

It doesn't provide for us anything, but it really does tend to divert our attention from the deficit we feel.

So the second obstacle is learning for acceptance, but settling for the status quo.

This is just the way it is.

It is one of the most irritating comments I hear people say, and I grip my teeth and I bite my tongue because I want to be an annoyance.

But it's when you hear people say it is what it is that is the status quo.

It's resignation.

It's not acceptance.

Acceptance is fully embracing the deficit that we have and understanding that it will remain until we die.

Now, that sounds very depressing, and to some degree, I would grant you that it is.

But acceptance then begins to allow for us to see the importance of meaning in our lives, not only in our relationships, not only in how God has created us, not only in the pursuit of.

Of a God that wants that relationship with us, who ultimately, not imminently or right at the moment, can fill that deficit.

But those are glimmers and moments in our experience because we are leaky receptacles, we're cracked bots, and we leak everywhere.

And because of that leakage, we are always feeling some measure of deficit.

And then there's one more, one last one.

And that's the obstacle of living an as if life versus living life as is.

So an as if life versus an as is life.

And so much of our lives, I think, sometimes is taken with creating an as if life, A life that is created to be experienced as if it were good, as if it were fulfilling, as if it were happy.

Fill in the as if, however you want.

We don't want to face as is because it would require us to live with life as is.

And it is disappointing now, it can be immensely fulfilling, but is so momentary it doesn't last.

And it doesn't mean that life is condemnable because of it, but it is because we even leak the good stuff and we want to continue it instead of relishing it for what it is as it is, rather than this is as if life, as if I'm in heaven, as if I don't have this deficit, as if I feel like I'm someone of importance, whatever, fill in the gaps, whatever that is.

And so if we're going to find the wisdom to deal with life as it is, not as I would have it to be, because that would be the as if, then I might engage life a little differently because I would understand that there are certainly big part of life that is disappointing.

It is.

It's part of being human.

But at the same time, there are moments in time that we can relish with great glee because of the joy.

And because of that, we actually have the opportunity to experience joy, not happiness.

Happiness is built on happenings.

That's where we got get the word happy is happening and it's momentary.

And I'm not saying that happiness is bad, it's not it's nice to be happy.

But we just have to understand that our expectations are not for the eternal state of happiness, but joy offers us something even more.

And it can be perpetual in the sense that joy is not always being happy, but it is being connected.

And so there are three opportunities that lay out in front of us.

First is living out the wisdom that we gain not only in our relationships with the important people in our lives, or mentors or relationships or things that I read or anything else.

But just remember, the knowledge doesn't call us out to relationship, but wisdom does.

Wisdom calls us and draws us into relationship and trust.

And we live in a world that rejects trust for control.

And I have said it many times here, I say it all the time in my classes when I teach.

And that is that control and trust cannot coexist.

And so wisdom allows for the brokenness of humanness, our own and others.

And so wisdom draws us into relationship and into the experience of trust.

Because that's where fullness is, is in trust now, not blind, naive trust.

And just remember Let me just put a parentheses in.

That is, you can't make somebody trustworthy by trusting them.

That's not how you do that.

You perceive and discern whether someone is trustworthy, and then you invest small increments of trust to see how they handle it.

But as that is built, then I think wisdom ends up getting gained in significant ways because we are taking the risk that comes with trust.

And so the second thing is not only living out wisdom, but living in reality as it is and not making appearances.

And we spend more time in appearance making than in connecting with people as we are.

And so we have to find a way to disconnect and detach from making the appearance, the as if of how our lives are, which social media very much tempts us into creating a highlight reel of our lives, thinking that that's the reality, but.

And everybody else is watching thinks that's the reality too, when it isn't.

There are significant moments in between those highlight reel pieces that are impactful because oftentimes wisdom is gained from sorrow, not from great joy.

Now, again, I am not saying one is better than another, not in any way, shape or form.

But sorrow invites us into our humaneness.

And in our humanness, we learn what it means to be fully human, even if we are broken.

And then the last one is that we live as is versus as if.

See, we have to ask ourselves the question, what do we desire?

Because to be as we are?

Or are we committed to creating an image of what we should be?

Because the reality is that if someone were to love us, we would desire them to love us as we are.

But if we spend all of our time trying to create images of what we should be and they accept that, then we can actually say they really don't know us and we are no more connected to.

See, we begin to embrace what truth is, rather than the rhetoric of could be, or should be, or would be.

And living as is is where reality is embraced.

And that reality includes not only joys, but sorrows, not only happiness, but sadness, not only grief, but living.

And I'll end on this just as a reminder that Elizabeth Kubler Ross made it very clear that the nature of grief and experiencing sorrow, she didn't use that word, but that's really what was a part of her sentiment in terms of what she was talking about was that we live our lives as if we will live forever.

And because of that, then we end up living shallower lives or shallow lives.

And it really is remarkable that when she says what she says in one of her books, and interestingly, her books she has On Death and Dying, which she did most of her research on people that were dying.

And then she has another book on grief and grieving because death and Dying wasn't addressing the issue that she wanted to address.

And that particular book was published just a few months before she died.

And she commented to her co writer that maybe I should have written another book called On Life and Living.

And that probably would be pretty accurate because she really nailed it down when she said we live purposeless lives because we think we can live forever, and therefore we never do the things that are most critically important to do, ultimately.

And so I think it's important to keep in mind how that works and what we see and how we experience life and how we experience other people and how they experience us.

That's also a part of it that I think is equally important.

And so as we.

As I close, I want to make sure that you don't miss what I've been saying, because we know a lot of stuff, but that doesn't mean that.

That we are actually any wiser because of it.

And so I think the thing that is important to keep in mind is we need to strive for living in reality as it is, not as we would have it to be or as we think it should be.

And we need to be willing to know life and living as it is, not as it should be, and not be caught into the notion that whatever we're living is, we're not going to upset the status quo.

Because of course, if we do that, then it will get worse rather than get better.

And there's a whole raft of things that come into that that I think is worth paying attention to, because there is wisdom and sorrow.

And we don't really like that idea at all, quite honestly and understandably, I mean, very understandably, that we don't like there's wisdom there.

And I think quite honestly, because of our pursuit of happiness and our pursuit of distraction, I think we probably are a little less wise.

And I'm probably being diplomatic by putting it that way because I think we know a lot of stuff, but we really don't have much wisdom to share with people in our relationships or anything else.

So some thoughts, just for your consideration in what has been percolating in my own head.

And hopefully it is something that will help you to consider more fully the nature of what we experience in life and the anniversaries we experience that are very much a part of our grief journey.

And I will return with more things that hopefully will help us to think through all of that and what is important.

So, so that's it for tonight.

Thanks so much for joining me.

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