SOLACE: Soul + Grief
This podcast is sponsored by SOULPLUSGRACE serving the San José area, offering grief support and grief journeying with spirituality. We hope to help you travel through grief with God at your side. Candee Lucas, your host, is a Jesuit-trained-and-inspired spiritual companion to the dying and their families, friends and caretakers.
"I am a trained Spiritual Director for those who seek to complete the 19th Annotation of St. Igantius’ spiritual exercises. I have also worked as a hospital/cemetery chaplain and grief doula. I believe all paths lead to God and that all traditions are due respect and honour. I take my sacred inspiration from all of my patients and companions–past, present and future; the Dalai Lama, James Tissot, St. John of the Cross, the Buddha, Saint Teresa of Ávila, and, of course, Íñigo who became known as St. Ignatius. I utilize art, poetry, music, aromatherapy, yoga, lectio divina, prayer and meditation in my self-work and work with others. I believe in creating a sacred space for listening; even in the most incongruous of surroundings."
BACKGROUND
Jesuit Retreat Center, Los Altos, CA -- Pierre Favre Program, 3 year training to give the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius/Centro de Espiritualidad de Loyola, Spain -- The Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola -- 30 Day Silent Retreat/Center for Loss & Life Transition – Comprehensive Bereavement Skills Training (30 hrs) Ft. Collins, CO/California State University Institute for Palliative Care--Palliative Care Chaplaincy Specialty Cert. (90 hrs)/Sequoia Hospital, Redwood City, CA -- Clinical Pastoral Education/19th Annotation with Fumiaki Tosu, San Jose, CA, Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius/Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA M.A. – Pastoral Ministries
SOLACE: Soul + Grief
The Timeless Echo of Love and Loss
What if the ancient myth of Orpheus and Eurydice held the key to understanding our own journey through grief and loss? Today, unravel the timeless tale of Orpheus's profound sorrow and his desperate bid to reclaim his beloved from the underworld. Explore the poignant lesson of universal longing to reunite with lost loved ones. We reflect on Margaret Atwood's evocative poems to capture the delicate dance between love and the necessity of letting go, offering a mirror to our deepest emotions.
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You can reach us at: candeelucas@soulplusgrace.com
Music and sound effects today by: via Pixabay.
Gentle companions along the way. We welcome you to this week's episode of Solace Soul + Grief. We all suffer losses and life transitions and we found it helpful to remind ourselves what place God has in that journey. Each week we try to become in touch with our ability to open our hearts in all our brokenness, to be able to receive the brokenness in others, participate in the healing love that God brings us all. My name is I was chaplain and aftercare coordinator at Catholic Cemeteries for the Diocese of San Jose. We're glad you're here. You're always welcome in our circle of love and healing support.
Candee:Orpheus comes to us from Greek mythology. He was a bard and legendary musician and prophet. He was also a renowned poet. The major stories about him are centered on his ability to charm all living things, even stones, with his music and his attempt to retrieve his wife Eurydice from the underworld. As an archetype, Orpheus is one of the most significant figures in the reception of classical mythology and Western culture, portrayed or alluded to in countless forms of art and popular culture, including poetry, film, opera, music and painting. Orpheus's music and singing could charm the birds, fish and wild beast, coax the trees and rocks into dance and divert the course of rivers, but we think of him in terms of our own grief and our own myth-making, for his attempt to retrieve his wife Eurydice from the afterworld. How many of us, if given the opportunity, would make that journey? Would we cross the River Styx, the parts unknown, the Bardo, for one last moment with our loved one? I believe many of us would. Some days. I think I would.
Candee:The most famous story in which Orpheus figures is that of his wife, Eurydice, while walking amongst her people in tall grass, at her wedding, she was set upon by a satyr. In her efforts to escape the satyr, Eurydice fell into a nest of vipers and suffered a fatal bite on her heel. Her body was discovered by Orpheus who, overcome with grief, played such sad and mournful songs that all the nymphs and gods wept. On their advice, he traveled to the underworld. His music softened the hearts of Hades and Persephone, who agreed to allow Eurydice to return to him on Earth on one condition he should walk in front of her and not look back until they both had reached the upper world. Orpheus set off with Eurydice following. However, as soon as he reached the upper world, he immediately turned to look at her, forgetting his eagerness that both of them needed to be in the upper world for the condition to be met. As Eurydice had not yet crossed into the upper world, she vanished for the second time, this time forever.
Candee:The myth theme of not looking back is reflected in the biblical story of Lot's wife when escaping from Sodom. We turn further to the theme of a lost love and an attempt to return that love or retrieve that love, from the Canadian author Margaret Atwood and her poem Orpheus One-- He is here. Come down to look for you. It is the song that calls you back, a song of joy and suffering, equally a promise that things will be different up there than they were last time.
Candee:You would rather have gone on feeling nothing, emptiness and silence, the stagnant peace of the deepest sea, which is easier than the noise and the flesh of the surface. You are used to these blanched, dim corridors. You are used to the king who passes you without speaking. The other one is different and you almost remember him. He says he is singing to you because he loves you, not as you are now, so chilled and minimal. He says he is singing to you because he loves you, not as you are now, so chilled and minimal moving and still both like a white curtain blowing in a draft from a half-opened window, beside a chair on which nobody sits. He wants you to be what he calls real. He wants you to stop light. He wants to feel himself thickening like a tree trunk or a haunch and see blood on his eyelids when he closes them and the sun beating. This love of his is not something he can do if you aren't there. But what you knew suddenly, as you left your body cooling and whitening on the lawn, was that you love him anywhere, even in this land of no memory, even in this domain of hunger. You hold love in your hand, a red seed you had forgotten you were holding. He has come almost too far. He cannot believe without seeing. And it's dark here. Go back. You whisper, but he wants to be fed again by you. O, handful of gauze, little bandage, handful of cold air. It is not through him you will get your freedom.
Candee:--He walked in front of me, pulling me back out to the green light that had once grown fangs and killed me. I was obedient but numb like an arm gone to sleep. The return to time was not my choice. By then I was used to silence, though something stretched between us Like a whisper, like a rope, my former name drawn tight. You had your old leash with you, love, you might call it, and your flesh voice before your eyes held steady the image of what you wanted me to become living again. It was this hope of yours that kept me following. It was your hallucination, listening in floral, and you were singing me.
Candee:Already, new skin was forming on me within the luminous, misty shroud of my other body. Already, there was dirt on my hands and I was thirsty. I could see only the outline of your head and shoulders, black against the cave mouth, and so could not see your face at all. When you turned and called to me because you had already lost me, the last I saw of you was a dark oval. Though I knew how this failure would hurt you, I had to fold like a gray moth and let go. You could not believe. I was more than your echo. And one last time, Orpheus II-- Whether he will go on singing or not, knowing what he knows of the horror of this world.
Candee:He was not wandering among the meadows all this time. He was down there among the mouthless ones, among those with no fingers, those whose names are forbidden, those washed up, eaten into among the gray stones of the shore where nobody goes through fear, those with silence. He has been trying to sing love into existence again and he has failed. Yet he will continue to sing in the stadium crowded with the already dead, who raise their eyeless faces to listen to him while the red flowers grow up and splatter open against the walls. They have cut off both his hands and soon they will tear his head from his body in one burst of furious refusal. He foresees this, yet he will go on singing, and in praise. To sing is either praise or defiance. Praise is defiance. His head, still singing mournful songs, floated along with his lyre down the river Hebres unto the sea, after which the winds and waves carried him to the island of Lesbos. There the inhabitants buried his head and a shrine was built in his honor. Orpheus' soul eventually returned to the underworld, to the fields of the blessed, where he was reunited at last with his beloved Eurydice--.
Candee:So we can see how our oldest myths have become memories of songs in our beings. Memories of songs in our beings. How we remember in our souls, in our faraway souls, what death feels like, how we remember in our old souls what longing feels like, and we realize from the poets and that the path of grief and the path of love are intertwined. They lead to the same place, to the heart of our love, to the soul of our love, to the soul of our being. This path is both familiar and unknown and unrecognized. Yet we walk it, surely, with our God, who eases the journey with his love, which we can only experience as boundless.
Candee:That concludes another episode. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts, amazon Music or Spotify. For those who are grieving. You can contact us at email address in the show notes. Be gentle with yourselves. Remember you are traveling with God and he is traveling with you. Vaya con Dios.