Events

On Sunday 2nd November
10am Queens Road Unitarian Free Church, Urmston
11.30am Dunham Road Unitarian Chapel, Altrincham
11.30am on Zoom ID 841 9082 8195 no password required

During our usual Sunday morning service we will be creating and holding a space for those who wish to remember loved ones who have touched their hearts and souls but are no longer physically with them.

We are all united in love and loss...Grief is the price that we pay for love.

All are welcome regardless of beliefs and understandings about life and death, to share in this sacred time and space.

Come as you are, exactly as you are...but do not expect to leave in exactly the same condition...

“All Souls” by May Sarton

Did someone say that there would be an end,
An end, Oh, an end, to love and mourning?
Such voices speak when sleep and waking blend,
The cold bleak voices of the early morning
When all the birds are dumb in dark November—
Remember and forget, forget, remember.

After the false night, warm true voices, wake!
Voice of the dead that touches the cold living,
Through the pale sunlight once more gravely speak.
Tell me again, while the last leaves are falling:
“Dear child, what has been once so interwoven
Cannot be raveled, nor the gift ungiven.”

Now the dead move through all of us still glowing,
Mother and child, lover and lover mated,
Are wound and bound together and enflowing.
What has been plaited cannot be unplaited—
Only the strands grow richer with each loss
And memory makes kings and queens of us.

Dark into light, light into darkness, spin.
When all the birds have flown to some real haven,
We who find shelter in the warmth within,
Listen, and feel new-cherished, new-forgiven,
As the lost human voices speak through us and blend
Our complex love, our mourning without end.

Some things cannot be unravelled they are with us forever and nor should they be. The gift of love is priceless and once given is a part of our soul forever. It survives death. It can never be destroyed.

When we lose someone we love, our lives are changed forever. Our lives will never be the same. We don’t rise above our pain. We don’t pretend it’s not there. We don’t get over it. We live through, and we are changed by the experience. Grieving, then, is more about transformation than transcendence. It is not about explaining loss or understanding why something happened. Grieving is about finding meaning in the absence of an explanation.

Grief empowers us to love. As the late Forrest Church wrote, “Love is grief’s advance party.” If we never loved, we never would hurt. Let me exaggerate just a bit to make the point: if you thought you would die if you ever lost someone you loved, you probably wouldn’t love too many people and if you did, you’d be holding a lot back, never really giving yourself to another, never experiencing the fullness of love or you would be clinging so tightly that you end up smothering your loved one. If you learn to grieve, though—learn how to name your loss, how to affirm your own inherent worth and dignity, how to use your spiritual gifts to sustain you through the grieving process, how to find new ways to live that are different but not diminished-then you are free, as John Shelby Spong likes to say, “to love wastefully.”

Or as Forrest Church put it “My heart has been broken again, and for that I am overwhelmingly thankful; without love, this would not be possible.” May it always be so.