Grief is change, God is change

grief 🤝 God?

Yesterday, a dear new friend sent me a voicenote sharing how she is grieving the loss of a beautiful idea she had because she continues to expand and have even better ideas!

This is something I am all too familiar with as I have grown and evolved in my healing business. And it made me think about how grief is directly connected to change.

Then I remembered Octavia Butler's quote:

All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is Change.
God
Is Change.

GOD IS CHANGE!

So if grief comes from change and God is change, what is the relationship between grief and God?

Octavia Butler

This felt very important regardless of how you perceive God, whether it's God, Goddess, Spirit, science, life, or whatever you believe in. I took this as an invitation to explore this relationship, and here's what I came up with:

Grief invites us into an understanding of God.

Grief is painful af, I can't deny that. And it can feel quite spiritual to experience grief, to feel the deep pain of a shift, and to allow your body to connect with other bodies to integrate these changes. I find this to be such an important connection and experience during a time when we are grieving so much on a global landscape, in our communities, and in our personal lives.

How is grieving, then, a divine force that we must embrace in order to be in alignment with life force?

At the Grief Party my Earthworm Slumber Party podcast co-host

Opulence Abundance

and I hosted recently, it was so powerful to be in a collective space sharing all the events and expectations and experiences and feelings and sensations we were grieving. The party itself was inspired by an essay Opulence shared with me called Embracing Grief by Sobonfu Somé where she shares that in her tribe, Dagara tribe of Burkina Faso in West Africa, they don't ask “Are you done grieving?” They ask “Have you grieved enough?”

Just reading those words made my heart sink with the grief of not knowing grief and the relief that I could feel grief differently.

As a young girl learning about Hinduism at Sunday school in a park district classroom with kids my age, I learned a fun acronym for GOD: Generator, Operator, Destroyer. This stood for the Gods Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva.

God, however you experience them, is change through creation, destruction, and everything in between. And grief is how you move through it so you can be with it.

How do see the relationship between grief and God?