Silent
Silent provides the tools for seekers to recognize their path and enables self-reliance for spiritual and magickal growth.
Seekers gain insight from his work and find their inner calm from his ability to listen and help others reflect.
After Christchurch: Creating Sacred and Safe Spaces
Lawrence Lerner • March 12, 2019
Knowing What Not To Say
This article was first published June 15, 2019 on The Interfaith Observer website.
On March 15th, 2019 a shooter used the Facebook social media platform to broadcast the massacre of 50 Muslim worshippers in Christchurch, New Zealand. How do I write about hate without honoring it? Turn hearts and minds to the community, the families, and friends that are left behind. Honor the fallen. Leave the shooter unnamed.
The shooter invoked the name of one of the four afterlife realms revered in Heathen traditions. Heathenry is an inclusive faith, and in speaking of Valhalla the terrorist sullied the gods and goddess we revere. The Muslim faith and families honored the victims as appropriate by rite and ritual. Across Pagan traditions we believe not only in a life after life but in rebirth.
Despite the horror, there will be a life that goes on after the life that was. Communities often go into a kind of group shock and then a flailing action in all directions. Some healthy, some not. I remember being in Chicago just after 9/11. I got into a cab and at the next stoplight the driver turned around and said in a quiet voice, “Please sir, tell me why.” We pulled over and talked for a while. The driver needed someone to hold space for him. “Holding space” is the term reserved for times when someone who is taking a journey within one or more that have undergone some trauma. It’s a role somewhere between witness and counselor.
In my personal vows to my god I repeat “I teach. I guide. I witness. I do not intervene.” I counsel others (and constantly remind myself) to act without interference, judgment or control. It’s too easy to take away someone’s agency with the good-natured, “Let me do that/care for you.” You may also find yourself holding space for someone while they hold space for another. After Christchurch, good people found themselves in the position of wondering how to support their local Muslim community. A community with which they may have heard many narratives but had little personal experience.
Holding space is a sacred and selfless service to others. You are there on a painful journey when they are vulnerable and may need to be weak. It’s not required that you be a priest to hold space, but it’s often who the community looks to in emotional times. How you do that is on a case by case basis. In Pagan traditions we pray to gain insight and wisdom to do it for ourselves.
Be proactive in outreach but not action. Let others know you are present and available to listen, witness, and be mindful. Presenting experiences and outlining options or giving them a process is healthy. You will make them stronger and give them the power to make decisions that align communities and evoke something new.
Talking is the most often-used form of providing comfort. Remember that words have intent and create the world around us. Our remarks, even with the best intentions, may be less than helpful. Consider some often-used remarks that could be phrased in a different way:
- “The universe never gives us more than we can handle”
- This evokes all types of questions and is a test of anyone’s faith.
- Suggest: “It’s okay to grieve at your own pace.”
- “I know how you feel”
- No, you don’t. You are not that person and don’t know how they are processing recent events.
- Suggest: “We are here for you when you’re ready to talk.”
- “How are you?”
- In American society, we often use it in place of “Hello.” Three words that are too often a plea to them to make you feel better. You need to hear the answer that they are enduring, getting on with life, getting over it etc. it’s unnecessary pressure them.
- Suggest: “I understand this is difficult for you.”
- “What can I do for you?”
- Don’t add the responsibility of finding some way for you to be helpful.
- Volunteer practical things. “I’d like to drop off some meals.” “I can take the kids to after school activities for the next few weeks.” “I can sit quietly with you.” In this instance, seek out or ask about
Muslim practices before you offer help.
You can create an oasis for communities to journey through it and let them come at their own pace. Give them a place to be safe, sacred, weak and away from judgment.
Think of it as putting pillows on a coach. Let others arrange as they see fit.
It is often said we die two deaths. First when the body ceases to function and then when our name passes from memory. Let the names of the victims not pass from memory and let all communities learn the lessons of supporting one another by holding space.
Blessed be.
The Fallen[1]
Abdukadir Elmi
Abdul Fattah Qasem
Ahmed Abdel Ghani
Ali Elmadani
Amjad Hamid
Ansi Alibava
Ashraf Ali
Ashraf Al-Masri
Ashraf Morsi
Asif Vora
Atta Elayyan
Daoud Nabi
Farhaj Ahsan
Ghulam Husain
Hafiz Musa Vali Patel
Hamza Mustafa
Haroon Mehmood
Hosne Ahmed
Hussain al-Umari
Hussein Moustafa
Junaid Kara/Ismail
Kamel Mohamad Kamel Darweesh
Karam Bibi
Khaled Mustafa
Linda Armstrong
Maheboob Khokhar
Matiullah Safi
Mohammed Imran Khan
Omar Faruk
Mohsen Mohammed Al Harbi
Mojammel Hoq
Mounir Suleiman
Mucad Ibrahim
Lilik Abdul Hamid
Abdus Samad
Musa Nur Awale
Naeem Rashid
Osama Adnan Abu Kweik
Ozair Kadir
Ramiz Vora
Sayyad Milne
Sohail Shahid
Syed Areeb Ahmed
Syed Jahandad Ali
Talha Rashid
Tariq Omar
Zakaria Bhuiya
Zeeshan Raza
Muhammad Haziq bin Mohd Tarmizi
Mohamad Moosi Mohamedhosen
Abdukadir Elmi
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Walk into any forest in the Cascades and you are standing on the dead. The fir that fell forty years ago is now the nurse log feeding a row of saplings. The salmon carried uphill by an eagle became the nitrogen in the cedar's needles. Nothing in that forest is wasted, and nothing in it is afraid. We have built an entire industry on pretending we are exempt from this. We drain the body of its blood, fill it with preservatives, seal it in lacquered hardwood, and lower it into a concrete vault—as if the earth were a contamination to be defended against rather than the place we came from. Cremation, for all its simplicity, burns fossil fuel and sends the body skyward as carbon. There is another way, and it began here in Washington. Human composting—the law calls it natural organic reduction—was legalized in this state in 2019, the first in the nation. The process is unhurried and honest. The body, unembalmed, is laid into a steel vessel and surrounded by wood chips, alfalfa, and straw. No chemicals are added. The microbes that already live on the plant material, and on us, do the work they have always done. Over eight to twelve weeks, the body becomes soil—about a cubic yard of it, dark and alive. Families may take some home for a garden or a tree, or donate it to forest conservation land. What was a person becomes, quite literally, ground for new growth. I have sat with the dying, and I can tell you that the question underneath most deathbed fear is not what happens to me? It is did I matter, and will anything of me remain? The Hávamál answers plainly: cattle die, kin die, the self dies too—but what one leaves behind endures. We usually read that as reputation. I have come to read it more literally. A body that becomes soil leaves something behind that you can hold in your hands. Something that feeds. For those of us who keep the old ways, this is not innovation. It is restoration. Our ancestors were returned to barrows and bogs and burial mounds, given back to the land that fed them. The vessel and the alfalfa are new; the covenant is ancient. The earth gives, and the earth receives. Every harvest festival we keep is built on that exchange. It would be strange to honor the cycle all our lives and then opt out of it at the end. This choice is now legal in a dozen states and counting. If it speaks to you, say so—out loud, in writing, to the people who will one day carry out your wishes. Death plans left unspoken become burdens; death plans spoken become gifts. A leaf falls. A seed sprouts. The tree does not grieve the leaf, and the soil does not refuse the seed. When my own time comes, I intend to be useful one last time. That, too, is a kind of prayer. —Silent
For the Pagan and Contemplative Community
There is a grief that arrives before the death. It does not announce itself. It does not have a name that anyone uses at the dinner table, or in the waiting room, or in the parking lot of the care facility where you sit in your car for a few minutes before going in, gathering yourself. It lives in small moments. The first time they didn't recognize you. The day you realized you were making decisions for them that they would have hated. The night you caught yourself hoping — just for a second, just once — that it would be over soon, and then spent the next three days punishing yourself for the thought. This is called anticipatory grief. And it is real, and it is heavy, and almost no one will name it for you while you are living inside it, because you are the strong one, and the person you are losing is still here, and grief, we have been told, comes after. It doesn't always come after. Sometimes it comes alongside. Caregiving is one of the most demanding things a human being can do. It asks you to be present to someone else's diminishment, day after day, while managing your own fear and your own exhaustion and your own sadness — and while the world around you continues as though nothing unusual is happening. You go to the grocery store. You answer emails. You show up. You are praised for your strength, which is a kindness people offer because they don't know what else to give you. What you actually need is someone who will let you put the strength down for an hour. Not fix you. Not give you a plan. Not tell you that you're doing a great job, or that they couldn't do what you're doing, or that everything happens for a reason. Just someone who will sit with you in the weight of it. Who will not be frightened by what you are carrying. Who will let you say the unsayable things — the anger, the ambivalence, the love that is so tangled up with loss that you can no longer tell them apart. That is what I offer. I am a death doula and spiritual director. I work with caregivers who are in the middle of it — not at the end, not after, but now, in the long middle stretch where the grief has no official start date and the world has not yet given you permission to feel it. We meet, usually by video, for an hour at a time. I listen in a particular way — not for problems to solve, but for what is actually present beneath the exhaustion and the competence and the careful management of everyone else's emotions. You do not have to have it together when you come into this space. That is the point of it. A few things I will not do: I will not tell you how to grieve correctly. There is no correctly. I will not rush you toward acceptance or silver linings. Some things do not have silver linings, and pretending otherwise is a small violence. I will not give you more to manage. You are already managing too much. What I will do is be present — fully, unhurriedly, without an agenda — for whatever you bring into the room. If you are a caregiver and you are reading this and something in you recognized itself in these words, that recognition is an invitation. I have a small number of spaces available for caregivers who are navigating the approach of death alongside someone they love. The intake questions at tokeepsilent.me are where we begin. Or you can reach me directly. There is no script for this conversation. We simply start. — Silent