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Grief AND thankfulness compared with consolation and desolation

Lynne Baab • Saturday January 18 2020

The words “consolation” and “desolation” have a variety of meanings in everyday use. In Ignatian spirituality their meanings are quite specific and shed an interesting light on this journey of grief AND thankfulness that I’ve been writing about. (The first post in this series describes the challenge of hold grief AND thankfulness in each hand.)

Consolation and desolation, in Ignatian thinking, are about our trajectory in any specific moment – whether we are moving toward or away from God. According to Vinita Hampton Wright, writing on the Ignatian Spirituality website, we experience consolation when we are “moving toward God’s active presence in the...

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Grief AND thankfulness: The role of lament

Lynne Baab • Saturday January 11 2020

As a young Christian in my twenties, I was taught to pray using the ACTS pattern: adoration, confession, thankfulness, supplication. Several decades had passed before I realized the prayers in the Bible, especially in the Psalms, contained other prayer components, such as lament, silence and statements of trust. (I wrote a blog post about that.)

For the past two months, I’ve embraced the challenge of holding grief in one hand and thankfulness in the other hand. For the hand that’s holding grief, I have been wondering what exactly is the connection with lament. Are lament and grief the same? Is lament the...

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Grief AND thankfulness in my conversion story

Lynne Baab • Friday January 3 2020

I have three ways of talking about what happened to me at 19. Most often, I say I became a committed Christian then. Sometimes I say I came back to the Christian faith, and occasionally I say I became a Christian then. I may not be clear on how to describe it, but I am so grateful for God’s call to me.

I attended church almost every Sunday of my childhood. My dad was a faithful Episcopalian, and my mom fell in line with his commitment. Because my dad was in the military, we moved A LOT (12 houses in my first...

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Grief AND thankfulness: a beautiful poem for the New Year and New Decade

Lynne Baab • Sunday December 29 2019

When I think about 2020 and the decade to come, I feel a huge mix of grief and thankfulness. For weeks I’ve been pondering how to write about it. Then I got a Christmas letter with a poem in it that helps me describe what I’ve been thinking about. This is a nativity homily from more than 1300 years ago. Saint Isaac the Syrian (also known as Isaac of Nineveh) lived from about 613 A.D. to about 700. As you read it, notice the resonance with the issues we face today.

This Christmas night bestowed peace on the whole world; So let no...

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