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Grief AND thankfulness: How to listen

Lynne Baab • Thursday January 30 2020

Imagine that your friend is talking about something important. You hear hints of grief and thankfulness, and you want to listen well and draw out those two ideas. Here are some suggestions for helping your conversation partners explore grief AND thankfulness, going from the basic to the more complex.

1. Pay attention to – and avoid – typical roadblocks to listening. My personal favorite is giving advice, which turns conversations away from emotions and thoughts and focuses on practical solutions (and away from my conversation partner’s thoughts to mine!). Another common way of stopping listening is to take the conversation back to...

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Grief AND thankfulness: How to pray for people we love

Lynne Baab • Friday January 24 2020

Let’s imagine you have a friend whose beloved mother just died. Your friend is really grateful for the medical care her mom got in her last months of life, and your friend is also grieving deeply. She wonders how long she’s going to feel this bad, and also wonders if maybe she should try to hurry the grief along faster.

Or maybe you have a friend or family member who just lost a job, suffered a major career setback, has a new major health issue, or had a big argument with a significant family member. How can you pray for friends and...

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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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