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Praying about the flow of time: Our Lady of Sorrows

Lynne Baab • Tuesday September 10 2024

I have been thinking a lot about sadness. My family moved 12 times in my first 15 years, and my mom was sad about the moves and affirmed my sadness as valid. Other than that, sadness was always viewed as a failure of thankfulness. I was supposed to be thankful that I wasn’t poor like my mom was in her childhood and teen years. Grateful that I had nice clothes like she didn’t have. Thankful that we could go on nice vacations like she never got to do. Grateful that I didn’t have to do farm work many hours a day...

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Can we feel sad when we have something we longed for?

Lynne Baab • Friday December 10 2021

Heather went through three rounds of exhausting in-vitro fertilization before her healthy baby was born. In the months after the birth, she experienced post-partum depression, but she felt she couldn’t tell anyone about it. “I just felt I should not be feeling this way. After everything we’ve been through, why should I have any kind of depression?”

Kristin, mother of one child, lost a baby at 39 weeks of pregnancy, then miscarried. A year later, when her daughter was born with significant digestive issues and cried a lot, Kristin just about went crazy. She wanted to be thankful for having a child...

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The pivot between grief and gratitude

Lynne Baab • Saturday November 27 2021

Imagine you are crying about something, perhaps the death of a family member, the loss of a dream, an argument with a friend, or something deeply frustrating that’s happening in your body. Perhaps you feel distant from God in the midst of this sorrow, and you wonder if God sees what you are experiencing. Then imagine some time passes, and you are now laughing at a joke, relishing a delicious meal, or gazing awe-struck at a blazing sunset. What got you from one place to the other?

Almost all of the psalms of lament pivot from sadness/grief/anger to thankfulness/praise/joy. Some of them...

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Grief and gratitude in Ezra, Nehemiah, and Gerard Manley Hopkins

Lynne Baab • Friday November 12 2021

A few days after my always-helpful husband, Dave, proofread my recent book on grief and gratitude, he told me that he was seeing grief and gratitude everywhere. He was studying Ezra and Nehemiah, and they are full of both, he said. As the Jewish people returned from exile in Babylon, there were so many challenges and so much to grieve: Jerusalem’s city walls and temple lay in ruins, the rebuilding took much longer than expected, and the people kept falling into idolatry. Yet the first celebration of the Passover and the Feast of Tabernacles presented such lovely opportunities to express thanks...

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