Scripps Sunday 11/3

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It's hard to believe that it's been a week since the tragedy-- 
holding you and your community close, Anna... 

for a day of mourning 
Love is in the particularities. Adapt this blessing with the appropriate name,
pronouns, and details that describe the person you grieve

Today we are drawn into mourning,
the complexity of love and loss
warms our hearts and chills our bones.
Just as the light of the sun
illuminates the lines of a spider’s web,
invisible connections are revealed:
we are wrapped up in love.
Blessed are we who
acknowledge the way
our minds linger on the details.
We know exactly how
his mouth looked
when he laughed.
Or precisely what it meant when
she used that tone.
Blessed are you when you have
no reasonable plans
to make sense of a world
without them. How could we?
It would be easier to pour
the ocean into the kitchen sink—
this love is bottomless.
And blessed are we when we carry
this grief with no dignity.
Just some Kleenex and a look that says:
You don’t know who died today.
How could you know
unless you felt the way time, today,
slowed until it meant nothing at all,
until I found him in my memories.
Oh God, you alone know
the whole of it,
their sufferings,
their joys,
their hopes,
their winding paths,
every movement of their being.
Restore our souls,
even as you receive theirs.
Welcome them in with the kind of embrace we long to give.
Blessed is the time they were given
and the time you now have.
Whether in life or in death,
love is the greatest,
most stubborn truth.


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