Good Grief: Acknowledging the pain of rightly ordered love

Among the many blessings of this school year has been my growing awareness that I am surrounded by a sea of grief.

In the midst of all the exciting future-oriented work we are doing at CDSP is the parallel reality that we are also losing things. Our residential program is closing; we are leaving the GTU; the future of the property is up in the air, but things will certainly change there too.

This climate is not formed by knee-jerk, reactive grief that simply opposes change. Rather, we’re experiencing a richly textured, layered grief. It raises up and reflects on past experiences, joys, and relationships connected to the life of this campus as a residential seminary—the only accredited Episcopal seminary on the West Coast.

Countless alums took formative, life-changing classes within the GTU. That will not be the case moving forward. The buildings named for significant people in the history of CDSP will almost certainly be changed. And that’s if those buildings remain at all in whatever fruitful life our campus finds after the closing of our residential program.

For many LGBTQ+ seminarians, residential formation at CDSP was perhaps the only space where they felt sufficiently safe to engage in true formation for ministry. Although our commitments to our LGBTQ+ students will not change, our students who graduate this May rightly lament the loss of this place for those who might have followed in their footsteps but now will not.

I am still fairly new here. Nevertheless, I too have stepped into this sea of grief. I realize that my grief is not as sharp as those who have deeper roots at CDSP. Still, I’d like to share how I have found some consolation through a text I’ve taught for decades, Augustine’s Confessions.

While he was a young man and still far from God, St. Augustine experienced the sudden death of a close friend. He recalls that his grief was almost unbearable. It left him exhausted, bitter, and unable to find much consolation.

Augustine understands that grief is tied to love. The loss of someone or something loved is naturally an occasion for grief. The deeper the love, the deeper the grief.

Of course, one way to shield ourselves from the pain of grief is through various forms of detachment. Our culture urges us down this path. We are encouraged to think of our connections, possessions, and relationships as disposable.

That is not the way of Christ. The God who calls all things into being desires us to have deep, heartfelt connections to people, places, and things. This genuine love opens us to grief when those connections are lost. When there is as much loss as we are experiencing at CDSP, that grief becomes a sea, threatening to overwhelm us.

Augustine reminds us that the same God who invites us into loving relationships in the created world also calls us to single-minded, wholehearted love of God. Loving God with all our hearts, strength, and minds does not diminish our love for people, places, and things. Rather it enables us to love all things properly.

In the rest of the Spring 2024 issue of Crossings, you’ll see that we have many people, initiatives, and occasions to celebrate at CDSP. In some cases, the losses we grieve make room for new life.

But neither this theological perspective nor the good news that can follow loss eliminate our grief. Nor should they. Instead, the grief that we rightly feel is tempered as we entrust all our loving connections to God’s care, the God who is at work healing the world.

In this way, when we find ourselves adrift in a sea of grief, we can find ballast in the promise that, in Christ, loss is never the final word in our story.