A prayer for holding grief

God of ceramic bowls, hear us we pray.

Grieving God.

I don’t know what to ask for. I’m numb and at the same time being crushed with pressure on my chest. I’m anxious and at the same time sleeping, always sleeping.

I do not need to list for you the trauma, the tragedy, the brokenness, the fire and flood and bombings, the deaths - a litany of human catastrophe, a liturgy of deep rooted pain.

And so I pray for a bowl to hold my grief. Maybe a ceramic bowl - the robins egg blue bowl that Rene painted for me so long ago. Maybe that very bowl, chipped and worn and well loved but now stuck in the back of the cubbord what with the move and time passing and all.

I pray that this very blue bowl be big enough to hold my grief as it was big enough to hold halloween candy for bright eyed children and dry ingredients for bread before I burned the crust-edges and decided to stick with stir-fry. I pray that this very blue bowl be big enough to hold all my stir-fry for my friends as they come over to eat and pray and be together. I pray that this very blue bowl be big enough for my despair, dusted though it may be with flour, salted though it may be with soy, sweet though it may be with an unwrapped tootsie-roll, fallen to the bottom.

I pray, that the simple act of digging it out from the shelf behind the flower vase and laying it in the middle of my kitchen table, I will also open up to the dusty, salty, sweetness of life and life taken away. Of life and life given.

And so this is my prayer for holding grief.

Robin’s egg blue bowl of life, may you hold all of us, all of it, all of who we are and who we are meant to be. May you hold it long enough and with love enough that, when we make it to Halloween this year (if we make it to Halloween this year) we will find you fit for a perfect dinner with friends and a night of doorbell ringing.

But, grieving God, even as I type these words I am sure, deep within the pressure of my chest, that the end of October won’t look any different than this beginning of September. I will still be at home and the world will still crash around me.

And so I hold the grief and mix the flour, sugar and salt in the bowl. If it can’t hold the grief, at least it can make some cookies.

Sweet God, I’ll take chocolate chip. Amen.