Some of my favorite stories entail an unexpected meeting of friends. Or perhaps more precisely, a meeting of unexpected friends. A character who was previously overlooked and often undesirable becomes an essential companion on the journey. A few favorite antiheroes that come to mind include Puddleglum (The Silver Chair), John Bender (The Breakfast Club), and Severus Snape (Harry Potter). I am coming to understand Grief as one such unanticipated ally.

My current imagination around Grief envisions her as a manifestation of the woman Wisdom personified in the book of Proverbs. One might say Grief is Wisdom鈥檚 shadow side. Like Crow in Max Porter鈥檚 novel , she is at once crass yet tender. She is dark yet bright. You鈥檙e a little afraid of her, and simultaneously drawn to her. She is strange. She is antihero.

I have begun a relationship with Grief that I expect will become one of the most intimate of my life. She has me weeping at the glint of sun on skyscrapers and water during my daily commute, and every time I turn on the news. She frightfully, intriguingly animates the faces of strangers. She has deepened my laugh. I no longer vilify crows. I am inexplicably tender. I believe that what I am becoming, what we are all becoming, are deep wells that can hold and tend to vast quantities of grief. I can only wonder what Grief will do to mold my face into her own gnarled, radiant image.

鈥淚 believe that what I am becoming, what we are all becoming, are deep wells that can hold and tend to vast quantities of grief.鈥�

In the spirit of Grief as antihero, I recently composed the following poem:

Grief, Goddess of the Stricken

Unflinching unveiler of truth,
breaking self-conscious silences at funerals
with orphan and widow sobs, swallowing into bottomless
black wells the statements of well-intentioned bullshitters,
measuring the compact weight of sorrow
in pounds of frozen lasagna and dollars spent
on Thai takeout.

She throws open bedroom curtains at 10:00am and sits
in the back of the bus with prostitutes,
E-line southbound, blasting down Aurora,
bleary-eyed and sipping Snapple tea
with their McDonalds breakfast sandwiches.
She holds our bodies hostage in the glaring light,
post-war veterans never fully home,
and won鈥檛 let any of us fake it鈥�
the beauty and the loss.

She holds us like stones until we find breath
underwater.

She makes wide-eyed haunted blackness bright,
wraps herself around us as a harness
in our eternal falling. She suspends
the rules of spacetime so we see every crack and hole
in every story, lets us know we are not alone
in our catastrophic rearrangements, our crater-carrying
existence in the absence of limbs,
vital organs,
a better half.

Her rhinoceros rampage banishes despair,
and in the paradox of newly vacant space, contracts
and expands the tracts of land
that lie fallow with seeds in the ground, yet she allows
them the wait, the not yet, not now.
She makes no demand that they reach
tender hands
towards the sun, because she knows
they cannot resist.

Holy Mother, raze us to raise us.
Oh Grief be the antidote, the prelude
to resurrection.

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Yet when we observe the cosmos, all we see is history. It鈥檚 true that light moves at an incredibly rapid constant. But the stars we behold on a clear night outside of the city are so far away that we are witnessing something ancient beyond comprehension. Even the light of our own sun is eight minutes old before we receive it. Oh, to dance with Sol before his wary tendrils escape my grasp!

The gospel accounts detail the arrival of the Light.

To walk in darkness is the lot of those who pilgrim through a bent and fractured universe. I often wink at my old northern friends Big Bear and Little Bear as I traverse the treacherous folds of space-time; but they do seem distant. When I trace my own constellations in the sky, I wonder if I鈥檓 really just searching for a face. The stillness of night often burdens me with the knowledge of 聽my own formlessness and fragmentation, loneliness and listlessness. But the stars shout like tiny beacons to waken in me a longing for inseparable union with the Light, the state of being 鈥渉ome.鈥�

The gospel accounts detail the arrival of the Light. John the Beloved, invokes our mythologies surrounding the creation of the universe; the Light is the uncreated source of all things鈥攐ur Mother, our Father. Matthew and Luke narrate his earthy, embodied existence as a human infant. Unlike the distant stars or our own sun, the Light came in direct proximity to humankind. Those who encountered Christ did not have to wait even eight minutes to perceive his glory. And oh, the fortunate ones who, drawn into orbit by his gravitas, first beheld his light and huddled around it in unabashed love and desperation: blue collar workers still dirty with grease and construction site dust at the end of a long day; a teen girl who bore the shame of unwed pregnancy; Persian sorcerers guided by dreams and, yes, stars.

鈥淭he heavens declare the glory of God.鈥�

The cosmos are drenched with his beauty, singing songs and tales that incline our hearts towards home.

鈥淭he Son is the radiance of God鈥檚 glory and the exact representation of his being.鈥�

In Christ we behold the face of God; his warmth and light nourish us on our journey through the darkest quarters of time and space.

And to what end? John鈥檚 own apocalyptic visions suggest we鈥檙e headed towards something brilliant beyond our current neural capacity. Maybe we鈥檒l no longer be bound to linear time. Maybe we鈥檒l get to participate in stellar midwifery and birth new galaxies. Maybe unicorns will be there. At present, though, I find the most radiant portals of Light in the faces of his image-bearers. We are his little lights who, as the prophet foretold, 鈥�Shine with the brightness of the heavens鈥ike the stars forever and ever.”

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