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Home What people are saying about Ordinary Losses |
A letter from
Elisa We take note of significant losses and celebrations in life but rarely stop to name the “small” griefs and joys. Ordinary Losses is about naming the losses of our lives in all their everydayness—losses of home, time, wonder, relationship—and finding redemption through what we lose. Some people ask me how I could write a book on loss when I am young, but loss and the graces of loss are a part of our lives from the time we are children. Much of Ordinary Losses relies on stories from my childhood, inviting readers to remember stories from their own childhood; remembering is often the first step of naming. Do you remember when home was not something you questioned? Do you remember a moment when you realized that the courage it took to take the next step was greater than the courage you had? Do you remember a morning when God seemed not there, when God did not come back by evening or the next day, when all you believed seemed pale, blank, and you wondered how you could lose something as grand as who you once knew God to be? I believe healing can come when we pay attention to the losses in our lives—not only the great losses that call out their name as they come to us, but also the quiet losses that come from change and growth. All loss can lead to redemption, but if we let loss slip past us without us naming it, or if we let it languish in our history without a look of recognition, we miss all we might know from its textures. Being attentive is important to the spiritual life and it is important to our stories. To name something is to recognize it for what it is. It is to acknowledge that something precious has changed or gone, but God is in this place with me. My husband and I are expecting our first baby in October. When she is born, she will lose my body’s warmth and safety and she will never know that kind of security again. In return, she will have touch, and light, she will have faces she was born to know. She will have a name to grow into and she will hunger after a purpose already begun. So both loss and gain will come through her birth, will come on the day she begins a lifetime of letting go and grasping again. Perhaps much of life is like a birth, a losing so that more life might be known. Perhaps the losing makes the new life sweeter, etching it out as if to say, Here is a beauty you have not known before—do you see it clearly now? As I talk with others about this book, I find that when we start talking about the idea of naming losses, a rush of stories comes. The testament to grace is that the stories come not with grief as much as joy—when we reflect on the changes in our lives, we see the pattern of God. For God speaks through circumstances and relationship, through the grace of joy and the grace of loss. I invite you to come and name your own story through Ordinary Losses, to come with all that might be, to come and listen. —Elisa Stanford, August 2004 |
