Walking Prayer at Walden: In Joy and in Grief We are Better Together

  • September 9, 2019

This morning we met on the beach to share gratefulness for our summer adventures, sadness for the challenges and losses in our lives, and hope for what this new year might bring. We were especially mindful of the loss of our dear friend Rhonney Doll and walked with her family, Jim and Emily, in our hearts. We began with a blessing written by Jan Richardson, in her book The Cure for Sorrow: A Book of Blessings for Times of Grief :

Blessing for the Brokenhearted
There is no remedy for love but to love more.
– Henry David Thoreau

Let us agree
for now
that we will not say the breaking
makes us stronger or that it is better to have this pain than to have done without this love.

Let us promise we will not
tell ourselves time will heal the wound, when every day our waking opens it anew.

Perhaps for now it can be enough to simply marvel at the mystery

of how a heart
so broken
can go on beating,

as if it were made for precisely this—

as if it knows
the only cure for love is more of it,

as if it sees
the heart’s sole remedy for breaking
is to love still,

as if it trusts that its own persistent pulse is the rhythm of a blessing we cannot begin to fathom but will save us nonetheless.