This week as Ordinary Time is winding down, and we are honoring All the Saints, living and dead, we also want to make space for honoring vocational grief. If you missed our All Saints’ gathering last week, we invite you to take 15 minutes this week for yourself.
Maybe you have the busiest of schedules, and that might be all the more reason to give yourself a few minutes right now.
Maybe you are wondering what vocational loss and grief are all about?
Several recent 3MMM episodes explore the losses and griefs related to our vocations. Learn what ministers, professors, activists, and chaplains are saying about their vocational grief. Then take time to name your own.
Take time for honoring loss and grief
We are heading into a very intense holiday season. Halloween and All Saints’ Sunday signal the start of a rapid succession of changes. The end of the year brings intensity around church work and academic work. It’s time for organizations to raise funds, and adopt new budgets, and make decisions about the coming calendar year. Thanksgiving travel. Advent marks a new liturgical year. Christmas, winter break, New Year’s, Epiphany. All this and more in the next two months.
Today’s episode is an invitation for you to stop and give your grief 15 minutes. Before these demands come at you like a freight train. Your spirit and your grief probably (surely!) needs more than 15 minutes. But it is a start.
Gather up a piece of paper and a marker or pen. Turn on the video (above), and let yourself pay attention to your own spiritual well-being by giving a little space to your vocational losses and grief.
Anticipating Advent
For Advent this year we have a few plans and maybe even a surprise or two. The main focus will be simple. We are exploring visio divina once again. Fewer words. More focus. Quiet prayer.
We hope this approach will support you as a ministry leader, seminary or higher education professor, chaplain, or person of faith. To pray this way, we will be exploring the Gaelic Blessing Deep Peace with music and art.
We all need room for quiet and stillness. Not only because it supports our care for our own vocational loss and grief, but because it moves at the speed of human being, the speed of soulfulness. Because it resists the cultural demands to rush and produce. Because silence is the language God speaks.
