Lose, Love, Live. Dan Moseley
experience of loss. Whether we choose the change or not, each change produces loss. If we marry, we lose our single life. If we become pregnant, we lose our sense of independence. If our lover dies, we lose our sense of being loved.
However, each loss is more than one thing. When we have significant changes in our lives, each loss has multiple meanings. This book is a book about the multilayered losses we experience in the living of our lives.
Moreover, this book is about what people do in the face of these changes and losses that results in some amazing and wonderful discoveries. It is about how loss is the central component in our desire to discover new dimensions of ourselves. It is about how the creation of space caused by change is exactly what is needed if we are going to become more than we have been. It is about how faith can open the spirit to the new world that is emerging.
While this book is about loss and the sadness that accompanies our losses, it is also about the discovery of more life and the excitement and adventure of that discovery. It is about the abundant life available to those who are awake and attentive to the possibilities that come to them in loss and emptiness.
However, if you are looking for a book on how you can do more to make these losses less painful or how to avoid them altogether, this book is not for you. This book assumes that loss plays a central part of being alive and that to avoid loss is to avoid life.
If you want a book that tells you “the right way” to live with and through loss, this book is not for you. If I were to tell you how to live your life in loss and then you couldn’t figure out how to do what I said, your attempt would just produce guilt—and anyone who has had significant loss doesn’t need someone else pointing out that he or she is doing it wrong. People who do that just make others feel more inadequate than they already feel and do not contribute to living our strength and confidence through these losses.
This book is not a list of stages or steps to follow in your journey through loss. There is no right way to do this any more than there is just one right way to live your life. Your life is unique. There is no straight line from here to there. When we think of life as a series of steps that, followed rightly, will get us what we want and prevent any pain, we start making judgments about ourselves from the beginning. If someone says we should be at stage three after four months of missing the spouse who has left us, but we are only at stage one, then we have to deal not only with our feelings but also with our guilt for not being where we “ought” to be. Among the most painful things about grieving loss are our expectations and the expectations of others that make us feel we are not “doing it right.”
This book is not about doing it right. This book is about living life through its losses, an invitation to follow the scenic route through life, to pay attention to your life, to notice what is happening, and as you do, to receive it as a gift. The journey of our lives is one in which there are wanderings, roads that double back on themselves, which allow us to revisit old sites even as we wend our way toward new sights. This book is an invitation to wake up to your life, to live your life as you go, and to love your life as you experience it.
This is not a book with answers. It is a book with clues that have come from my life and the lives of people I know. Someone has said that if the path ahead is clear, it is not your path. Your life is a mystery. No one can give you all the answers. However, when we share honestly with each other, we can glean hints from one another about what might be our way.
Come with me on a journey of discovery. I will share with you what I have found in my painful experiences of loss and the joyful and graceful life that emerges through that loss. I will share with you what my friends have shared with me as we have walked together through change. I heard somewhere we read to know that we are not alone. I share with you these stories with the hope that on your journey, you will know you are not alone. I will share with you my honest experience and hope that it will illumine your path.
I invite you to open your heart up to others so that you can find fresh joy in these new discoveries. I encourage you to share your journey so that those who feel your sadness can drink from your joy as they travel with you.
“Those who want to save their life will lose it,
and those who lose their life for my sake will save it.
What does it profit them if they gain the whole world,
but lose or forfeit themselves?”
LUKE 9:24-25
Someone once said, “Life after all is fair. Ultimately it breaks everybody’s heart.”1 I would have thought I would have known this fact. After all, I spent over thirty years sharing the pain and joy of life with people in three congregations. As their pastor, I had spent countless hours walking alongside hundreds of people as they experienced all that life had to offer. I shared the agony of divorce with some of them, wept with some of them as they gave up their spouses to death, swore at the gods with some as they mourned the death of their newborn babies, descended into the depths with others as they were fired after twenty-four years with their company. I would have thought I’d have known that eventually life breaks everyone’s heart.
Ironically it took more for me to get that knowledge through my thick skin. Before that could happen, I had to be stripped of the insulation that protected me from the pain and confronted with more loss and death than I could handle. It began with the discovery of cancer and, three years later, the death of my first wife, Cindy. We had been married thirty-one years. Soon thereafter, the young custodian of the church I was serving took his lover and her children hostage and, before the night was over, killed his lover and himself. Then the last of my three children married and moved out. Finally, a month later my dad died.
Up to this point, I was accomplished at facing difficulty with other people. My role as minister gave me a way of being present to the pain without it cutting so deep. But when the losses began to pile up and rip through my self-understanding as a husband, a father, and a son, I was without enough resources to keep on going.
I continued to do my work as a preacher and pastor, but I found it increasingly difficult. Speaking words of meaning became hollow. I felt like a “noisy gong and a clanging cymbal” (2 Cor. 13:2). Prayer was simply hollow ritual without meaning or power.
When I visited people in the hospital, my body cried out in rebellion. I found myself avoiding the leadership responsibilities of my job.
Finally, I chose to leave the congregation that had mentored and nurtured me and that I had served for over twenty years. I chose to leave the profession of pastor, which had sustained me and given me identity for over thirty years. I chose to leave the city in which I had discovered my skills as a minister and where I had offered them as a gift to others. I chose to lose much more after facing losses over which I had no choice.
Only then did the full effect of the losses of my life come crashing in. As I moved to a new city and became a professor at a seminary, I began to spin into chaos. As the relationships that had sustained me through the crises of my life ended, I was left naked and on my own. I could no longer avoid my feelings. I could no longer pretend that life would be the same. I discovered the terror of not knowing who I was.
I discovered raw empathy. Susan Wiltshire, in her book about her brother dying from AIDS, describes a broken heart as like a broken biscuit. When torn in half, there is twice as much surface on which to spread the butter and honey.2 I discovered that a broken heart also has twice as much surface on which to spread the pain and grief of others. Whereas I had been able to protect my heart by playing the role of pastor, I now had no such protection. While I was able to draw on the strength that people projected on me because I was a “man of God,” now I was just Dan. I had no presence to offer but my own, and the pain that others felt tore into my flesh. It was then I began to realize the truth of the statement “Life after all is fair. Eventually it breaks everyone’s heart.”
I found that our hearts are attached to familiar, dependable relationships and that when these change, by accident or by choice (it matters not), the heart