Lose, Love, Live. Dan Moseley
point B is of little positive value. It is simply space to be passed through quickly.
Roads, on the other hand, value the space and are part of the landscape. They are designed to be traversed on foot or driven slowly. He said that before roads disappeared from the landscape they disappeared from the soul. Humans seem determined to live life always looking for it when they arrive rather than seeing the road as their life.4
Living with the losses of my life slowed me down and opened me to the life that is the journey rather than the life that is a destination. Kundera spoke to the deep desire I had discovered to slow down and to allow life to be lived in me. I had spent much of my life traveling from point A to point B and was living at such furious speed that I failed to notice life along the road. As I traveled the back roads of my soul, I slowly discovered rich insights into living life more fully, experiences that occur to us and that, whether we want them to happen or not, can be gifts of life to us. I realized that loss is the one of the fundamental things in life you can count on and that through loss you can discover your life.
Change and Loss
Loss is the one constant in life because change is the nature of life. Change is the one incontrovertible truth about reality. If something is alive, it is changing. And if something is changing, something is dying. I have realized that loss opens up the future in ways nothing else can. Loss makes new life possible.
This is a very difficult perspective to sell in our society, which believes that winning is everything. One of the worst things a person can be called is a loser. Our culture is enchanted with the winners, the celebrities, the people “on top.” We are simultaneously cruel and callous toward those who were on top and then fell.
The message of this book—that we lose our way to new life—is not easy to sell. However, it is a word of truth and hope for those ordinary people who live life in its fullness. It makes sense to those who have experienced what life delivers to all—the experience of losing something that is core to who we see ourselves to be.
Mantra
I discovered how much hope this understanding offers when I was invited to speak at a national gathering. I was asked to share my spiritual journey in eight minutes. Accepting the challenge, I boiled down my life and realized that I could sum up my spiritual journey in the following mantra:
To live is to love. To love is to lose. To lose is to live.
In looking back at my life, I see that love creates life. What we love makes us who we are. If we love words, we become someone who lives with words. If we love baseball, we will spend time playing or watching it because it makes us feel alive. What we love gives us life.
We may love ourselves at a particular time in our lives. We may have loved high school. We may have loved that dress. We may have loved being a mother who nursed her baby. If we love our children, we become the type of person who is a parent to the children, and we shape our lives according to what the love of a child demands of us. If we love our job, we become a person shaped by that job. We love created things, and in loving we create ourselves.
Because we love what is not permanent, we are guaranteed to lose. Because we love what constantly changes, we will eventually lose what we know as we know it. That much is assured. We may love our job, but eventually we will lose that job—because we lose our love for what we are doing or someone more qualified may be hired or because we retire or we die doing our job. At some point, we will lose what we love; what makes us know that we are alive will disappear. To love is to lose.
The guarantee that we will lose holds true for our faith as well. Faith is a human construct. We create an understanding of our lives in relationship to God. We use symbols and language to create that understanding. These symbols, while shaped by divine power and history, are constructs of the human mind. The way we construct meaning in our lives through the symbols of our faith will change. Therefore, when we are faced with a crisis that results in losing whatever we have come to count on, the way we imagine God can also change and we may lose our faith. The object of our love is a construct of the human heart and mind. Since we constructed it, we can lose it.
We become who we are by what we love. When we lose what we love, we lose part of who we are. If our spouse walks out on us after twenty years of marriage, we will no longer be the person we were. Sometimes we have become so shaped by the way love was expressed for our partner that we lose a significant part of ourselves. Our sadness and pain is therefore as much for the loss of ourselves as it is for the loss of the other.
To live is to love. To love is to lose. But to lose is to live. If we lose one part of our life, we become open to another part. If we love having young children at home, when they grow up and leave home the empty space created by their leaving opens the door to love something else—like the freedom to travel or to visit with adults without interruption. When something disappears, it opens the space for something else.
Loss opens new space with regard to faith as well. When the way we understood God as a child no longer helps us navigate the swirling waters of adult life, we sometimes give up faith all together. For those who continue to immerse themselves in the stories and rituals of faith, new insights into the character of the Divine can emerge. When I lost confidence in the words that had been my life, I was driven into a wilderness of silence. But it was there that I realized how limited my experience of God was. I had understood God to be word. In the midst of the empty desert of silence and despair, I discovered that God is also silence—God is not only what fills space, but God is also the space that is filled. Emptiness creates space for new and expanding life.
When my granddaughter was four years old, her baby teeth began to fall out and she smiled her toothless smile. She was scared when the first one fell out, but her fear eased when she put it under her pillow and received money from the tooth fairy. Now she is proud—new teeth are coming in. She is excited about the new teeth. Her fear faded as she grew in the confidence that new teeth would replace the ones that were lost. Had she not lost those teeth, there would have been no room for new teeth. To lose is to live.
How do we learn to live with loss? How do we find the courage to embrace the empty space that creates room for new life?
Growing through Grieving
Living well through loss involvess learning how to grieve. Grieving teaches us to live again in the absence of someone or something significant. Grieving isn’t just a time of unbearable emptiness and tears but a whole process of becoming a new person shaped by the memory of what is lost, not defined by it.
Grieving enables us to become a person who has experienced a divorce, not a divorced person. It enables us to become a person who has lost a partner, not a widow. It enables us to become a person who has experienced the loss of a job, not a loser. Grieving enables us to know ourselves as persons who lose something when change occurs, not as people who are losers.
Therefore grieving is a process that takes time. It is not an easy process if the loss for which you grieve represented a defining reality in your life. The amount of time grieving takes is related to the depth of the loss. When a young man loses an important basketball game, he will go through this process relatively quickly. The process helps him attend to the pain of the loss and become free of that pain, so it won’t define how he plays the next game. He will be shaped by the loss but not controlled by it. A woman whose husband dies the year before he is due to retire will take longer to find the new life through this process of grieving and growing. Her identity and self-understanding have developed over a number of years, and the losses will be more complex and multidimensional.
The process of grieving involves pain because it is a birthing process, a stretching and tearing that opens the way for a new spirit to emerge. It requires the knitting together of painful and pleasant memories to discover a new way of understanding ourselves.
As I worked on this process in my own life, I did a great deal of reading and study of spirituality and growth. I came to realize that the process of grieving loss, of learning to live in the absence of someone or something significant, parallels what many religions call a spiritual pilgrimage. To grow spiritually isn’t simply the practice of reading about the good ideas of others; it is about the way we process the