Current Issue

GRIEF & GRATITUDE: Parabola Volume 49, No. 4, Winter 2024-2025

We have all grieved. My own initiation into overwhelming grief came with the death of my father. The shock unmoored me and I understood that grief is a land onto itself, desolate and nearly midnight dark. But not quite pitch, for over time flashes of light appeared that revealed gratitude for my father having lived and having loved me.

Many of the contributors to this Winter 2024-2025 issue of Parabola have shared the miraculous experience of grief transfigured by gratitude. Is there any sorrow greater than the loss of a child? Witness the heartbreaking yet profoundly hopeful account by Myra Sacks of what followed upon her young daughter’s death, or the extraordinary Fra Angelico painting of Mother Mary on the cover of this issue. Mary’s passion for her son shines elsewhere too, in Mary A. Osborne’s elegiac opening essay on Michelangelo’s Pietà and in Val Thorpe’s closing meditation on German artist Käthe Kollwitz .

Grief and gratitude are expressed here for our planet and all its creatures, beginning with Trebbe Johnson’s stirring “Lament and Praise for the Earth.” Do animals grieve? Perhaps even insects do, as we learn in Karen Adams’s charming “Telling the Bees” how the Royal Beekeeper broke the news of Elizabeth II’s death to her many hives. Certainly humans grieve for animals; Sarah Bowen illustrates in her eye-opening “Sacred Sendoffs” the rich history of animal burial, and we can even grieve a rodent, as portrayed winsomely in Rafe Martin’s “Lenny the Rat.”

The Buddha said that all life is suffering. Grief contributes to that suffering. Yet as these pages show, grief can open the door to new understanding and a new way of living. There is, writes Brother David Steindl-rast here, a path of grateful living that “can build the kind of world for which every human heart is longing,” for its life force is “the force of Life itself—the power of Mystery.” It is this sacred Mystery that is celebrated on this issue’s final page, an excerpt from the Mohawk Thanksgiving Prayer:  “Now our minds are one.”

—Jeff Zaleski


table of contents

The Transforming Power of Great Sorrow  Mary A. Osborne
A vibrant meditation on Pietà, grief, and growth

Longing for Being  Tracy Cochran
Revelations at a beloved childhood destination

Lament and Praise for the Earth  Trebbe Johnson
A powerful testament to what is lost and what is found 

Grateful Living  David Steindl-Rast
A better way to live, from a beloved monk

Holy Wednesdays  Myra Sack
Honoring her daughter who died yet lives

Telling the Bees  Karen Adams  
A charming tribute to the honey-makers 

Things Don’t Stay Still  Surnaí Molloy
What happened that summer   

Home Burial  Joseph Orso
Plain, simple, and strong 

Prairie Heart  K. Lauren de Boer
Paean to the open plains

The Unanswered Question  Kent Jones
From absence to presence

Lenny the Rat  Rafe Martin
A small friend makes a big impression

The Divine Messengers  Hilary Smith
Harbingers of Reality

Kaddish  Mary Blye Kramer 
An appreciation of Judaic mourning

The Vanishing  Nartana Premachandra 
A fantastical journey through the Serengeti

Searching for Private Driscoll  Brenton MacKinnon 
Paying respects 

Death Nesting  Anne-Marie Keppel
Help to bear the grief

In Stillness, Eternity Speaks  Logan Messenger 
A visit to the Carthusian monks

Sacred Sendoffs  Sarah A. Bowen
The astonishing story of animal burial

Elegy in Light and Shadow  Val Thorpe
Käthe Kollwitz and her extraordinary art

Being Attention  Fran Shaw
Wisdom from leading Gurdjieffian Jean-Claude Lubtchansky

poetry

Winners of the 2024 Poetry of the Sacred Contest

When She Was a Garden Spider  Terry Ofner

Night Prayer at Binh Duong  Simon Eggerston

The Peach-Stone in the Garden  C.P. Nield

book review

Thomas Keating: The Making of a Modern Mystic  Cynthia Bourgeault / reviewed by Richard Smoley