Revd Chris McDermott, Lead Chaplain for the University of Sussex
Forgive the glib reversal on John Donne’s famous sonnet, ‘A Valediction Forbidding Mourning’ the celebration of an unbreakable bond between lovers.
Back in June I referred to Gillian Rose, a key focus in my research work at the moment. Since then I have engaged in some local mediation work that has reminded me of the degree to which grief and loss are always inherent to some degree for people in conflict. This may be particularly the case amid the Covid-19 pandemic. In a recent engagement with individuals in conflict it emerged to what degree they have been traumatised by the pandemic, experiencing the loss of routines, work, normality – never mind how their wider families have been affected. It potentially becomes a perfect storm when conflict emerges: the loss of relationship, self-esteem, one’s ordered world etc. then melds with the trauma of the pandemic. Perhaps people become even more aware of the trauma when something like conflict enters the picture.
I have worked with conflict for many years but recently, in view of my engagement with Gillian Rose’s work, I have realised how practically insightful and valuable what she describes as ‘inaugurated mourning’ is to the process of reconciliation – or indeed, sitting with conflict when reconciliation does not seem feasible. She renders articulate many past experiences of working with people across a range of conflict scenarios. But let me add here that Rose is a difficult writer and I struggle – as a non-specialist – to get to grips with her oeuvre, though constant exposure is shifting this somewhat.
Rose herself regards philosophy as difficult work and rather delights in making things hard for her reader. So, it was particularly striking to realise how her thoughts distilled as practical tools for working through conflict. I won’t repeat here what was said about the process of ‘inaugurated mourning’ in my June column ‘living with the broken middle’ with its process of moving through a series of mutual (mis)recognitions in which one’s own and the other’s story is appropriated without reducing each other to projections of themselves.
Indeed, in the experience of irreconcilable differences, the challenge will be to sit with the uncertainty of the situation without rushing to premature closure or easy answers. Patience, goodwill and recognising the humanity of the other – and the larger context informing the experience of conflict – are vital in sustaining us during these uneasy sittings in the ‘broken middle’.
Another poet cut from a rather different cloth from Donne - Rainer Maria Rilke - knew something of the experience of ‘broken middles’. In his Letters to a Young Poet he writes to Franz Xaver Kappus:
‘You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.’ (Rilke, 1993: 34-35)
In uncertain times, possibly amid the strain of relationships, and augmented by the pressures of a crisis beyond our control, what can be hoped for – and even deliberately nourished for ourselves – is the grace to live those questions toward that distant day without easy assurance of the answers.