Mourning : encountering the Orphan and the Angel

Often in a mood of melancholy, I had a sense of having left something behind, and in those moments the currents of my own personal grief were mixed with some larger grief, which I have come to associate with the figure of the Orphan.  In melancholy the Orphan was my constant companion.  More than that, I was seeing the world through the Orphan`s eyes.  Was my wife still somewhere in the world, perhaps just around that corner, waiting for my return?

In melancholy my life took on this searching quality, as if everything and everyone held some secret, which, if I could divine it would bring me home. I was in those moments, also living my life with a backwards glance, like that man on the hill surveying his home for a last time. A simple gesture, this backward glance, and yet it seem suffused with ancient rhythms.

Did we once really cross to the light and leave behind something of ourselves, some archaic remnant which still dwells deep within our soul and is reborn in moments of loss and sorrow?  Was the sadness I felt in these moods of melancholy, that bittersweet task that mixture of sorrow and peace after the shocks of grief had passed and winter storms of mourning had abated, if not ceased, the presence of the Orphan?  Was my own loss now being dissolved within this larger loss of a kinship we all once shared with the animal world? I tell you there were times I saw a smile of recognition on the face of a cat and that these brief moments calmed me, would you believe me?

Robert Romanyshyn

Its interesting that after typing this quote out from Robert Romanyshyn’s book earlier this week and re reading it that this morning the image that came to my mind was of the Tarot card of The Fool in which he is skipping along with a little dog by his side.  I was thinking of the innocence and openness of that archetypal figure.  In the case of the Orphan there is still innocence but on one level it is a ruptured or void like innocence born of deep unmothering or aloneness after loss.  At these times of spiritual orphanhood, we experience powerful if not fully conscious longings for connection with the animal soul and body of another, and we have a sense of being cast adrift on a wild ocean bearing a wound that aches at having fundamental basic human needs for love and connection denied or thwarted, stolen or lost on some level.

We feel alone and wandering in an alien universe.  We are the lost soul seeking we know not what, touched by the animal or natural world and perhaps opened to deeper layers of realisation, whilst being undone or unravelled by these experiences.  We also feel as though we have lost our ‘home’, a place of comfort, support and solace.  In the abandonment of emotional neglect we may feel we never had or knew this home and yet in some paradoxical way it is by experiencing this absense of home that we are sent on a quest to find or build it, out of our expereince of being lost or homelesss.

The Orphan is a kind of archetypal figure of the melancholic mood, an image for this moment of the grieving process which is more than personal, which has a shared, perhaps  Universal quality to it.  It is a kind of code of the soul by which strangers recognise each other as fellow travellers.  It is a pattern in human experience for the deep longing to be home and for the awareness we are always on the way, that home is as much a destiny which awaits us as it is a heritage which sustains us.

To be an Orphan, Saint Augustine says, relates one to God.  Carl Jung’s psychology of individuation is an ongoing incarnation of God for the sake of divine transformation.  In becoming who we are called to be, we bring God into his creation.  In this respect, it might be proper to say that the divine enters the world through the cracks in creation, including, and perhaps especially so, in our moments of breakdown and loss.

Perhaps, then, the Orphan is our God face, the face which we wear when loss cracks our stony hearts into wider fields of love.  In these moments the Orphan is the one who is present to the holy splendor of the ordinary, the one who sees the miracle in the simplest moment, the one who glimpses the numinous quality in the sahdows of loss.  If anyone had tried to tell me any of this would happen to me after my wife died, I could not have believed them.  Now I cannot help but walk in the presence of the Orphan…….

In odd moments, most often when I am walking in the hills alone, I like to think of that someone as a companion, a fellow Orphan. In these moments I like to remember the weary traveller and shipwreck of loss I woud like to offer a word of thanks for leaving behind in the face of  loss. a message of love,

In accepting the responsibility of our orphanhood, we becomes faithful sentinels for the passing and flowering of the world.

Deeply painful as it is, Romanyshyn here is addressing the idea that this kind of Orphanhood experience can also, at times be a necessary prelude to a larger spiritual awakening to fundamental existential truths we may have never had to encounter had we not experienced  disconnection, severing, separation or loss of someone or something once loved dearly.

So many of us go on this journey of Orphanhood but there are also gifts inside of it if we can open our hearts and souls to hunger and quest and reach deeply enough.  Much of this kind of deeply powerful spiritual transformation is impossible to articulate with words, unless we have been through it, it is outside of our minds.  One thing is for sure, in our orphanhood we plummet and navigate depths others do not know.

It is interesting too that in the writing above Robert Romanyshyn talks of the ‘cracking open’ of our soul in response to pain, trauma and loss.  Two quotes come to mind as I write this, one is by Kahil Gibran which speaks of our pain releasing the kernel of wisdom deep inside the other is by trauma specialist Peter Levine who speaks in his work of the rich spiritual gifts of experiencing loss or trauma which lie on the other side an opening to and appreciation of the goodness that was stolen for a time and becomes even more precious and numinous as a result.

It is impossible to find these gifts in the initial stages of our loss or suffering.  They are really in many ways the fruits that come out of the experience of bringing them to birth inside as a result of our deep encounters with trauma, grief or loss.  They may also only be gifts the fully sensitive amongst us can find due to our capacity for imagination, sentiment and solitude.  And we Orphans, recognise implicitly other orphans and in encountering those who can help us to see there is a larger purpose hidden in our orphan state one which brings us into the presence of larger, archetypal or god like forces seeking incarnation, revelation or understanding we find a kind of recognition and healing,we are not the only ones who suffer so as trauma and loss are archetypal human experiences.

It seems that is really only when we are able on some level to accept our Orphan state that we may begin to glimpse what lies on the other side, and what Romanyshyn also talks about as an encounter with the inner Angel.

In those darkest moments when we find ourselves so very far from human aid, there is a chance that a light may begin to peek out from the cracks, perhaps though not until we have fully got down on our knees and surrendered.  We may have had to cry a lot of tears before getting to this place, we may have had to scream a lot deep within or rail against our fate, loss, trauma or journey and yet it seems that there does come a time when after fully surrending to our orphan state, to the sense of lostness and pain we feel that we glimpse this light, we may also glimpse it in others if this state has led us on quest where we encounter other Orphans who have begun to encounter their own Angels too.

In my own darkest moments a powerful figure of mothering did appear to me and begin to speak to me through my intuition and imagination.  It told me I would survive and be reborn. It was like a kind of angel and it does appear to me that this figure of light could only be born out of darkness, I am not entirely sure but I do believe it is a part of our deep soul which can emerge and which we find or connect with only after walking the paths of suffering, often into a deep and dark wood such as spoken of by Dante.   Whatever or whomever this figure is, it is a very real presence which we only encounter in moments of presence.  It reveals a shining numinosity which can sustain us in times of trial, it is a force of radiant love which can embrace and comfort that orpahaned part of us and others.   Is this not one of our deepest most human and fundamental spiritual needs as we seek to grow through loss and trauma to embrace a conscious life on the other side?