The Orphan and the Angel : archetypes we encounter in grief and grieving.

Little did I realise then that it would be my own personal grief which would move me into that place where the figure of the Orphan would awaken me to the dying of creation and open my heart to the necessities and requirements to love.  Now more than ever I wonder if we have become so estranged from the world that we no longer are moved by the suffering of the trees, the sorrow of the animals, the sadness of the stars?  Is it only now our own personal sorrows that touch us?  Have we become so distant, so remote, so removed from the rest of creation, that we are no longer able to respond to the simple appeal of things?  And then, unable to respond, have we become irresponsible, careless, neglectful, and even destructive?  The poet Rilke understood this simplicity of things and the appeal they lay before us :

These things that live on departure understand

when you praise them : fleeting, they look for rescue

through something in us, the most fleeting of all.

To awaken to the Orphan in our grief is the necessary precondition for hearing the lament of the world, for witnessing its dying, and perhaps, if we are lucky, assisting in its healing.  Today we desperately need a transformation of soul, a radical spiritual revolution.  The Orphan who arises in our souls from the ashes of grief is one step in this transformation.

In this regard, the Orphan is also the figure of our souls who, although most homeless, beckons us toward our spiritual home.  Here, I believe the Orphan encounters the Angel.  Why the Orphan and the Angel dwell together, I do not really know.  But sometimes I feel that they hold between them the tension of home and homelessness, which seem to lie at the root of the soul.  Noel Cobb, poet and Jungian analyst, says it this way :

Angels above us, around us and below us

Did you not have to become outcasts

In order to discover your true home?

Extract from : The Soul in Grief : Love, Death and Transformation, by Robert Romanyshyn