As a fruit of the losses we go through, I want to share with you the one I was given. It was borne out of a revenant experience—and what experience of shattering loss that we cannot escape isn’t a revenant experience?
Loss is the antecedent to a revenant experience.
That is to say, to truly live we must first die. This metaphor is best illustrated in Jesus of Nazareth who went to the cross just days before he was raised in what is indisputably the greatest miracle of all time. Jesus’ death and resurrection is a model for what we’re to follow by metaphor. We follow him by his example.
There is always a compensation for the suffering we go through. To live as that is the truth is faith. We just have to find it. That itself is a faith quest. Yet, even as we do this—head held high in heartbreaking sorrow—which itself is mind-bending paradox—do we stay in the game, so to speak.
The longer—the more frustrating, the more we come to the end of ourselves—the experience of living in that liminal space of pain, learning to bear it honestly in sorrow amid the gamut of emotions before God, the deeper God takes us into his own heart. But this is always juxtaposed by equivalencies of support and encouragement—hence the importance of community!
Only as we hold steadfastly to the ideal that there will be—and therefore IS—a compensation for what we’re suffering do we reject overtures to give up and hold out for something entirely better. We can only do this one day at a time, even as time just about grinds to a halt.
Good does come at the end of the road of a faith that insists that good is coming. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. But dying to ourselves will always feel like hell. We must not forget that Jesus has overcome hell.
It starts as a revenant experience, for in dying to ourselves—which, check and see, is a biblical imperative—we come to live out of a power that is not our own.
Imagine that it is impossible to attain to living as a revenant without bearing loss. Can you see, therefore, that even in the event and circumstance of loss, we are being promoted to a heavenly glory even as we live and breathe in this life? Even as we suffer in the pit of grief we are given access to a living death that precedes a glorious resurrection.
These words were ushered into me several years after I endured my revenant experience: I am cosmically alone with God. I believe they were God’s words for me.
I would recite it in Greek: έγω έιμι κοσμικον μονου μετα θεον
Sound weird? Sound kind of lonely and sad?
The reality for me was (and is) everything that means everything to me. Suddenly, out of loss, what was discovered is, if loss cannot kill us, nothing can. Having experienced and survived that taste of revenant death, nothing of this world truly brings us close to that kind of ‘death’. Sure, we can still slip into our humanity and lose our way. It happens still so often. BUT, there is an opposite image in the Spirit that is, in a flash, returned to.
Once the Spirit is given to us, we cannot return, indefinitely, to what was.
It is not the end of our life to experience something very close and akin to the end of our life. Indeed, it is actually the beginning. In alignment with what Paul said, “When I am weak, I am strong,” we learn that enduring death to ourselves bestows an inextinguishable hope, and this hope cannot be learned without traversing the journey of grief.
See how good grief is?
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