January 2024 eNews: From Bishop Monnot

Many of you know that my father died this past September. At the age of 90, with significant adverse health events, this was not a surprise when it happened. It did, however, move me into a time of grief.

Grief is a funny thing. It affects all of us differently, and despite our recognition of the well-known “five stages of grief,” grief does not proceed in a linear or convenient way through those stages. I have experienced an unpredictable and occasional series of intense feelings of grief, which usually come over me when I am alone. I have felt a need to reorient myself in many areas of my life, as, for the first time, I have become a person with no living parents. This reorientation has included learning to see things differently, and to ask again some of the big questions that our Christian faith can help us to answer.

Grief can leave us feeling raw, as though a band-aid has fallen off before the hurt below it was fully healed. In my experience, that raw feeling brings things into sharper focus and, if I will let it, can lead me into a deeper relationship with God, an intensification of my faith.

While I don’t recommend seeking out opportunities for grief, what I do know is that most of us have something to grieve about much of the time. Sometimes it is an acute loss, like the death of a close family member. Other times we may discover grief at the root of other feelings we are experiencing, if we can find the perspective to look deeply. For example, anger sometimes has its roots in some kind of grief, such as the grief of recognizing that the world is full of injustice and greed, so far from the vision of the Kingdom of God that we hold dear. Moving forward instead of staying stuck in anger may require us to acknowledge the grief at the root of our feelings and to sit with our grief and anger in the presence of God.

Bringing our feelings, no matter what they are, to God, will help to deepen our connection to God. Just as sharing feelings with another person brings the two of you closer together, praying about our feelings, with or without words, brings us closer to God. This is true about any feelings—grief, anger, or fear as well as joy, gratitude, and delight. Whatever our feelings are, Jesus has shared them and so God understands them completely.

As I am moving through this grief process since my father’s death, I am discovering that my prayer practices are evolving. This reminds me that all of us, whether experiencing an acute grief or not, can take the opportunity to reimagine our spiritual practices, to experiment with something new, to reorganize our lives to support an ongoing deepening of our connection to God. Ask God to help you to see how to deepen that connection, and expect God to show you the answer.

Sometimes, when we intentionally pay more careful attention to deepening our connection to God, we may discover ourselves feeling called to a new stage in our journey. This call could be into a new form of ministry, which might mean needing to conclude our time with a ministry we have been involved with for a long time. The call could be into a new and deeper form of prayer, or a change of vocation. Sunday, January 21, is Religious Life Sunday, and this reminds us that our call could be into a form of religious life. Attached here is a flyer with information about The Benedictine Way, which you may be familiar with through the work of Br. James Dowd, its prior. Br. James is a good friend to this diocese, and to me, and I share his vision of The Benedictine Way in Omaha as a Monastery for the Heartland.

Whether your call is to monasticism, to a more intentional prayer practice, to a vocational change, a new ministry, or a deepening of your current faith life, I encourage you to follow it. Listen for God, through everything, and we will deepen our connection to God together.

Yours in the abundant life of Christ,
+Betsey

The Rt. Rev. Betsey Monnot, Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Iowa