c. 2004 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) November, a season of loss in its own right, has become a deeper one for millions of people for whom the presidential election was a daunting experience of loss. As at an old-fashioned wake out of James Joyce, the loss is being mourned as poignantly and as variously as that of innocent youth swallowed up by the howling but unknowing Irish Sea.

Loss is the black border on our humanity identity cards, at the edge but nonetheless part of the whole of every one of our days. It is ironic that, as so many people grapple with this sudden loss, others are arguing passionately about what, in view of the supposed influence of evangelical Christians on the outcome of the election, religion is all about.

Both those cheered by victory and those cast down by defeat are sharing worthwhile exchanges, for example, about the nature of moral values and of the wide spectrum of intention and action in which they are expressed. Is morality summed up in being for marriage as between a man and a woman? Is religion really well described as a dangerous dragon with a fascistic heart that will breathe fire on those who do not accept its demands for conformity?

What both groups might well do, in these days of leaves fluttering down about us, is to meditate on the nature of true religion for its focus is less on specific issues, such as whether Iraq is the right war at the right time in the right place _ significant though this may be _ than on the great mystery of our existence, that we should be alive together at this time in this place, no matter how wrong, puzzling, or painful it may so often seem.

Despite Coach Vince Lombardi’s ethic about winning that turns loss into shame in one noisy version of the American dream, both life and religion are more about loss than they are about triumph. The basic religious mystery is not a Hallmark card, abstract pieties, or, as legendary at Irish wakes, the phrase mumbled with eyes averted, “I’m sorry for your troubles.”

Religion focuses us on the ever imperfect reality of our lives even as, in the heart of a joyful wedding ceremony, the young couple are reminded that their love will encounter better and worse, sickness as well as health, and that death will part them.

Indeed, loss is a necessary aspect of any growth or any creation. We must let childish ways drop away to become adults; we must lose ourselves if we are to find the fullness of love with someone else. For the love that bridges loss and outlasts death is never given to or understood by those who believe that winning, in life and in football, is the only thing.

So artists _ painters, writers, musicians, or actors _ according to the research of the late psychologist Frank Barron, must give up their previous level of achievement, no matter how well integrated, if they are to achieve a higher and better creation. They must “die,” as they describe it, if they are to bring new and richer life to their work.

Loss is not understood by those who believe in some cheap grace of salvation-by-the-numbers. Nor can its depth be appreciated by those who caricature religion as the stock in which extremists want to lock people to humiliate them publicly.

This visitation of loss points to what genuine religion is all about, that great mystery of living just-as-we-are in this world just-as-it-is. Loss is not a curse but a condition of being imperfect, living in time, of entering the smaller mysteries of loss and death that fill our days but are the only openings we have to the love that enables us to transcend them all.

MO/JL END RNS