What it Takes to Pray our Goodbyes

We have all said our goodbyes. We have moved away or been moved away from, changed jobs or even entire careers, finished school and graduated, lost opportunities, dreams, and even people we loved. 

Bless us, we learn to say goodbye the best way we can at the time.

But I have noticed that when my goodbyes are rushed or barely attended to, I may keep saying the same ones over and over without any freedom to be comforted or changed by them and move on in honesty and wholeness.

I am learning to pray my goodbyes, a process which includes a deep freedom to let God tenderly care for me and say hello to what is next.

During my childhood, goodbyes came mostly from the process of growing up and moving whenever my Dad was transferred for his job. There was New Iberia, Lafayette and New Orleans in Louisiana all by age 7, then Holland, Texas, Iran for high school, back to in Texas in a different neighborhood and school for my senior year, then away to college. Seven drastically different places before I was seventeen.

Here’s how I learned to do it at the time.

Risk awkward hellos by making new friends early on, count on family above all, celebrate friendships and new adventures, learn fun facts about new countries, move in the summertime, and avoid airport goodbyes at all costs.

Those are the ways I softened the lump in my throat and the prickly ache behind my eyes, making childhood goodbyes a little less sharp.

At first glance, you might not notice anything amiss with my coping strategies for loss, change, and moving on. After all, they actually worked as far as they went. But if you look closely, something I have begun to do in the last decade, you may notice scant mention of tears, tending to tender places, or what it took to be the new kid so many times in so many different cultures at so many stages and ages. I remember starting my period on the 17-hour flight from Houston to Tehran and realizing I was landing in more than one foreign country.

Somehow, I had picked up along the way that if you lingered too long on loss, the sadness of parting, or even a bit of despair at beginning again, again, you might get stuck there and never move forward. While it can be true that we can get stuck in hard and bitter places. It is not because we faced our pain but because we never really looked it full in the face or beyond it.

Now that I am older and paying closer attention, I can see my combination of avoidance and jumping ahead did some good work when I needed it. And it no longer serves me well now when I want to be healthy, wholehearted, and nimble. I want to bloom and that means seeds in the ground.

I am learning that being a human in God’s creation includes engaging in the repeating pattern of hello–goodbye-hello.

We cannot jump from hello to hello without attending to the goodbye in-between.

Well, it can be done, but not to wholeness. We simply must pass through our goodbyes.

Our friend Jesus did it.

Consider Jesus’ last week on earth. He mourned his cousin John, washed his friends’ feet, let Mary anoint him for burial, ate a honest meal with his friends leaning on him, took friends to the garden to pray, sweat out his true desire with his Father in that garden, gave John, Mary as his Mother, and Mary, John as her son, all the while turning his heart toward returning home to His Father.

Jesus was not merely saying his goodbyes; he was praying his goodbyes.

They are different. Catholic writer Joyce Rupp explains praying our goodbyes includes four parts: recognize, reflect, ritualize and reorient. This is helping me complete a process as integral in our natural world as the sunrise-sunset-sunrise of every day.

Recognize

Recognizing is pausing to name our loss, specifically and honestly. This is harder than it seems and often does not happen first in the order of things. Sometimes, naming our goodbye first calls for time reflecting on our current season. This could be as simple as taking stock of your right now life. What is happening in family or friendships, work, church, in our city, country or around the world? As a result, what is the weather inside our souls?

Kate Bowler describes our goodbyes beautifully, in her Kate Bowlery way,

“The strangest part of change, I suppose, is how it occurs as a series of small funerals. We lay our dreams to rest. Goodbye, love. You lit up my world. Goodbye job. You were that mold that I poured myself into. Goodbye, self. I need to let go now, and I can hardly begin to try.”

Calling change “a series of small funerals” helps me realize our goodbyes are often little deaths and might need marking as such.

And our bodies can be our place of beginning.

Our bodies can be a help for they hold many clues prior to finding the words to name things. Think hair raising on the back of your neck, hunger pangs, stomach knots, or tension in your shoulders or jaw. Notice where we are holding tension, anger, joy, excitement, sadness, depression? Notice your breath. What is happening at the moment you find yourself holding your breath, catching it, or sighing deeply?

Reflect

Reflection includes a fair bit of noticing, questioning, quieting, pondering, conversations with God, and eventually with the wisdom of the Holy Spirit, connecting dots from our ache to its cause or causes. This reflection might happen suddenly in a blaze of insight or in little moments at the kitchen sink, on a walk, in the shower, working in the garden, on the bread aisle in the market. A few good questions I have found helpful are: Where exactly do I ache?, What kind of season am I in? (nature or life), What am I losing/saying goodbye to?, What pain or truth am I resisting?, Where is my energy going in this season? I will write my responses to these questions in my  journal and likely talk about them with my friends, especially my dear friend Jesus.

Once we begin to recognize the specifics of our ache, we can name our particular goodbye(s). It could be school or a job coming to an end, a child moving out of one season into the next, maybe even getting married and moving away, our parents  divorcing, aging, or losing their health, someone we love dying, friendships shifting, people leaving our town, neighborhood or church (maybe it’s us doing the leaving), a friend’s marriage ending, or perhaps our own marriage.

With the sped up pace of our world, we are often saying multiple goodbyes at once, some sudden and others long and drawn out. Consider rapid changes in technology, science, and social awareness, as well as those brought by the Covid19 pandemic to homelife, healthcare, travel, gatherings, work, neighborhoods, dining out, shopping of all kinds, and education at all levels, just to name a few. It is enough to make your head spin and disorient you within your own life.

Of course, we don’t have to react to every shift in life as if it were a dramatic goodbye. Yet often we find ourselves lamenting changes around us where we cannot go back and discounting its effect within us. Many of my paths and corners in my little town are very different than three years ago. Some buildings are closed and empty, others have come down. People have moved away and new people moved in.

Goodbyes are simply a part of life, but perhaps at a compressed pace like never before. We might want to learn to work them out as we go.

Ritualize

Engaging in rituals helps embody our goodbyes. Rituals offer us ways of acting out our pain. Joyce Rupp suggests rituals holds two parts: a metaphor or image that helps mark and symbolize our goodbye along with movement. Here are some helpful rituals that I have stumbled on.

Last summer when I was lamenting my oldest son and his family moving away and settling in on a faraway coast, I found a crushed bottle cap on a daily walk where I was trying to name the grief I was feeling. Not only did my son love bottled root beers and sodas as a college kid, but the flattened ridges captured the way I felt about how far away he lived and the possibility it might not be temporary. I was happy for him and his family and at the very same time, sad for the miles between us. Along with my son and his wife, here are three little adorable souls I want to know as they grow.

I fondled the bottle cap in my coat pocket all the way home accepting the tension between those two realities and making plans to connect across the miles. Later at a friend’s house, I placed the cap in a bird’s nest along with some others saying their own goodbyes which helped me see I was processing my empty nest in another layer than before.

The movement of walking and placing the cap in a bird’s nest alongside others were healthy ways of acting out my goodbye.  It might seem counterintuitive to lean into a goodbye when trying to let go. But the truth is, I wasn’t moving further from my son emotionally. Despite the miles, I was moving closer in heart to the one I loved. These movements generated more movement. Besides getting unstuck in my pain, I also inched deeper into the reality of my life with an empty nest and closer to my friend Jesus who knew the sweet sorrow of parting from those he loved.

Whatever you choose as your object or image for your goodbye (or maybe chooses you), the invitation is to engage with it in a way that is meaningful to you and deepens your understanding and expression of your goodbye.

Here are a few ideas to get you started: flowering bulbs, an acorn or other seed, ashes, bird nests, torn paper, empty envelopes addressed to you or the one you love, falling leaves, suitcases, a butterfly, a flock of geese, or anything that speaks to you about your particular goodbye and points toward hope on the other side of it.

Don’t limit yourself to this short list. Make praying your goodbyes part of an ongoing conversation with your good God and use the beautiful imagination he gave you.

Reorient

This may be the most significant part of praying our goodbyes – turning back toward God with our whole selves - or realizing we are not ready to. Grace for all of it and your own pace of returning. Our turning toward home - or resisting it - can happen by increments or in one swift spin. Or sometimes in a mysterious combination of both. No matter the way, God is calling.

The Psalms show us how turning toward our good and loving God can happen anywhere along the way. We can begin with Him or wrestle our way back on a dark and lonely night as Jacob did. Or as in the parable of the prodigals, hobble home broken and humble like the younger son or remain close physically yet with a hard heart like the older son. The truth is in all of these stories including our own, God has never left our side. We are the ones turning towards or away from Love. And God patiently, lovingly waits for our return.

Grace, to us. We are likely doing what we know how to do. We are still learning how to trust God’s goodness and ourselves in his hands. Our friend, Jesus knows all about this and he left this world with a parting gift, God’s Holy Spirit to woo us home.

We may have forgotten that God’s Love is not only once-upon-a-time. It is ongoing in us toward a bright and everlasting future.

This is hello, my friends.

Joyce Rupp writes,

Jesus risen is a proclamation of “hello”. Jesus risen proclaims,

“Stay close to the Father when you suffer from goodbyes. Lean on this love and believe in his power to sustain you and to raise you from your dark and lonely places”

The difference between saying our goodbyes and praying our goodbyes is the trust that we need not be afraid to enter into our goodbyes because a hello awaits us on the other side, and even more, through it. Our friend Jesus is near and dear every step of our way.

It helps me to remember that the original meaning of goodbye was an alliteration of the blessing “God be with you.”

When old words die out on the tongue,

New melodies break forth from the heart;

And where the old tracks are lost,

New country is revealed with its wonders.

Rabindranath Tagore

“Praying Our Goodbyes - A Spiritual Companion through Life’s Losses and Sorrows” has been on my nightstand for the last few months as we are praying a goodbye to our home and neighborhood of 17 years.

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