We normally do not consider losing something as profitable.  When something or someone goes away, especially something that we consider to be of value or someone whom we love dearly, our reaction or response is usually framed within sadness, confusion, perplexity, and sometimes anger.  When we are experiencing what seems to be the height of fullness or fecundity, when everything seems to be falling in place, the perceived loss of what we consider to be responsible for that fullness can be excruciating.

There is also the perception of loss in what could have been.  Life not yet grown, abruptly halted.  In the extreme case of a young person losing their life, there are many times extreme devastation experienced by those left behind.  Here, the feeling of devastation and loss is tied to the perceived unfulfillment of their lives.  What might have been, who they could have become, is unknown and tragically extinguished without reason or warrant.

John’s Gospel  (JN 16: 5-11) is describing this scene:

Jesus said to his disciples:
“Now I am going to the one who sent me,
and not one of you asks me, ‘Where are you going?’
But because I told you this, grief has filled your hearts.
But I tell you the truth, it is better for you that I go.
For if I do not go, the Advocate will not come to you.
But if I go, I will send him to you.

Jesus immediately senses the grief that the disciples are experiencing on account of his sharing with them his departure and return to the Father.  As a response to this grief, he does not simply try to console them.  Actually, he says something quite remarkable:

“I tell you the truth, it is better for you that I go.”

He then tells them that the Advocate will come to them, but only through His leaving or going away.  This is a profitable loss.  There is, in a way, an exchange that is going to take place and it is going to result in better and more. We know from other places in John’s Gospel that this moreness, granted by what is here called the Advocate, is the Holy Spirit of Truth.

The Christian Mystic, Raimon Panikkar, talks about the gathering and harmonizing effect of Jesus’ leaving as an exchange of truth for the Spirit of Truth.[i]  The distinction is that the Spirit of Truth will be a guide toward not just fragments of truth or even precise formulations of truth, but toward Truth in its entirety and wholeness.  This Spirit does not lead us to know everything but to be everything.  This is a relation to wholeness that is Truth.  Far from a static conceptual notion of truth as this or that, it is a moving center that gathers and grows.  Panikkar provides a wonderful image of this Truth journeying like a pilgrim.  And that’s where we come in.  This Spirit comes to us.  Jesus is leaving.  Now it is up to us.   Our own lives become incarnations of Christ in the Life of the Spirit![ii]

This is the Divine exchange manifested in the human exchange – the life of trinity as our life!  Like the persons of the trinity, we dance with the Divine and with each other in uniqueness and collectivity.  We each have our part to play, our gifts to share, our truth to gather, but these are not fragments.  We are small windows of the wholeness of Truth, which Panikkar calls icons of reality.  Participating in this Truth is the Way and the Life, as Jesus puts it.  And like Jesus, the time we have on this earth is a critical and creative moment in the ongoing Life of the Divine, and when it is our time to leave, the leaving itself becomes an amazing opening and generation of the Spirit to continue the work of coming into more Life through creation, incarnation and salvation!

This is the freedom of living in the Spirit of Truth – the whole Truth – wherein “I share this life, I participate in the adventure, I do not need any heavy baggage…every act is unique and unrepeatable…every day contains life in its entirety…and there is more…”[iii]  It doesn’t matter the length of time we are here, as much as it matters that we consciously plug ourselves into the Whole Truth while we are here.   When we do this, we can let go, surrender to Life, which gives us the ultimate freedom of both leaving and remaining, dying and rising, absence and presence.  These are not dualities going around in circles but gathering spirals of newness born each time we live and die.

It is quite humbling to conceive of how unequivocally important each of our lives are, and the profound responsibility that goes along with that.  In our comings and goings, in our life and death, we are living the Divine pattern, as it is manifested within us.  After all, we are created in the Divine image. Strangely enough, yet delightfully so, each leave-taking is a pregnant space for the Spirit of Truth.  Every unclenched fist, every ‘let it be’ is a dynamic dying that has nothing to do with indifference or capitulation, but rather it is a full engagement in Love as the Spirit of Truth – always Resurrection!

How then can grief and death and the loss of loved ones become transformed in this divine pattern of leaving/living exchange?   Where does the truth end and the Truth begin?  Where is the New Life and how can we grow and gather it more?  When we can begin to ask these questions, then all of the seeming overwhelming questions of injustice and suffering in our world become transformed, i.e., become more Real and more True!  All the circumstances of our lives can serve to engage Divine Love and thereby increase the capacity to live in this Living exchange.  How can we not afford such profitable Freedom?

“Light in itself is darkness, it cannot be seen, is invisible: in order to become luminous, it needs me, an opaque body.” [iv]

[i] Raimon Panikkar, CHRISTOPHANY: The Fullness of Man (ORBIS BOOKS: 2004), 123.

[ii] Ibid., 124-127.

[iii] Ibid., 131-132.

[iv] Ibid., 134