Four participants started off 2015 by Walking the Mourner’s Path, an eight-week, Christ-centered series of workshops designed by an Episcopal priest to help people who feel “stuck” in their own grief for lost loved ones. This particular series, facilitated by the Rev. Ruth Hooper, Patricia Donohue, and Cameron Rau, focused on grieving for spouses and siblings, and inviting the Holy Spirit to be present with us in our pain. Each week’s 90-minute workshop drew upon lessons learned from the previous sessions. Participants told stories, shared pictures, and remembered their relationships with their loved ones. The final session included a group Labyrinth walk, a ceremonial burning of letters written to their loved ones, and a Eucharist in which participants met for the first time their “prayer partners” — members of the Daughters of the King who had been paired anonymously with the participants and had prayed for them daily over the last eight weeks. The Rev. Canon John E. Kitagawa celebrated the Eucharist, and Richard Kuns (coordinator for Walking the Mourner’s Path) served as a sub-deacon. In addition to “unsticking” the participants from their grief and opening their sense of the abiding presence of the Holy Spirit even in our greatest pain, the series drew four strangers together on their individual journeys and guided each one to find a collective and intertwining experience in their Walking The Mourner’s Path together.
The next Mourner’s Path series will be offered in the fall. For more information, contact Richard Kuns.
—Cameron Rau
Good News from St. Philip's 