Holy Wisdom, Holy Grief by Eric Hannem

Submitted by Erin Trondson (she/her),
Executive Director

Dear Holy Wisdom Community,

I wanted to introduce you to another community member and friend who has become part of our community. I met Eric Hannem at one of our programs over a year ago at Holy Wisdom. He was in a period of deep grief and shared that he found healing in the land, the sisters, and our hospitality. We have struck up a correspondence over the months, see each other whenever he is on retreat, and he recently shared a poem he wrote that I absolutely wanted to share with the full community. Please find the poem below along with a brief bio.

Holy Wisdom, Holy Grief

There are places that astonish us only once.

The first visit belongs to beauty.
The second belongs to memory.

If we are fortunate enough to keep returning, another kind of knowing begins, one that asks almost nothing of excitement and everything of fidelity.

Holy Wisdom has become such a place for me.

Not because it grows more spectacular with every season. It does not.

The prairie remains stubbornly prairie.

The lake continues receiving wind the way it always has.

The oaks neither celebrate another year nor mourn the winters already behind them.

Even the bees seem governed by an obedience, moving from blossom to blossom with the confidence of creatures who have never confused purpose with recognition.

Nothing here appears interested in becoming extraordinary.

Perhaps that is why everything here becomes sacred.

The prairie does not aspire to become a forest.

The lake does not envy the river.

Even the wildflowers spend themselves freely upon the wind, unconcerned with whether anyone pauses long enough to admire them before another season gathers them back into the earth.

There is a kind of freedom in that.

They have learned to inhabit the ordinary so completely that nothing remained merely ordinary.

Bread became Eucharist. Hospitality became prayer. Work became praise. Silence became another language for love.

I do not think I understood that when I first arrived.

Like so many pilgrims, I came hoping to find something.

Peace, perhaps.

Clarity.

Instead, Holy Wisdom asked almost nothing of me except that I return.

Friendship with a place is unlike friendship with a person. 

A place does not reassure you. It does not flatter you. It does not tell you that you are growing. 

It simply remains itself, and in remaining itself with such astonishing faithfulness, it reveals how much you have changed.

For a long time, I believed that love required constant remembering, that every silence threatened to erase the life of the one I had lost, and so I carried memory almost as an obligation, repeating the story inwardly, afraid that if I loosened my grip even for a moment I might lose him a second time.

Yet somewhere between the prairie grasses bending beneath the July wind, the bees disappearing into blossoms only to emerge dusted in gold, and the long afternoons beside Lost Lake where nothing remarkable seemed to happen at all, I found myself inhabiting a silence that no longer asked me to defend the past.

Love has never diminished.

It no longer depends upon my constant attention, any more than the prairie depends upon someone standing watch over every wildflower. 

Love had entered the deeper places, where roots disappear beneath the soil and continue their work, drawing nourishment from darkness.

Perhaps grief was always meant to become something like that.

And that seems, to me, the closest thing to holy wisdom I have ever known.

Eric is a writer from southeastern Wisconsin whose essays explore grief, love, healing and belonging. Drawing from personal experience, he reflects on the people we lose, the versions of ourselves we leave behind and the enduring ways love continues to shape our lives. His first collection of deeply personal letters exploring grief, love and healing is forthcoming.