Grief & Praise by Martin Prechtel
Excerpt from “Grief and Praise”
by Martin Prechtel
I was noticing something the other day. I work with a lot of people and people work with me, and we come together to be together. And I was noticing that... people who feel real bad about themselves when they’re like middle aged because nobody praised them for something worthy when they were this tall. They may have praised them for something, but they may not have praised them for something worthy. And then I noticed those people who couldn’t weep properly for the dead, and they couldn’t weep properly -- and when I say, weep properly, I’m not talking right or wrong here, I’m talking when you really know how to do it, where you look bad when you’re done, you know, when your hair is missing and your clothes are ripped, and your’e down in the street.
And I thought, why is this? Why is this? I noticed that people who couldn’t grieve, couldn’t praise. And if they did, it was really hard for them and it’s not their fault. And I thought, what is it about this place that’s like that? What is it about this? So I realized...When we speak in Mayan, did you hear the grief in that? Right away, I bring a tear to my eye. It’s not an act. It’s not theatrics. Right away. Because your mortality, your mortality is in your face every time you praise, realistically.
Now people say, what does that mean? How does he really mean that? It’s because if you’re praising something, your grief — and I’m not just talking grief for the hell of it, I’m talking true grief — true grief has to be present for the stakes to be high enough for the praise to be legitimate.
Now if you’re in the workplace, and someone says, “that’s a really nice job”, chances are what they’re trying to do is make sure you’re doing your job right. They’re not too concerned about your ancestors or your children growing up without pain or getting killed in the streets. But if true praise is coming along, then it’s got to contain the notion that you are mortal, and the praiser is mortal, and that the beauty is that this moment we’re all together in this place to be together. And there’s a grief in that that makes the magic of the praise very real, because the stakes are extremely high. Do you see what I mean?
At the same time, any grieving... what is that? Somebody dies, or a loved one goes somewhere else, or like myself who had your whole country ripped out beneath you. What is that grief you finally do? What is that? It’s a form of praise of life. It means you miss it. You miss the damn thing....You have to be able to do like that. Because otherwise it mean you don’t love the thing you lost. What use is that? You gotta love the thing you lost, just like you gotta love the thing you got. When you’re grieving for the thing you got, it’s praise. When you’re praising the thing you lost, it’s called grief. You understand what I’m saying?
I think about this a lot - that grief is praise for what we’ve lost, and praise is grief for what we have, and both are visceral to the moment and are inseparable fundamentally from one another.
Martin Prechtel’s teaching here comes out of decades of village life among the Tz'utujil Maya and the displacement that followed the Guatemalan civil war. He’s speaking powerfully of the grief of those who have actually wept properly for the dead in cultures that knew how, and who watch contemporary Western life try to live without that knowledge. His central claim — that the inability to grieve is also the inability to praise, and that the two are one motion —is central to chaplaincy, for activist burnout, for anyone who really who is willing to grieve and willing to love, and to offer true praise that comes out of a knowing that the person, the moment, the constellation, will never come again in exactly the same way and that’s part what makes the praise genuine because it is tied to our inherent sense of loss.
