Genesis 23:2 · World English Bible
Genesis 23:2 Meaning Sarah Died in Kiriath Arba (also Called
Sarah died in Kiriath Arba (also called Hebron), in the land of Canaan. Abraham came to mourn for Sarah, and to weep for her.
What does Genesis 23:2 mean?
Grief is the mind's honest confession that it has believed the body to be the self, and so has watched the self it loved slip past saving. When what is cherished seems to end in flesh, the ache that follows is love running to the wrong address, seeking in a form the constancy that only spirit keeps.
From the Christian Psychology reading below.
Genesis 23:2 through 1 lens
The same verse, read by one tradition.
Christian Psychology
CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY
Christian Psychology
Grief is the mind's honest confession that it has believed the body to be the self, and so has watched the self it loved slip past saving. When what is cherished seems to end in flesh, the ache that follows is love running to the wrong address, seeking in a form the constancy that only spirit keeps. The awakened part of the mind may weep and still know that nothing real can die. What is mourned is not a person lost but a belief in loss, and that belief can be set down.
The tears are the beginning of the correction, not its enemy, for they turn the mind toward the one thing it has been overlooking: that the beloved was never contained in the fragile thing now still.
Sarah: the cherished part of the mind the ego insists lives and dies with the body, the treasured self believed to be perishable Abraham: the part of the mind that has learned to trust, now facing the appearance of loss and choosing which teacher to hear Hebron in Canaan: the ground of ordinary experience where the mind meets what looks like death and must decide what it truly is
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Live Genesis 23:2 today
- If someone you lost comes to mind while you are driving or doing dishes, let the tears come instead of pushing them off. They are not a setback; they are love still trying to reach someone.
- Call or text the person who is grieving and say the name out loud, the name everyone else is tiptoeing around. Most people want their person spoken of, not protected from.
- When grief hits in a place that will not hold it, a meeting, a grocery line, let it be there without making it stop. You can feel it fully and still get through the next ten minutes.
Where is my love still going, now that the address has changed?
The same truth in other traditions
Zen
The wave was never separate from the water it rose out of, and it loses nothing when it settles back. Only the wave thought it was going somewhere.
Stoicism · Marcus Aurelius
Everything we love is on loan and we knew it when we took it. Grieving it does not mean we were wrong to love it; it means we loved it fully.
Bhagavad Gita
The one who lives in you was never born and does not end when the body does. What falls away is the clothing, not the one who wore it.
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