Grief and Praise: Martin Prechtel and The Smell of Rain on Dust
Updated: Aug 21
There is an idea in Martín Prechtel's The Smell of Rain on Dust that made a profound impression upon me: that grief and praise belong together, and cannot really be separated.
This is not simply the suggestion that we should try to find something positive when we are grieving. Prechtel is making a much larger claim about culture, relationship and what happens when the losses we experience are given no adequate form. Grief is a response to what has mattered, and praise is one of the ways of acknowledging that it mattered.
If there is ever to be any real peace on earth, all people need to relearn and reestablish the now diminished and hidden arts of Grief and Praise, for one without the other is not possible.
It is an idea I have found increasingly relevant when thinking about the relationship between grief, beauty and our damaged relationship with the natural world.
Grief as a cultural and communal practice
Prechtel describes cultures in which major transitions in life are anticipated and accompanied by ritual, allowing grief to be expressed rather than leaving it suspended without a place to go.
Life change rituals should accompany every stage of life and anticipate people's full expression of grief. For this reason natural culture doesn't need to address life changes with therapy because they anticipate these changes and have a place for the grief.
He goes on to describe how grief can be converted into ritual beauty and culture-supporting continuity, becoming part of a communal relationship with the Divine.
What is striking here is not simply the existence of ritual, but the assumption that grief belongs within life rather than being an interruption to it. Loss is inevitable, and therefore a culture that understands life deeply must also have ways of responding to it.
This feels strangely absent from much of modern life. We have developed many ways of talking about grief, but far fewer shared forms through which it can be expressed, witnessed and given significance.
Prechtel's understanding is not that grief should simply be processed until it has gone. It is something that needs to move within a wider cultural and spiritual life.
When grief has no place
The word grief has become increasingly visible in contemporary culture, but visibility is not necessarily the same as understanding.
Grief is often approached as something to be worked through or brought towards resolution. These approaches can certainly be valuable, but they can also reflect a deeper difficulty in allowing grief to remain connected with what has been loved.
Without praise, Prechtel suggests, grief loses something essential. It can remain focused upon suffering without having a way of expressing the beauty, value or relationship from which that suffering arose.
This is one reason his argument has stayed with me. There is a danger that grief can become narrowed by the very wound it is responding to.
We can become so concerned with what has been damaged that we lose contact with what was beautiful, vital or worthy of reverence in the first place. The result is not necessarily greater care. Sometimes the fixation upon damage can itself become another form of blindness.
Grief, praise, and beauty
Prechtel's insistence upon praise can initially sound uncomfortable. There is an understandable concern that introducing beauty or praise into grief might somehow diminish the seriousness of pain, as though suffering should be made acceptable by finding something uplifting within it. However, this would be quite far from the view Prechtel holds.
Praise does not cancel grief. It gives grief something to speak about.
To grieve deeply is to have been deeply affected by something that mattered. Praise acknowledges that value, and in doing so keeps grief connected to the living relationship from which it arose. Without it, grief can become strangely abstract: pain remains, but the beloved thing becomes harder to see.
This has particular resonance for me in relation to the natural world. It is possible to become so conscious of ecological destruction that the Earth is encountered primarily as something wounded. Yet if our perception becomes fixed entirely upon damage, something important can be lost. Reverence requires that we remain capable of seeing beauty and vitality as well as devastation.
Perhaps this is part of what Prechtel means when he places grief and praise together. Grief without praise can lose its relationship with love, while praise without grief can become sentimental. Each gives the other depth.
A different way of thinking about grief
The Smell of Rain on Dust is less like being given a technique for dealing with grief than being invited into a different understanding of what grief really is. Loss is not treated as an unfortunate interruption to an otherwise complete life. It belongs to life, and therefore the capacity to grieve belongs to culture, relationship and spiritual practice.
This also changes the meaning of beauty. Beauty can be part of the response to suffering, because it allows us to remain in relationship with what has been loved. Rather than considering beauty an escape from suffering or an attempt to make difficult things more bearable, in Prechtel's understanding it become the vital act of creating new life from death.
That distinction seems so important at a time when both ecological grief and personal grief are increasingly visible. There is a difference between acknowledging suffering and allowing suffering to become the only lens through which the world is perceived.
Grief and psychotherapy
These ideas have obvious resonances with psychotherapy, although I would not suggest that therapy can simply reproduce the communal rituals Prechtel describes.
Grief enters therapeutic work in many forms. Sometimes it follows a recognisable loss, while at other times it is connected to something less clearly defined: a life not lived, a relationship that could not become what was hoped for, an aspect of oneself that has been neglected, or something that remains difficult to name.
Part of psychotherapy can involve making enough room for such experiences to be recognised rather than immediately turned into problems to be solved. The aim is not necessarily to remove grief, but to discover what it belongs to and what it might need in order to become part of a meaningful life.
This is one point at which Prechtel's understanding of grief connects with some of the wider questions I explore elsewhere on this site, particularly around depth psychology, spirituality and our relationship with the more-than-human world.
Grief, praise, and the living world
The connection between grief and praise becomes especially significant when the subject is the Earth itself.
It is possible to care deeply about ecological destruction while gradually coming to experience the natural world primarily through the language of injury, loss and crisis. Yet if our relationship with the Earth becomes entirely organised around what has been damaged, we risk losing the capacity to encounter what remains alive, beautiful and worthy of reverence.
This is one of the questions I explore more fully in Spiritual Ecology and Psychotherapy. Prechtel's distinction helps me articulate something that I have increasingly come to feel: that grief needs praise if it is to remain connected with love, otherwise it will only lead to more grief.
The Earth is not only something that has been wounded. It is also the world that continues to give, surprise and sustain us. To praise it is to refuse to allow suffering to become the entirety of the relationship.
In this sense, grief and praise may belong together as two movements of attention. One recognises what has been lost; the other keeps us capable of recognising what is still here.
My own artwork often explores the relationship between grief, beauty and the natural world. Image-making can become a way of remaining in contact with something difficult without reducing it to a problem that needs to be solved or turning away from it altogether.
Prechtel's writing has given me another language for thinking about this. Grief can be an expression of love, but it needs forms through which that love can continue to
participate in life.
