A Hole in the World: Finding Hope in Rituals of Grief and Healing

by Amanda Held Opelt

In a raw and inspiring reflection on grief, a mourning sister processes her personal story of loss by exploring the history of bereavement customs.​ When Amanda Held Opelt suffered a season of loss—including three miscarriages and the unexpected death of her sister, New York Times bestselling writer Rachel Held Evans—she was confronted with sorrow she didn't know to how face. Opelt struggled to process her grief and accept the reality of the pain in the world. She also wrestled with some unexpectedly difficult What does it mean to truly grieve and to grieve well? Why is it so hard to move on? Why didn’t my faith prepare me for this kind of pain? And what am I supposed to do now? Her search for answers led her to discover that generations past embraced rituals that served as vessels for pain and aided in the process of grieving and healing. Today, many of these traditions have been lost as religious practice declines, cultures amalgamate, death is sanitized, and pain is averted.   In this raw and authentic memoir of bereavement, Opelt explores the history of human grief practices and how previous generations have journeyed through periods of suffering. She explores grief rituals and customs from various cultures, As Opelt explores each bereavement practice, it gives her a framework for processing her own pain. She shares how, in spite of her doubt and anger, God met her in the midst of sorrow and grieved along with her, and shows that when we carefully and honestly attend to our losses, we are able to expand our capacity for love, faith, and healing.

Genres: Grief, Nonfiction, Spirituality, Memoir, Christian, Religion, Faith

256 pages, Paperback

Published July 18, 2023

About the author

Amanda Held Opelt is a songwriter, speaker, and author of the books A Hole in the World and Holy Unhappiness. She writes about faith, grief, and creativity, and believes in the power of community, ritual, shared worship, and storytelling to heal even our deepest wounds. Amanda has spent 15 years serving in the non-profit and humanitarian aid sectors. She lives in the mountains of Boone, North Carolina, with her husband and two young daughters.

Reviews

[Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Each of us has a tiny Hole in our Heart - and so naturally in our World. What else could we have, in a world that just doesn't care how we feel? And Amanda is right: bereavement for someone we love enlarges this hole exponentially!

Amanda loved her sister, Rachel Held Evans, with all her heart - a love that everyone around the world who has eagerly read each word of her daily Blog shares.

Habits help at times like this, Amanda says. Especially habits of ritual - praise and worship. Those are essential because they connect and ground us to the past - not to our past, which has now been inexorably damaged - but to a communal and universal past of Faith.

And when people around us can't console us, God can. Trust me.

If at first, though, through our habits of desultory disbelief, we can't connect with Him in His heart, we can align ourselves to his harsher words of grim necessity -

Cry, cry, what should I cry?
All flesh is grass...

Everything we do has its alloted time, Ecclesiastes says.

And that includes birth and death.

And in a communal environment of acceptance, we learn a new sense of resignation in our mourning.

Resorting to ritual now is just good plain common sense.

Even if we're a nonbeliever, the habit of routine can help assuage our grief.

Healing can now begin.

But if your faith is merely buried -

Ritual can resuscitate it.

Thank you, Amanda, for strengthening my faith.

[Kat Coffin · Rating 5 out of 5]

One chapter in, I knew this book would be life-changing.

For about three years, I have battled with grief and faith as opposing forces. I lost friends in the year of 2019, not all to death. Some to betrayal, some to the unknown, where I do not know if they are dead or alive and may never find out. And Rachel's death was particularly hard for me. I felt ashamed of how devastated I was. I was not her sister, her best friend, her family, what right did I have to grieve for her? My grief was a pebble to the landslide her circle was going through. But I still mourned and I was still furious with God. My last memory of Rachel is asking her to pray for one of my lost friends and her pausing in the midst of signing my book, in the middle of a line that wrapped around the building, to take my hands in prayer and ask God for protection of my friend. How dare God take her away. It wasn't fair. It would never be fair.

And so I developed a bitterness towards God for all that He'd taken from me and from others. Rachel's family didn't deserve it. I didn't deserve it. Where was God?

I never considered grief and faith as a harmony. And that is what Amanda's book achieves, it balances the raw agony of grief into a melody that faith intersects with. God does not battle the grief, He winds his way around it, wraps it into a song that I am still learning to sing.

Unsurprisingly, I cried several times during this book. Amanda's moments of vulnerability that she shares with the courage of a thousand armies, her thoughtful reflections on the myth of the bereaved Mis in the monstrousness of her grief and the love that brought her back to humanity, and perhaps the hardest for me to read--the questions, the peace, and the prayers that I'd so firmly raged against. I was Mis, screaming at the faith I was raised in, tearing any overtures from God to pieces.

This is a book that I will sit with for a long time, that I will return to when grief and death and loss make their inevitable intrusions into my life again and again and again. Rachel Held Evans was the C.S. Lewis of our time, but Amanda's book is the "A Grief Observed" of our time, one of the most important books I've ever read, a book that has rearranged spaces in my soul I thought I'd effectively destroyed.

There is no one answer to Amanda's grief or to mine. But her book reminds us that there can be communion and healing in ritual, in fellowship, in stories, in laughter--there can be life, if we choose to seek it.

[Donna Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

I gave this book a high rating because I absolutely loved the concept behind it. The author, inspired by her own grief, looks into old grieving traditions which are lost, or almost lost, to today’s culture. Some examples are wailing, wearing black, and sitting shiva.
I was fascinated by the subject matter. I thoroughly enjoyed the descriptions and histories of the traditions. I also frequently enjoyed the flowing, essay-like style of the author’s writing.
On the other hand, I wanted the author to stick more closely to her stated topics. Before each chapter ended, I had completely forgotten its title (topic).

[Monica H (TeaandBooks) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Are you grieving or do you know someone who is? A Hole In the World by Amanda Held Opelt may be just the book to read right now.

Opelt is the sister of New York Times' bestselling writer, Rachel Held Evans, who passed away in 2019. Opelt also had three miscarriages nad her grandmother passed away shortly before her sister. This writer suffered a big season of loss and she chose to write about it in this book. A Hole In the World is a mix of her personal stories along with some history of the rituals of grief in both our modern world and through the ages from Bible times forward.

The book begins as the author navigates Ash Wednesday after her sister died. She is struggling to understand her own grief process and what it means to grieve well. As she struggles to find those answers, she takes the reader through the rituals of grief through the ages: Keening, Covering Mirrors, Sitting Shivah, Wearing Black, Sympathy Cards and more. I found a lot of this information to be fascinating. I especially enjoyed the chapter on Telling the Bees relating to fear, Casseroles and feeding the body, and Sympathy Cards relating to words.

A Hole in the World is a book to make the reader think and reflect. I simply couldn't read it fast. I would read and then take time to reflect. I could relate to much of what the author shared in her personal experiences in some way as I grieved my own losses in the past. I also appreciated all of the history of grieving practices both in the Bible times and through the ages. I found it all interesting. Opelt writes in such a way that the book is easy to read and relate to, even though it is somewhat deep in places.

Besides reading the book individually, A Hole in the World would be a good book for those working in grief counseling and in groups where grief is processed together. There are no discussion questions in the back, but I believe the book would generate a lot of discussion in those settings.

I received an Advanced Copy of this book from the publisher. All opinions within this review are my own.

[Justin Lonas · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is a lot going on in the world, much of it hard and painful, much of it lovely and joyous, often all at once. How do we live in the face of it?

My dear friend (I've known Amanda for nearly 20 years now!) has wrestled beautifully with this tension.

Walking through deep hurt isolates and disorients, but pretending it is not there, as we are often expected to, does nothing for our wellbeing or for our neighbors'. Grief and sorrow call us to attend to one another, sharing burdens without adding new ones. How we live toward one another in the midst of pain and loss is something too few of us have considered. The unprocessed grief of our collective losses as a nation (throughout our history, but especially over the past 2-3 years) leave us lashing out, in a stupor, or terrified.

Amanda's work capturing and applying rituals of grief from across the globe and across the centuries is a balm and a blessing. Someday we all die; we all bury loved ones; we all suffer under the weight of a broken world. Learning to lament, to grieve well, must be found anew. Acknowledging the hole in our world death represents makes space for the wonder that there is still life in the midst of it.

[Kari · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mixed feelings overall. I enjoyed learning about some grief rituals that I hadn't heard of before. Opelt is a more conservative evangelical narrator than I typically read, and I think that plus her age and the way that she focused on some recent losses left me unsatisfied. I would have enjoyed a book about the grief rituals more without her story, in part because I did not feel that her own personal story of grieving was very instructive to me.

(I feel terrible saying that, but it's true.)

[Rachel Cowan · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 ⭐️s.

this book felt like a comfort that i was able to return to when the grief felt lonely and unbearable; it kept me company on my bedside for months, and i didn’t want to finish it. thankful to you, EA, for gifting me this treasure.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

*See my full review at Fathom Magazine: https://www.fathommag.com/stories/sto...


If it were possible to give this book beyond 5 stars I absolutely would. What an incredibly moving, nuanced book on the nature of grief -- a needed word of hope for the emotions we cannot name and tame on a daily basis.

You will buy this book. You will then read it and cry. You will then buy copies for your friends so they too can read and cry. You will then discuss together deep truths and healing and be more alive because of it.

"Death is part of life. Its cruelty is a reality we must accept. And until we die, we hope. We pray. We approach God. We beg. “God, make us glad for as many years as we have seen trouble.” And, I believe, once we make an acquaintance with death, we can approach it with that same familiarity, the same audacity, the same hopeful request. We can sing, as my ancestors did, “O, Death, won’t you spare me over ’til another year.” Please?"

[McKinley Terry · Rating 5 out of 5]

I certainly needed this book after a month that was filled with grief. It provided comfort to read both about Opelt’s process of grieving her grandmother, sister, and unborn children, and different ways that various cultures have grieved together in the past. This is a beautifully written book.

[Liv Holloway · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautiful reckoning of the process and rituals of grief — across time, cultures, and religions. At times, this book haunted me in the best way. An unexpected comrade alongside having just given birth to a baby; death and life are always side-by-side. Also appreciated these words coming alongside me in this Lenten season, as we collectively come a little more face-to-face with our mortality.

P.S. I know Amanda personally and loved her all the more when I read this work. Her heart is so genuine and kind, and I’m grateful she risked the vulnerability and bravery to show up in this way about her own significant losses and rendezvous with death.

[Maria · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent book on grief…a book I will purchase to have my own copy so I can mark it up and read through it when grief overwhelms me.

“As Rachel explores each bereavement practice, it gives her a framework for processing her own pain. She shares how, in spite of her doubt and anger, God met her in the midst of sorrow and grieved along with her, and shows that when we carefully and honestly attend to our losses, we are able to expand our capacity for love, faith, and healing.”

[Michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5: Along with an overview of some historic grieving rituals, this book provides some raw, honest feelings on the author's real life experiences with grief. It is intelligent, well written and the opposite of self righteous and preachy. I found it to be a safe place to think, question, process and find some next steps.

[Ericka Andersen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written and intimately personal. Amanda's book is important.

[Sarah Steinmann · Rating 5 out of 5]

A truly comforting and beautiful book about grief and loss. I’ll be coming back to to this book again and again.

[Kaytee Cobb · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was beautiful and just the right prescription for a broken heart.

[Cover Lover Book Review · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Hole in the World: Finding Hope in Rituals of Grief and Healing made a big impact on me. Much greater than I expected. Although I haven’t experienced grief as often as the author has, I know how strong it can be, how fluid it is, how it lingers around every bend awaiting the most inopportune time to flood back into my mind and heart.

I’ve never really thought about or looked into rituals of grief and how they might serve me. I find many of these practices interesting, some of them strange, but appreciate how these traditions of mourning give us space to grieve. Permission, so to speak. Oftentimes, we are expected to bounce back, return to work, continue with everyday chores, etc. and we stuff down our feelings and ‘suck it up.’ But is that healthy? I love how the author blurred the lines of these practices, making them fit into her steps through grief.

This book created a strong visual for me, envisioning these rituals as a vessel for my pain. This, perhaps, made the biggest impact on me. To use rituals as a place to place my grief. After losing my mother during my teenage years, I didn’t know where to place my feelings of loss. It felt unfair that I’d live out the rest of my life without my mother. My future husband would never know her, and my future children would live their lives without their grandmother. I wish I’d had this book during those early years, to process my pain, and to shelter it beneath my faith.

This is a powerful book. I dare say it has the potential to change your life.

A few quotes from the book that spoke deeply to me:

These solemn practices surrounding mourning intrigued me because I felt a distinct lack of ritual in my life in the aftermath of my losses.

During the course of my study, I discovered that generations past had a robust array of rituals surrounding death that allowed mourners to be fully present in the experiences of bereavement.

The thought that I could be accompanied by joy as I walk through the pain and toil of life is deeply hopeful. It is almost as if the antidote to sorrow is savoring.

But somehow, somewhere, the beauty of God’s work in my life seemed to overtake the ugliness of it all, eclipsed it in some mysterious way.

First Line (Introduction): It's high noon on Ash Wednesday and I am lost in the church basement.
Genre: Christian Spiritual Growth & Grief, Memoir

Disclosure: #CoverLoverBookReview received a complimentary copy of this book.

[Cameron · Rating 4 out of 5]

The life of grief is learning to live with a peace that passes all understanding. It is learning to live within an affliction for which there’s no cure. You integrate the wound into your daily life. You learned to live with a gaping hole in the world.

But what does love look like when the object of the love no longer exist, at least not physically in time and space? Is love just a memory? Is it past tense? Is it delusional to love someone who is gone?

I've come to believe that just because I'm devastated doesn't mean I'm not coping well.

Yes, the pressure, persecution, and perplexity of life may continue, but we do not have to be crushed by it. We are not endlessly despairing. We are not abandoned. We are not destroyed.

It's not the weight you carry but how you carry it— books, bricks, grief-

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.
—2 Corinthians 1:3-4

I will never say that my grief has been good. But I will say that it has not been wasted. Not one bit… The sorrow that threatened to break me apart is now the cement that holds me together.

[Heath · Rating 4 out of 5]

First things first, this book is a sacred thing. Opelt processes and shares the experience of losing her sister, Rachel Held Evans, and three children to miscarriage and her grandmother all within a very short span of time. It is an honor to be invited into her reflection on these themes.

This is a good book for those processing grief, particularly the death of a loved one. It gives a good roadmap of how someone is navigating that process for themselves. In particular, I appreciated how Opelt drew on historic forms of grief to guide her own. We live in a time where the Commonweal has has been shattered and we have no cultural forms to help us navigate seasons of change.

Opelt is a layperson writing on issues of psychology. She gets it right most of the time, though at times she misses a few things here or there and I would disagree with some of the conclusions she draws. However, these differences are largely minor and would not impact the overall guidance through grief.

[Kim Fertig · Rating 5 out of 5]

After my mother died, I searched books on grief. I was sad. I felt all alone in my sadness. And this book sounded…different.

It’s not your typical “self help” book on how to work through the stages of grief. This book is about grief itself, the depth and the darkness, and the lost rituals that used to honor a time of grieving.

The author shares her personal story of grief intertwined with her research on many different grieving rituals and traditions from the past. I didn’t feel like she was instructing me on how to get over my grief; her own story of loss told me I was not alone, and her research confirmed the importance of this sacred time.

It’s different and fresh and I loved it. While reading it, I didn’t just feel like I was wallowing in my own complex emotions, but I was learning something about history, community and the human experience.

[Robin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great read from an author who is still fresh from her own grief. Amanda Held Opelt was sister to Rachel Held Evans, a Christian author, blogger, and columnist who passed away suddenly in 2019. Opelt outlines various rituals of grief that have helped sufferers over the centuries and how we have very few left nowadays, leaving us with no structure or "places" we can grieve. As a result, we do not know how to grieve and often stuff the grief down, causing it to come out sideways in other ways. She is a great writer, honest and raw, with a great mix of history and biblical truth. She's helped me to think about which rituals (even new ones) would be meaningful for me as I continue to process my own grief.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this exploration of grief that is as intimate and personal as it is wide-ranging, Amanda Held Opelt weaves history, literature, language, and theology together with threads of her own experiences of loss, still so raw. A Hole in the World assures the reader that they aren't alone, that however they are grieving is part of the process, and offers an array of rituals, perspectives, and tools to those who are grieving and those who want to support them in their grief.

While recognizing that each loss and each person's grief are uniquely theirs, Opelt also leans on the similarities of grief and the solidarity that those who grieve can find in their shared experience of bereavement. She delves into funeral and death traditions for other times and cultures and traces their remnants into our society, finding comfort, strength, and resilience in rituals of the past and the present.

Opelt's voice is clearly her own, and it also leaves faint echoes of her sister's voice, so dearly missed. Beautifully written, tenderly vulnerable, and full of hope, A Hole in the World is an unflinching examination of the both isolating and communal hurricane of grief that affects each of us.

[Kathy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wasn’t sure I wanted to read this book. Amanda is Rachel’s sister and I was afraid it might be the same experience someone who enjoys my sister’s paintings would have if they commissioned a painting from me: a huge disappointment. (Not that it would ever happen. I know my limitations.) Reading Rachel’s books made me weep and laugh and feel as if I had seen the heart of God. Amanda’s writing is equally beautiful and she treats death and grief realistically and poetically while giving interesting historical notes about death rituals and practices. If you have ever lost someone and experienced deep grief, this book will resonate with you.

[Ashleigh Cagno · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wasn’t sure if I would write a review , because it is personal for me. I lost my oldest brother suddenly last year. Amanda lost her sister suddenly as well . There are many books about death and dying out there , and many well written ones . Yet I felt so understood as I read this book , I cried at different points as I read it . I appreciated how she weaved it all together . I also was fascinated by the various rituals she shared and what we could possibly glean from them about mourning . I am very thankful for this book and for Amanda’s willingness to risk sharing her grief with all of us .

[Steve Sargent · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amanda didn’t find her own voice (she always had one) as much as she added her distinctive tone to the sounds of the world. And I am so grateful that she did; we are better off as a result.

The book itself is excellent, the chapters taking on a familiar rhythm and structure, interwoven with her own grievous and joyous story. For those triggered by it, the masculine form “He” for God is thick throughout, so a heads up may be in order for the reader. Overall, the book will remain on my shelf, ready to return to frequently.

[Beth Underwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

"It can be hard to differentiate between your emotions and theirs, to know how to shoulder their burdens while staggering under your own. We all lost the same person. But we lost her in different ways, and we all grieved her differently."

This specific paragraph, along with the whole book, healed a small piece of my heart after recently losing two significant loved ones. This book will be placed on my keep and share shelf.

[Elizabeth Deters · Rating 5 out of 5]

An honest look at grief through traditions from a woman who is no stranger to grief. Some traditions she shared haven’t been celebrated in a long time, and some so familiar like casseroles linger in our communities still today. She also addresses the role the church should play in honoring and preserving these rituals as a way to invite grief in palatable ways for the community.

[Jolanta · Rating 2 out of 5]

I know that each of us experiences grief on a different scale but this felt over dramatic, “catastrophic” and extremely heavy. Even when the author doesn’t talk about the grief itself, there’s absolutely nothing positive or uplifting that comes out of her mouth. It’s plain pain and nothing but pain.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I felt part of the world of Rachel Held Evans and so this book by her sister is really special. I appreciated the mix of history, anthropology, and literature that she connects with her own experiences of grief. She provides ideas for rituals rooted in the past and makes the case for community and the role of churches in the world. It was exactly what I needed at this season.

[Bonnie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A phenomenal, vulnerable exploration of personal and corporate grief. The organization around various rituals was thoughtful, as it showed us various modes of sitting with our grief--and perhaps to offer us a language of expressing that grief together.

[Valarie Englert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Vulnerably shared, and pretty raw, which is where I am now. Male-exclusive pronouns for the Divine are used (with a capital ‘H’, no less), which proved a bit worrisome at times, but the overall grappling with profound and fresh grief is real and honest.