Beatitudes: Blessed Are those Who Mourn

Blessed are you who are poor,
    because God’s kingdom is yours.
Luke 6:20

Hear, O Lord, and have mercy on me;
Lord, be my helper!
You have turned for me my mourning into dancing;
You have put off my sackcloth and clothed me with gladness.
Psalm 30:10-11

Like the first beatitude (see prior post for May), this one surprises.  What is “happy,” “blessed,” or “fortunate” about mourning?  Of course we all experience grief or loss sooner or later, and sometimes with agonizing intensity.  But we don’t normally choose them or want to endure such suffering.  There must be something more going on here; some deeper truth.  Let’s explore this together

Mourning

What does it mean to mourn?  The Greek word used in the text of the beatitude is “pentheo,” which refers to deep and intense grief.  We know this grief, and the longer we live the more we become acquainted with it.  The death of someone we love – a parent, spouse, and especially a child of ours who dies young – sparks such intense grief.  To mourn, then, is to enter, usually involuntarily, into the painful feelings of loss.  We may feel we have been severed, lost part of our very being, had the spark of our life crushed.  We ache, become disoriented, lose our verve. 

We may mourn our own death, especially when its reality comes upon us with a dire diagnosis.  Our mourning then goes through several stages, as outlined in the work of Elizabeth Kübler-Ross: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance.  These same steps can be found in the grief we experience in any significant loss, not just our own pending death.

We can also mourn our own actions when we fail to live up to our own or others’ expectations.  This we experience as regret, guilt, disappointment in ourselves, self-blame.  We come to feel divided within ourselves, experiencing the gap between what we have done (or failed to do) and what we wish we had done.  We mourn our failings.  In this case it is often our ego that is doing the mourning!  The ego likes to take control as “captain” and usurp the deeper core of our being.  When events challenge or displace such a controlling ego, we experience loss, disorientation, vulnerability, confusion.  We mourn the stability our life seemed to have when the ego was firmly in control.

This beatitude honestly and forthrightly acknowledges that loss and mourning are a normal part of life.  It comes to us all, in varying degrees.  We are vulnerable.  Suffering, disappointment, loss, guilt, betrayal, injustice – these and other experiences, unwelcome as they may be, are a part of what it is to be human and alive.  We cannot avoid it.  We mourn; it is a simple reality.

Comfort

What, then, is the promised comfort in our mourning?  This beatitude promises the blessing of comfort for us when  we mourn.  What kind of comfort is this?  How have we experienced comfort in the midst of or as we come through mourning, if indeed we have been comforted? 

For many, intense suffering can be an experience of questioning the benevolence or even the existence of God.  If God is all knowing, and all powerful, and all loving, why am I suffereing so much?  If there were a satisfactory theo-logical or intellectual answer to this question, I’ve never run across it.  But I do believe there is an experiential response to the question and this beatitude points to it.

Rather than the mystery we call God being aloof, distant, and above and beyond creation, my own sense and experience is that the divine mystery is fully present with us in all our experiences, including our suffering and sorrows as well as in our joys.  Mourning does not separate us from God; instead God can be sensed even more acutely in the midst of suffering.

One of the stories to emerge out of the haulocaust in WWII is of a prisioner in one of the concentration camps who asked another “Where is God in this?” as he pointed to another prisioner hanging from the gallows.  To this his companion replied, “He is there, hanging at the end of the rope.”  While this may not satisfy everyone as a response to the question, it does affirm that God knows suffering at least as deeply and painfully as any one of us.  And is willing to participate in it with us, to be there in the midst so we are not alone.

And “not alone” is a movement that we can experience out of our own suffereing.  When we mourn and experience its depths, and simultaneously come close to God’s presence (whether felt internally or through the presence of others with us) we are moved to a deeper solidarity with others who suffer likewise.  Suffering is then not an idea or a concept, but a lived experience that leads us to help another bear the burden of sorrow when it comes upon them.  There is a generosity of spirit toward others that is cultivated within us through our own mourning.  This movement has been eloquently expressed in Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem Kindness.  She writes:

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
You must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it til your voice
Catches the thread of all sorrows
And you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore….

Strangely, it is common at some point in the journey through mourning to arrive at a place of peace.  Kübler-Ross’s final stage of acceptance is a place of peace.  Not the usual peace we think of experiencing on a pleasant walk in the woods on a balmy day, but a deep peace that exists along side of and is not diminished by the experience of sorrow.  This is often described as “sweet sorrow” or a “bitter-sweet” place. 

This experience is captured in words of Psalm 30 (vs 11): “You have turned my mourning into dancing, you have taken my sackcloth from me and chothed me with joy.”  Paradoxical, perhaps, but something many of us have experienced coming through the depths of deep sorrow.

Another form of comfort that can emerge from our suffering is a realistic recognition of our vulnerability together with a healthy acceptance of it.  When we are young we may approach life with a sense of possibility, strength, even invincibility.  And this can serve us well for a while.  But in time experience teaches us our limits, and we are wise to learn to recognize and live within them with eyes wide open.  There is a deep freedom that comes from this.  Fear, while it is not eliminated, is cut down to size and ceases to rule our lives.  We recognize risk and choose to take it freely at times when that is called for. 

And accompanying this freedom, like a twin, is hope.  For the two go together.  When we engage with our mourning fully, with eyes open, and with the accompaniment of others, including especially God, we can see beyond the suffering to the new levels of possibility that lie beyond – even if this “new” is with diminished physical capacity or without the presence of someone we love.

My clearest personal experience of this was through the death of my father.  At his memorial service all our family and many of his life-long friends were gathered at his church.  I had agreed to say some words of remembrance on behalf of the family, yet was caught up in the deep emotion of the moment so found it hard to speak without the emotions rising to the surface and causing me to pause before continuing.  Yet somehow I found the presence to say what I had to share.  And, most significantly, I felt in and through this experience the sense of this being a “thin place” – or in this case a “thin time” – in which the veil between earth and heaven is so transparent as to make them both visible, present, and intermingled simultaneously.  Sweet sorrow.  Peace in the midst of mourning.  Not being alone.

The Practice of Mourning

How, then, do we practice mourning when it comes upon us as a felt grief, experienced sorrow, unwelcome pain that arrives without our wanting or consent?  The practice is a question of how we respond when mourning comes upon us.

Drawing on my limited experience, and more fully on the wisdom of writers and mentors, I have come to understand a few things.  First, we must consciously acknowledge our loss, grief, sorrow, pain, and neither deny or hide from it.  We must experience it as it is, neither more nor less.  Second, the experience of loss is the necessary pathway to letting go, to releasing our grip on and identification with what has been lost.  This is the case even if the loss is huge, including the loss of a loved one, the loss of the means of living, or the loss of work in which we invested our identity. 

This practice is hard work that we resist, usually fiercely. The loss forces us to search for and seek that which is deeper, even more foundational — the rock on which we ultimately stand.  For me this is my identification as a creature formed by and loved by God.  Nothing else is needed, though much else can be an experience or expression of this foundational rock.  You and others may express this in different words, yet I imagine it would be getting at the same truth.

One of the main aspects of our personhood that needs to be let go of is the ego-in-charge.  If the ego is the captain of our ship, then we are on shaky ground.  Its proper role is as the executive officer (and we do need an ego for this function), that uses our skills, knowledge, and competencies to carry out intentions formed by the deeper self that is grounded in God.  Thus, through mourning, we die to the ego-self to find our Real Self.  And the search for and discovery of that is the journey of life.

So what is emerging for me through this reflection is that mourning, much as we may like to avoid it, does bless us in significant and necessary ways.  When loss strips of us supports that served us seemingly well, we are thrown into the search for what is actually deeper, stronger, and more steadfast; the rock of our existence.

Before we get there, however, we have to pass through the dark woods of mourning.  We are tossed into mystery, we might say.  Though lost, we press on out of a set of necessities that we cannot fully know.  The way out is unclear.  We cannot get to comfort without going through the heart of the mourning.  And even then the comfort is of a different sort than we wanted when we started into the journey of loss.  But it is a deeper and stronger comfort when it comes. And when it does come, it is a gift, one that may come slowly (as in the stages of grief), but ultimately leaves us stronger even as we bear its scars.

That this comes as a gift is the grace that this beatitude points to.  Mourning is turned to dancing, as the Psalmist says (though it is a different dance than we enjoyed previously).  Our sackcloth is put off, and joy comes with the morning. 

In sum, this whole process of mourning is the seedbed for significant transformation.  We become better grounded in the Real, we experience the grace and respond to it.  And we become more attunded to others who are living through their own mourning.  At least for me, when I have lived through an experience of loss I am more understanding of and in empathy with others experiencing the same loss, and can therefore be a more effective presence for them.  The whole experience connects us more fully with ourselves, with others, and with God.  That, surely, is the comfort and blessing of mourning.

Pause and Reflect

·      What aspects of this beatitude do you object to or wrestle with?

·      Is there some actual advantage you see in mourning – material or spiritual?

·      If you were to rewrite this beatitude in your own words as you understand the depth of its meaning, how would you write it?

·      What invitation to you personally do you sense as you reflect on this beatitude?

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