Those who mourn – 22 February 2013

Second in the ranks of the blessed, says Jesus, are those who mourn.  The first are the poor in spirit.  To mourn is to express a loss which is irrecoverable.  It may also be a loss which was unthinkable, unbearable, or unexpected.  I think that is what it is important to see -- that mourning is about the loss, as we know, even when the loss was perhaps merciful, expected, even hoped for.  Mourning is not the same as feeling sorry for myself, or feeling unjustly dealt with and complaining about life.  I may be doing all those things – but mourning is about the loss, the empty chair, the loss of the time in which things might have been said that should have been said, or been different.  True mourning is bearing the load and pain of the irremedial loss.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;

For nothing now can ever come to any good.

The secular culture has many alternative strategies for managing loss and grief.  One approach is to see grief as a “process”, at the end of which presumably is something called “closure”, after which you may be more your old self again.  Funerals are now getting turned into “celebrations”, or even are not held at all lest someone get too upset.  Other well-worn paths include alcohol and other drugs, and resort to medications and therapies which may or may not be needed.  The chemical solution.  Pain is seen as the enemy when it’s not. 

A useful exercise in the real nature of mourning, grief and loss, is to read Anne Perry’s little series of novels on the First World War.  Horrifying loss and all its attendant meaningless pain swept over Britain and Europe and far beyond.  A generation of young men was as good as wiped out.  It was a reversion to the barbarism that Jesus knew, the violence and injustice, the collapse of civil rights, the pain and blood, disease and torture, for which we scarcely have words, the ruthless power of the tyrant, the indiscriminate slaughter of which high explosive is capable.  Mourning and loss were old friends, and much of the loss was not so much about death as about the loss entailed in permanent wounding of body and mind, and in the demolition of ideals and faith itself.

And yet Jesus says, Blessed are those who mourn.  Is that not extraordinary...?  It is as though, in that emptiness, even (as some will report) the absence of God, even there appears a light.  The darkness is not dark to you... And it is seen eventually by those with the courage to mourn.