In Matthew’s gospel Jesus tells his disciples, ‘blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted’. Like most of these Beatitudes, we find ourselves confronted with paradox, for grief can feel more like a curse than a blessing, a time of desolation rather than comfort.
Pondering these words of Jesus in recent weeks, I’ve found myself drawn to understand this word ‘mourning’ more deeply. It’s a word which has largely fallen out of everyday usage, but to our ancestors ‘mourning’ held a particular meaning. Mourning was not so much the private pain of grief we might imagine today, but rather the sharing of deep sorrow in response to the loss of something cherished, or the wounding of someone beloved. Mourning involved the acknowledgement and honouring of loss.
To be human is to know loss in its many forms. I imagine every one of us here today can connect to personal loss – the loss of a loved one perhaps; or a home which was dear to us; a stage of life which has now passed; a relationship which could not last. At the same time, much of the grief we carry silently in our hearts these days is not personal. The world we knew in childhood is burning and melting before our eyes. I have no doubt that we feel this loss, privately, but I also sense that we are no longer sure how to acknowledge and honour the grief we feel in relation to the brokenness of the world. We lack the rites and rituals that would allow us to mourn these collective losses together. And in not mourning them together, we are denied the possibility of finding comfort in each other.
We live at a time which glorifies individual wellbeing and emotional growth. We can feel under enormous pressure to be seen to be feeling good and rising above our problems. This forces the vulnerability of sorrow into a private realm, sometimes coated with a mantle of shame. Men and women in my psychotherapy practice, routinely apologize for their tears, or for feeling sad.
The truth is that many of us carry decades of un-mourned loss, losses which were not acknowledged at the time, not validated or held within a wider containment of family, community or faith. Losses that were not honoured or comforted. And we also carry a sense of grief in relation to present losses that are all around us: the loss of community and in-person contact in an age increasingly dominated by digital media; the loss of moderation in our seasonal changes in a time of climate collapse; the extinction of species; the dismantling of truth as a shared currency, in the wake of disinformation. It can feel overwhelming. The temptation is to turn a blind eye to the unsettling feelings of grief, to double down into distraction. Of course, for when we confront the troubles of the world on our own, we cannot bear it. We need the comfort of each other. And this word ‘comfort’ simply means ‘to be strong together’ (com-fort). We have only to think of Jesus’ words from the cross to his mother and to his beloved disciple John: ‘Woman, behold your son’, He said to Mary, and to John ‘Behold your mother’. He knew that they would need the comfort of each other to bear the grief of His crucifixion and death.
The risk we take in not mourning our losses together is that over time our hearts have to close, to block out the pain. We become more cautious about opening to love again. Confronted with the experience of loss, dare we love each other wholeheartedly again, dare we care passionately about trees and wildlife lost to wildfires, and whole communities devastated by floods? In telling us that those who mourn are ‘blessed’, I wonder if Jesus is telling us that mourning our losses is one of the ways we remain open to loving each other and the world. Mourning, as the honouring and sharing of grief, is perhaps an act of protest that declares our refusal to live numb and disconnected lives. Grief, after all, is the measure of our capacity to love. It is through mourning that our hearts are opened to the reality and the enormity of our love for each other and for the world in all its fragile beauty.
Seeing this connection between these two deeply human capacities – our capacity to love and our capacity to mourn – I realise of course, that Jesus demonstrates both to us. At the tomb of his friend Lazarus, John tells us that ‘Jesus wept’ (John 11:35). Even though he knew He would raise Lazarus from the dead, He shared directly in the raw human grief of the moment. And here we begin to see that compassion for the suffering of others is related to our capacity to feel sorrow. We remember Christ’s commandment ‘love one another as I have loved you‘ (John 13:34). And His love is warm and tender, and willing to be vulnerable. Jesus models the capacity to mourn, not only for his own suffering, but for the troubles of the world. On the night before His crucifixion in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus tells his disciples, ‘My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death’ (Matthew 26:38). The cross was an act of total solidarity with the pain of the world, a gesture of infinite compassion and com–fort.
Far from being a source of private shame, Jesus’ sorrowing is revealed as an act of courage. It takes courage to mourn – courage and comfort. Perhaps this invitation to mourn the larger pain of the world together is what Jesus is pointing to when he says ‘blessed are those who mourn’. It’s not that being sad about the state of the world earns his blessing, but that by keeping our hearts open to love and to loss, we become aware of the blessing of God’s compassion and comfort which is ever-present in our midst. From beginning to end Jesus’ life is a testament to the nearness and availability of God. In Matthew’s account of the nativity, we learn that the promised messiah is to be called Emmanuel, meaning ‘God-with-us’.
If God is somehow participating in human suffering, instead of passively observing it at a distance, then our relationship to love and to loss is transformed. And ‘transformation’ is what lies at the very heart of Jesus’ ministry. In Matthew Chapter 4, we learn that following His forty days in the desert Jesus began to preach, saying ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand’. This ‘repentance’ (what the Greeks called metanoia), points to a fundamental reorientation of the heart and mind towards an all-encompassing, all-penetrating God-centred world, what Matthew calls the ‘kingdom of heaven’. This kingdom of heaven, Jesus tells us, is ‘at hand’, meaning it is within reach, within us and around us. It’s just that we, clouded by our fears, preoccupations and priorities, fail to see what is right in front of our noses. Repentance is a matter of seeing through appearances to the realm of God’s love and compassion, which is the true substance and light of the world.
If we are to be transformed, we first have to turn away from conventional ways of seeing (this ‘turning around’ is what Jesus means by ‘repent’). In the society of Jesus’ day, blessedness had come to be regarded as a reward for adherence to religious laws and customs, expressed through outward signs of piety. Health, wealth and prosperity were regarded as signs of God’s blessing. We may recognise some uncomfortable parallels with our own age which celebrates fame, success and winning above all else.
Jesus professed a radical inversion of this narrow perspective, placing the interior condition of people’s hearts (which God alone can truly see) as the doorway to the kingdom of heaven. To be touched by the grace of God is not the privilege of successful or pious people, Jesus tells his disciples. Anyone can experience blessing. At any time. Anyone can enter into relationship with God. The doorway to experience the God-centred world, to enter the ‘kingdom of heaven’ which is ‘at hand’, Jesus tells us, is an open heart.
And mourning is one of the ways that our hearts break open.
At times, grief reduces us to our most naked self. We can feel estranged from the values and preoccupations of the world. We realise, often with painful clarity, what and who truly matters. If our hearts are to be a dwelling place for God, they need to be hollowed out of everything that does not really matter. Mourning involves a kind of defoliation in which we shed the canopy of personal identities and priorities we once thought essential. What remains is the bare soul. As a therapist, I have often sensed that there is a kind of transparency in those who mourn, a sheerness to their being which renders them more present and vivid. In mourning, it sems that it is not only our vulnerability which becomes more visible to others; it is our light. The light of what is most enduring and true in our lives – which must be love.
Reading Matthew’s Gospel account of the Beatitudes, and reflecting on my own experiences of loss, I begin to understand why Jesus might tell his disciples that those who mourn are blessed. I remember that grief is the measure of our capacity to love. How different our loving might be, if we were to heed Jesus’ words and honour those who mourn, comfort one another in our grief (both personal and collective), knowing that in the nakedness of loss, our hearts become more transparent to the presence of a God who is ‘with us’, now and always.
