A Call to Divorce, Part 2 (cont'd): Blessed are those who mourn

Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

This beatitude is difficult to translate into everyday life.  It does not come naturally to me.  While the other beatitudes seem to be upholding a virtue then promising a blessing, this one seems to be almost a throw away.  Yes, it seems to say, those who are mourning will be comforted, they will not be left in mourning; those who mourn will one day be those who do not mourn.  If this is the case, then those who do not mourn are doing fine, because they will also continue to not mourn.  So Jesus must have been saying something else here.

I don’t have a great answer about what Jesus was saying, to tell the truth.  I have some ideas about mourning and what it might be good to mourn that we do not mourn, as a rule.  But my focus here is to compare the Christian teaching with the American teaching.  As I considered this, I had a hard time coming up with a contrary teaching.  A few terms came to mind to replace “those who mourn”, but it’s been difficult to find one that seemed to really do the trick.  The best I have come up with is Blessed are the comfortable, for they shall not mourn.

Mourning is so often abhorrent to us.  We do not want to feel pain, and often we do not want to acknowledge pain.  We do not want to be vulnerable enough to be hurt by loss or by injustice.  We want to continue on without difficulty, being unaffected by any of the negative things around us.  Essentially we want a life of detachment, where people are rarely allowed in far enough to deeply touch us, because then we will be safe.

On the other hand, there are those who wallow in pain.  This is also to be contrasted with mourning.  I look back to when Moses or Aaron died.  Israel stayed in that place for a certain amount of time, mourning, then they continued on.  They didn’t stay there forever.  Wallowing in pain, I believe, is similar to the detachment of the previous approach.  We separate ourselves from others and from positive things, comforting ourselves with our pain.  And so we are able to keep others at a distance and prevent ourselves from further hurt.

What is encouraged is not wallowing or separation from pain, but mourning those things truly worth mourning.  Mourning is an appropriate response to loss or lack or injustice or any of those other pain-causing events.  And by treating those things appropriately, we are able to treat other things appropriately as well.    We are able to put our suffering in its proper context within our own lives and with respect to God.  We are able to identify a wrong as a wrong, and we are able to move on.  It is possible that Jesus may even be saying that those who do not mourn will not be comforted.  They may find torment or they may carry the burden of their pain forever.  I am ill-equipped to give a definitive answer on this, so I’m left to speculation.  But I think this is probably correct although far from complete.

How has the church in some ways adopted this American value?  This is also difficult to nail down.  In some ways it has lifted the value completely and simply inserted it into teaching.  It will be phrased in ways that say the Christian must always be joyful, which means that we should not mourn.  Or it will misinterpret passages that point out that we do not mourn as those who are without hope and take that to mean that we do not mourn because we do hope.  These can certainly be damaging, both psychologically and spiritually.  I wonder if some of the difficulty I have faced in my life, where I wondered why I had suffered so greatly and believed that it was a sign that God hated me, was partially related to the fact that I had not mourned.  This is speculation, but I think it might have some validity to it.

An additional problem that arises from a lack of mourning is how we approach our own sin.  We have these same two approaches, of complete detachment and of wallowing.  The one insists that God has forgiven you in the name of Jesus, so you must accept his forgiveness and move on without ever fully acknowledging your sin.  The other gets caught up in sorrow and shame and never accepts forgiveness.  We have a lot of difficulty knowing how to properly mourn our sin.

The concept of penance has been helpful to me here.  Obviously penance, like anything, can be done wrongly.  One could approach penance as a magic bullet that makes God forget about our sin or somehow makes up for what we’ve done, so they become blasé about their sin, knowing that they will do penance later and everything will be okay.  Another could approach it as a way to try to expiate shame, so they will do penance until they no longer feel bad for their sin, trying to buy salvation by how deeply they have abased themselves.  Neither of these is what penance is meant to be. 

Penance is, simply, an act of contrition.  I did something bad, I feel bad about it, I know that God forgives me apart from anything I do simply by his mercy and grace, and I’m doing this thing as a way to show my sorrow for what I’ve done and out of gratitude for what God has done and as a way to somehow restore balance within my soul and remember that my relationship with God is not based on what I have done and it will not end because I sinned.  Penance is complex, and I believe that it is closely connected with this sense of mourning.

I’m tacking this on as a bonus, because it’s closely connected with sin and forgiveness:  As I thought about fearing God the other day, and how difficult it is to understand what fear means in the context of a close and loving relationship.  What occurred to me is that it may simply be a lack of presumption.  We often presume upon God’s forgiveness, so we aren’t very careful about sin and we don’t try very hard to root it out of our lives.  After all, I know that God will forgive me because Jesus promised.  I don’t have anything great to say about this, but I wanted to mention it in case it’s beneficial to anyone.  Presumption upon God’s forgiveness is very much what is being talked about when we are told not to test the Lord.  It is also what we are cautioned against by Micah when he says “walk humbly with your God.”  It is also the heart of the mentality that pervades so much of our lives that asks “how much can I get away with.”

So, let’s not push God, taking his forgiveness for granted.  Let’s not run from mourning in our own lives.  Let’s mourn our sin.  And let’s mourn with those who mourn, rather than leaving them to mourn alone.  Mourning can be a community activity, particularly when the thing being mourned was a public event.

I am confident in saying that I know how to do basically none of this well.  But by the grace of God, may I learn to mourn as he desires and in the end receive his comfort.