Mourning

A Journey of Transformation

I’m a crier. I do it a lot. I’ve given up trying to stop. I just let it come, whenever and however the emotions arise. Instead of fighting it, I get curious. I ask myself why? What might be fueling these emotions? Maybe I can learn something from what my body is telling me. I have discovered that a lot of it for me is a simple, deep sadness, about the hardness of life. Loss, separation, death, betrayal, illness, hard hearts, and the many other hard things just make me sad. Whether the source of the hardness is someone else or me, it doesn’t matter. I still get sad.

My encounters with hardness don’t seem to stop either. They seem to be inevitable. I find myself useless to comfort myself when I think of the hardness that has befallen me and that I have caused (to say nothing of any larger state of the world). The grief I experience seems aggravated by having had a taste of the Kingdom of God. The goodness, mercy, peace, kindness, rest, joy, and ordered composition (the antithesis of chaos) of God’s Kingdom, makes the rest of the world a bedrock of sadness. Being a man of constant sorrow is not a far vision for someone who has tasted the goodness of God’s Kingdom so intimately yet is surrounded by a world so specifically, and seemingly organized, against it.

It’s almost as if Jesus knew this when he was speaking on the hill. After beckoning all the poor in spirit to enter the Kingdom of the Heavens, even in the midst of their poverty – don’t wait until you have something, until you’ve achieved something, it is yours now – Jesus turns to address mourning:

Happy are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

As with Jesus’s addressing of poverty, it is important to note that Jesus is not saying that those who mourn can be happy because they are mourning. Anyone who has mourned knows that the process of mourning is specifically not a happy one. That’s kind of the point of it. Instead Jesus is saying that those who mourn can be happy (or blessed) because in the Kingdom of God, they will be comforted.

Life in the Fertile Crescent was not easy two thousand or so years ago. In an agrarian culture with a strict caste system, military enforced political structures, and religious laws and hierarchies, there was much to be oppressed by – nature, other people, and the authorities, for example. For many, there was likely a stark difference between the hope in their hearts and their reality. This difference can be experienced as loss or separation – the experience of lack or distance between a person, what they know could be, and what is. If we really sit with these ideas…I mean really sit with them…grief is what comes up.

If we accept Jesus’s first proposition and experience the Kingdom of Heaven as ours, even in the midst of our poverty, there are a number of things we will likely mourn. There is a mourning of our old ideas of God. There is a mourning of a particular part of ourselves that is passing away. There is a mourning that arises as we see the world around us differently. Mourning these things may be experienced in varying degrees at different times by different people. I will however, endeavor to articulate these three areas of mourning here.

Our idea of God

Imagine for a moment that somehow God was against you. That in all your striving against nature, the authorities, other people, an industry, even your own shortcomings, there was never a real success. Something that matched your expectations. There was always something more to be done – never restful satisfaction. God, the one people say loves, must to be against you. There is no other likely explanation for your failure. Then comes Jesus, a recognized representative of God (he did miracles after all), saying that even in your inability, you have the Kingdom of God. Here it is, for you. God is, for you. You, can be with God now. If we accept Jesus’s proposition, the idea that God as a gatekeeper, someone who only allows the really good people (people who have already achieved something) into his company, must die. This inches into radical territory, admittedly. There is much that would be good to be discussed, but that is well beyond the scope of the focus of this note. Here, it is enough for us to say that fundamentally Jesus’s propositions are radical. To be clear, I’m not saying that change towards the good isn’t a part of all this. What we are talking about is spiritual transformation, after all. What I am saying is that God lets us in before we are “really good people”– or at least good enough to get in on our own merits. In entering into God’s company, we are invited to begin the process of fundamental transformation together – with God. With all this, the idea of God as anything other than someone deeply desiring communion with us, and willing to do extravagant things to make that available, must die.

Ideas about God die hard. We have lived our lives based on them. We have invested our time, effort, thinking, and expectations around what we believed about God (or stated another way, the way we thought reality is supposed to work). When the ideas die, it hurts. We may feel like someone had lied to us…even someone we trusted. We may feel unloved – thinking, “Why didn’t someone tell me sooner?” So much time may feel lost. The realization that God is even better than what we thought will do much to cover these feelings. But the experience of mourning will be inevitable. The lost time, the lost opportunities, the lost love, even the loss of the bad ideas require mourning.

Our idea of ourselves

We may experience the grief of losing our former self. The old ideas of how smart we were, how sure we were, how good we were – that we had to achieve something before being accepted – must all die. The old mind that wanted to be accepted only on account of achieving something first, must go. The old self that wanted the gift of love as validation for having been good or for having been hurt – it goes, too. The old spirit that wanted to fight for itself and win the gift of God’s favor – gone. These all die.

Our mind begins to shift to see ourselves as God sees us. We are exceptionally limited beings born of love and for love, striving often in our own strength, unable to find comfort for the hurt, grief, and mourning we experience. We are children in God’s eyes. The idea that we are anything but children is something that will leave us as we enter God’s Kingdom. When almost every other corner of life is contextualized by advances in individual achievement, growth, and maturity, this may be a hard thing to come to grips with. Coming to grips may be a wrong analogy. It’s more like being free from the grips of the world’s contextual frame. But those grips used to hold us close, give us structure, even some sense of comfort. When they leave us there is a connection that is severed. The part of us that was deeply connected to those grip dies, and may require mourning.

Our ideas of the world around us

There may have been a time that we looked at the world around us and saw some sort of organized goodness. There may have been a time where such organized goodness was only available in our imaginations. Wherever we found it, this image of organized goodness, we adjusted to it or worked towards becoming a part of it. In our effort to achieve the good life, we did what we thought we had to. But what if we had the wrong idea of what the good life really was? Having a taste of the Kingdom of God will shift our vision of the world around us (no matter how good or how bad of a vision of the world we have). Our cynicism may die as we begin to see God at work around us. Our optimism may be challenged as we see the degree to which the world seems so clearly organized against God. Just as we will begin to see ourselves through God’s eyes, our vision of the world around us will also shift towards having more of God’s perspective. Our old assumptions of how we saw things and habitually responded will necessarily change. Our ideas will die, and may require mourning.

Comfort

When folks mourn, in the deepest sense of the word, there are many who don’t know what to do to provide comfort. I often don’t. The need is obvious, but the solution, much less so. I’ve been on both sides of this coin and it seems like whatever someone tries (or whatever I’ve tried) to do might do some good. But it is always something less than true comfort. It is more like temporary relief. Maybe that’s all that can be done between one person and another. After all, how can I really comfort someone who’s pain comes from the loss of something or someone that will never return? Even if we don’t desire the return of whatever has left, the experience of loss may be severe. The resolution must be internal. The activity and shift, initially invisible. This is exactly what Jesus proposes. As if knowing that the mourning will come, Jesus says that the mourners will be comforted. Jesus, here, doesn’t mince words. It’s not temporary relief that he promises. It is actual comfort. Notably, it is not a lack of any experiences of mourning. Jesus is not a romantic here when it comes to the experience those following him in the world will have. He addresses that more fully later and we’ll get to that soon enough. We’re only on the second note after all. Nevertheless, Jesus promises comfort to mourners in the Kingdom of God.

With such a promise, many questions might come to mind. What is this comfort? What does it look like? How does it happen? It will be different for everyone. Just as everyone’s experience of mourning is different, the kind of comfort they require is different. God knows this. To help our imaginations I will share a little from my own experience…

I’m laying on my bed, it’s the middle of the day. I can feel the feelings begin to rise. I’ve been dealing with the aftermath of severe burnout for a few weeks now. My body is settling down a bit (it had taken to shaking), but the waves of emotion still come, sometimes unexpectedly. In this moment, on this day, I feel an alternative voice. As my mind is beginning to be overwhelmed by voices of condemnation – you should have known better, nobody knows you, if they don’t know you how could they love you, it is your fault you have lost everything, you will never succeed, for example – I hear an alternative voice. This voice in this moment comes by way of thoughts that land softly in the melee of my mind. They include thoughts like, “You are loved,” “You are safe,” “Do not fear, you will be fine,” among others. Over weeks and months, through intense work and making significant choices, the voice of condemnation receded, and the voice of love took a prominent place in my life. Comfort came even as I mourned my failures.

In my experience, the experience comfort has been complete, and so too has been the mourning. It is almost overwhelming, like something I didn’t believe could happen. Only from God. The completeness of the comfort seems to have been related to the completeness of the mourning. My experience of mourning has been intense – the things I’ve had to let go of (even the things I wanted to let go of) I was deeply attached to. Yet the comfort has matched the mourning every time. I have cried a lot, really wept, and the comfort that follows (even the comfort in the midst) always overwhelms the immensity of the pain. I have never left a time of mourning worse than when I entered. I’ve almost become desiring of the comfort, so doing what I can to enter into the necessary mourning willingly.

It takes the time it needs. We can’t rush this. However, regardless of what has been going on in my life, I have received the time required for this experience of mourning and comfort when I have directed my attention towards it with God. Appointments and dates are canceled, to provide needed time alone. Appointments and dates are made, to provide needed time with trusted people. God has willingly taken control of my calendar.

Qualitatively, whether with a trusted friend, family, or alone, I have never felt isolated or lonely in my experience of mourning. It has not been easy. I am not strong enough, smart enough, or spiritual enough to do any of this on my own. My experience is that God is faithful to what he promises. Are you mourning? Want comfort? God has a standing invitation for us to come and get it. My experience happened first inwardly, actually watching videos and reading books. Then people who I didn’t know I needed to come around to help me carry my burden showed up. They didn’t always come around in the way I might have expected, and never in a way that they could ever become a crutch to my primary reliance on God. Nevertheless, there they were, doing what God would want done, manifesting the Kingdom of Heaven.

For anyone who has ever mourned and not received comfort this may all sound like a fairytale. It really is like something from another world. That is the whole deal. The Kingdom of God is a different kind of world. The personality that guides it is different than that of the world we may currently be immersed in. Entering into it is a process. But what a difference it is to follow someone who recognizes and honors the mourning that is part of the process of transformation and be promised comfort in it.