DEALING WITH HOLES IN OUR LIVES


Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
(Matthew 5: 4 - NAS)

So, now we have an idea of what it means to be “blessed,” and it is something that we can see working with those who are “poor in spirit.” When you know you need God, sure, we can see how that can be addressed by the Lord.

But Jesus then immediately follows that “just spiritual” condition with something everybody meets in their “ordinary” life. We may not have cause to mourn every day, but nobody gets by without some sort of loss that they mourn.

What does it mean to “mourn”? The dictionary says it means to feel and show or express grief.

To show or express grief? Oh, wait a minute here.

Our modern culture has taken a very problematic attitude toward grief. We’re not really very comfortable with the grief of others. It disturbs us.

Yet, on the one hand we make a great show of certain moments of grief. A celebrity, especially an entertainer, dies and there is suddenly an huge outpouring of public displays of grief, where fans give show to huge emotional displays of loss. I’m not trying to say that their grief is fake. The loss of a talent that has inspired many, given pleasure to many, is indeed a sad thing worth grieving over. Artists enrich our lives and we are diminished when we lose such individuals.

But our idolization of entertainment providers becomes a form of worship. It doesn’t seem to occur to people that they are raising up a god that comes before God. I have heard commentatory speak of wailing fans as being “inconsolable” – meaning they could not be comforted. Doesn’t that run contrary to what Jesus is saying?

But there’s another side of our expressions of grief. There’s a tendency for us to pressure those who have suffered a personal loss to either get over it quickly or to make a bigger, more public display of their grief. There seems to be an expectation of public display when the loss is unexpected, tragic, and caused by human agency. We put up “shrines” (and they are indeed called such) at the spot where a person was killed by some reckless driver, or where some other unjust end occurred. We institutionalize the memory of the lost one, and focus all thoughts on the fact that the dead person is lost. On the other hand, we also urge people to “get over” their grieving when the loss comes about in less dramatic ways. When the loss is some physical ailment, without heroic resistance to the ravages of some “famous disease,” many people urge the grieving to move on, get back into the flow of life.

As a culture, we are terribly inconsistent about dealing with grievers.

Loss hits us hard in the core of our being. We grieve over losses, because it changes our lives drastically. We want to express the distress of deep changes, because that expression lets the emotion flow through our being and “get out.” We used to have a broad cultural customs that dealt with the process of grieving. A year of mourning, wearing black in various ways in order to communicate to those around us that we had major loss. But we don’t do that any more. Or not much. We don’t give people very much temporal space in which to deal with their losses. Instead of formally grieving for the loss of a loved parent for a year, we zip across country to attend the funeral, maybe having a week for the “public display” of loss, and then we expect the griever to return to the usual pattern of life, and get on with things as if the loss were no different than a minor holiday weekend absence.

Perhaps the answer to this lies in the other part of what Jesus says. “They will be comforted.” What does that mean?

We do know what it means to be comfortable. That means our physical being is not being stressed. It’s possible to be comfortable in action, if we are moving in such a way that does not stress our bones and muscles. But we usually think of it as being at rest. We extend that sense of balance to our emotional lives when we mean that we are being emotionally comforted – we are brought to a place where our emotional distresses have been at the very least balanced by reassurances on the positive end of our emotional spectrum.

Mourning is a way of letting the negative baggage of loss get out of our system. Yes, it can affect the people around us, making them discomforted because they don’t know how to deal with it. And that is part of why they try to limit mourning. They feel as if they are expected to provide the comfort and they don’t know how to do that, so they want to eliminate their awareness of loss and mourning around them. Those who do try to comfort, sometimes do it badly (though not intending it that way), urging replacements on the griever long before that person is even ready to look beyond the loss.

Mourning is a way of valuing the people, places and things in our lives. When we lose them, by whatever means, we have cause to mourn. Something that was significant to us is now gone from us, for whatever reason. In order to cope with that, we do need to spend some time thinking about the value of the Lost One to us. We do need to sound out the shape that person had in our lives. But the time for mourning should be about knowing and acknowledging that loss, not taking residence inside it.

This is the difficulty about mourning, and where that word “inconsolable” comes into play. Each loss makes a hole in our lives. Some people fall into that hole, pouring the entirety of their lives into the much smaller space of their loss. “He was everything to me!” I don’t wish to belittle the importance of anyone’s grief, but that’s not true. There is only one thing, only one person that is bigger than the shape of our whole lives, and that is God Himself.

We need to address the hole that loss makes, the way we would deal with any wound. It has to be cleaned, dressed with healing ointment, and bandaged. A bandage does not hide the wound, but instead shelters the wound while it heals. There may be scars left by the healing process, so that we always have a marker of what that event was. But a scar is healthy. The wound is no longer bleeding. The wound no longer has exposed nerve endings sensitive to even the slightest brush. Mourning and the period of mourning is the time of emotional healing, and a cultural mourning period used to allow for the bandage protection and ointment that we need.

But when people start making their loss more important than their own life, they are keeping the wound open and bleeding. They are weakening themselves by letting it keep bleeding. They are feeding infection. When they do that, they make it impossible for healing and comfort to get to them.

We actually have a choice in this. Accepting the possibility of being comforted does not mean that you are diminishing the importance of what is lost, it does not mean you are disrespecting that person or place or thing. To mourn means that you are allowing yourself to express a loss, to define the shape the loss had in your life, to clean the empty space, anoint it with healing balm, cover it over to protect that place – and then move onward. The wound may heal with no visible scar, or it may leave a mark. But either way, comfort has been brought to us.

No loss is bigger than the whole of our life. If we still breathe, and do not crawl into the hole of our loss, comfort will come to us in the process of mourning and healing. We should not let others rush us through it, but we should not make the empty space our temple.

It’s easy to focus on the loss that comes from death, since such losses are our most primal ones. But we lose other things in our lives which also need to be mourned. We need to allow ourselves that process as well. Any change can be perceived as loss, and we need to accept it. Accept the comfort that comes from acknowledging and grieving those changes.

Those who mourn will be comforted.