Blessed are those who mourn...

Dr. Rajesh Bhola

India

Jul 25, 2014

We mourn over those we lose, and over what we lose. Mourning is spontaneous, and inevitable. It comes from our being ‘possessive’ – of both people and material things; we feel deprived when we lose them, and mourn their loss. But, as Jesus intriguingly said, ‘Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted’. The blessing does not lie in the experience of mourning, but in the consequence that arises from it. The blessing that comes with mourning is the blessing of being comforted. Comfort is either something we give to others or receive from someone else; it is not something we do for ourselves. One of my friends lost his son. He was so overcome with sorrow that he lost his appetite and did not want to leave the house. Concerned for him, three of his colleagues paid him a visit. The grieving friend confessed that he was struggling with doubt. "I am no longer able to pray to God," he admitted. "In fact, I am not certain I believe in God any more." After a moment of silence, one of his colleagues said, "Then we will believe for you. We will pray for you." The three men met daily for prayer, asking God to restore the gift of faith to their friend. Some months later, as the three friends gathered for prayer at his house, their friend smiled and said, "It is no longer necessary for you to pray for me. Today I would like you to pray with me." Mourning should teach one to have a deeper sympathy and compassion for others - to share the sorrow of others.

However, today, the whole effort of human life, the pleasure madness, the drive for amusement, entertainment and thrills, the mania that seeks the next high, the money, energy, and enthusiasm expanded in living it up - all these are an expression of man’s aim to avoid sorrow…and mourning. People want to escape the pains and sorrows of life. They long to get away, to look away and to run away - to find a place where sorrow does not exist, and where there is no pain. We should condemn this shallow, superficial laughter of life, this frivolous happiness of the world. ‘Blessed are those who mourn rather than those who rejoice, because there can be no true rejoicing until we have stopped running away from mourning’. Blessed are the people who feel keenly their inadequacies, guilt, failures, helplessness, unworthiness and their emptiness, and who do not try to hide these things under a cloak of self-sufficiency; rather, they are honest about them and grieve and mourn. Their tears - whether of loneliness, discouragement, love, loss, anxiety, concern, care, worship or devotion - are a gift from Him to release the sorrow of their hearts.

Famous writer C.S Lewis wrote, ‘God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain’. He added that one of the most disquieting dimensions of grief is God's silence. ‘When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to him with gratitude and praise, you will be - or so it feels - welcomed with open arms. But go to him when your need is desperate, when all other help is in vain, what do you find - a door slammed in your face and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside…and after that silence’. The book’s ending, describing the final moments spent by Lewis with his wife, was like a symphony that was not quite finished…ended with an unresolved chord. ‘How wicked it would be, if we could, to call the dead back! She said not to me but to the church priest, “I am at peace with God.” She smiled, but not at me’. His last line is a quote from Dante: ‘She turned once more to the eternal Fount’. This points to a final remedy for grief, where God will ‘wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away’. Though we may sometimes doubt it, the promise of that day is certain. For now our pilgrimage to that city of happiness is a trail of tears - it winds its way through the valley of shadow.

I have come across people who have, by virtue of their wisdom and understanding or through their experiences, learnt to ‘voluntarily’ mourn. By remaining in a state of detachment, they do not feel deprived, and so do not feel a sense of ‘loss’, or shock. The loss has, in a way, already occurred somewhere deep inside them. Those who mourn voluntarily know that all their belongings and their relatives will not stay with them forever. Deep inside they know that all these possessions are in a way dead. These mourners left ‘everything’ much before ‘those things’ left them. We have two clear choices – one, of detaching ourselves from possessions; the second, of being stripped of our possessions. All mortal possessions should be cautiously used, remembering that these are only an illusion and will be snatched away involuntarily - causing sorrow and mourning for which we may not be prepared. To avoid this turmoil, let us prepare, deep in our hearts, to learn to detach ourselves from our ‘possessions’.

I walked a mile with pleasure

She chatted all the way but left me no wiser

I walked a mile with sorrow

No word said she

But oh the things I learnt from her I cannot forget’.

From the Old Testament: ’It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting; for that is the end of all men, and the living will lain it to his heart. Sorrow is better than laughter, for by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made better. The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth’.