Blessed Are the Ones Who Grieve

How old were you when you learned the language of grief? I was in high school when my my friend’s nephew died. He was 10. Then my best friend died right after my junior year had started. I learned pretty quickly that no one seems to know how to speak grief unless they too have mourned. In trying to make you feel better, people say a bunch of stuff like “at least it wasn’t ...” or “at least they're in a better place” or “I know how you feel” or the cringing “I guess God needed them more than you, it was their time.”

No one teaches you how to speak grief. It is a group you never hope to have membership in, and yet somehow, mourning seems to be something that we can’t get around in this life. As Kate Bowler says, “there is no cure for being human.” There is no cure, no escape hatch, no bypass, no easy way around grief.

And yet Jesus says “Blessed are those who mourn.” Now if we just stop there, if we only read the first half of the Beatitude, it can make us go “wait, what? What do you mean blessed are those who mourn? My grief isn’t a blessing. I didn’t ask for this. I would do anything to give it back.

How are we to understand this blessing? How does mourning signify a way of being in Christ that leads to happiness?

While some of you like myself always interpreted this Beatitude to signify some form of grief, it actually has a long history (almost 1,400 years in fact) of being understood exclusively as penitence or a fancy term for mourning over one’s sins. In other words, for hundreds of years, blessed are those who mourn meant blessed are those who mourn for their own sin or the sins of others. It wasn’t about any other kind of mourning. There is likely more than one reason for this, but one of note is that the Psalms of lament (aka Psalms that include crying out to God particularly in grief) that had been used in worship had declined and now prayers of confession were being used. We see this even now. In essence, what had given language to grief in prayer changed over time.

With the Reformation, Martin Luther and Calvin began to feel differently about this interpretation and slowly others began to consider that maybe “blessed are the mourning” may include other types of grief as well. Now this grief that is mentioned here is not a momentary grief. It is deep grief. So what all might it include. As Rebekah Eklund asks, “what kind of tears are included in this blessing? or what kinds of profound suffering might be included?” She gives several options that have been considered over the years: things like divisions within the church, systemic injustice, weeping with one another over loss, and sorrow and yearning for the return of Christ and all to be made well.

No matter how you might understand the scope of mourning here, the second part of the blessing remains the same: for they will be comforted. Luke’s version says “for they will laugh.” As Psalm 30:11 says “You have turned my mourning into joyful dancing. You have taken away my clothes of mourning and clothed me with joy.”

The word for comfort here is where we get one of our name for the Holy Spirit, the Comforter or the Paraclete. But how might the Holy Spirit bring us comfort in our grief? Is it possible to have comfort and grief alongside one another? What if the language of grief is meant to be shared with others, with those who companion us in our mourning. What might it look like for someone to come alongside you in your grief and to bless you even in that space?

A few weeks ago I began taking a course with David Kessler and he shared how one time when he was at a conference he looked over and saw a gentleman crying. David said he just went over and asked “may I sit with you.” He simply sat next to the man. Hundreds of us across the world are trying to learn skills to be a grief educator and we are all worried about saying the wrong thing or a stupid thing but sometimes the blessing comes in just being present with someone. Not trying to lighten the mood or change the subject but sitting in the hard space of loss. I went by the hospital this week to make rounds and got to visit a woman in the icu along with some family members. I didn’t know them or their story. I didn’t have any perfect words of wisdom and I couldn’t do anything to fix or heal their loved one from death. But I sat there with them, and somehow it was enough.

Barbara Brown Taylor said she once led a session where she asked everyone to break into groups and act out the Beatitudes. It came time for “blessed are those who mourn.” She describes it this way: “The group came out—all women again—and arranged themselves around the woman who had volunteered to lie dead on the ground. A second woman sat down and cradled the first woman’s head in her lap. Two others knelt beside her and two others stood over them until they made a sort of cathedral over the dead woman’s body. Everyone was touching someone so that they were all linked together, but unlike the first group no one moved. The women just held that pose, so full of love and grief, until a sob rose right out of the midst of them.”

What does it look like to be comforted? Liz Tichenor shares the story of how when her child died, the community that showed up for her. Friends on either side held her up as she placed dirt on the grave and sobbed into the earth. Then they pulled her up and also began to place dirt on the grave. What she couldn’t do, they did for her. Liz said “I’m sitting there in the front of this little church, you know, snot running down my face and shaking and, you know, literally being held up by my best friend on one side. But they broke that fourth wall in being wholehearted, broken hearted, tender hearted, all of it with us. And they were really explicit. This is what we’re doing together. This is not just watching Liz and Jesse burying their son. This is all of us burying our beloved child together.”

When I lost my friend in high school, they had a visitation and later a memorial service. I remember sobbing through the whole thing, and my friends came and sat with me or more so huddled around me. About a month later I had a grand mal seizure and couldn’t drive myself anymore, and these same friends lovingly took me everywhere. They became my consolation. This is what Jayson Greene calls the “first responder” friends.

Some talk about grief as a spiritual practice, and I think that is true, but I also think that comfort is as well. When we comfort one another and when we receive comfort, it is a glimpse of the eternal comfort that is to come. For just a moment, the language shifts and the light of resurrection breaks through the narrative of death.

Charles Poole tells the story in his book A Church for Rachel of a young woman named Betty who was nearing the end of her life. She had an incurable disease and had been praying to be released from her fear of death. The one day she said she felt a strong sense of the presence of God, and then, she heard children laughing, children laughing on the other side. Although Betty wasn’t cured of her disease, she was cured of her fear. Charles says “that is what faith does. Even when faith does not defeat an incurable disease, it does create an incurable hope, because faith leaves room, even in deep darkness, for the promise and possibility and surprise and laughter and love of God. Faith never stops saying “Who knows?” Who knows what God will yet do? Who knows what goodness and grace is waiting?”

So blessed are those who mourn, those with an incurable hope, those who believe that laughter is on the other side.