Blessed are Those Who Mourn

Blessed are those who mourn
For they shall be comforted.

I attended another funeral yesterday. There have been many funerals recently.

The chief mourner, the husband, my good friend, Alan, spent most of his eulogy apologizing for his “self-pity” over the premature death of his wife. She died age 49 of breast cancer.

It seems to me our modern emphasis on the supposed joy of the Christian life has left us crippled at such times. Sorrow to us silly pseudo-pentecostals now suggests a lack of faith.

“We are Easter people,” we insist, “and Hallelujah is our song!”

But this is not true Christianity. This is the Christianity of placidly smiling plastic saints, social harmony above all moral values, and gentle Jesus meek and mild. This is the Christianity of the Hallmark card. It has always repelled me.

On a trip to Athens and Sofia once, I explored in turn museums of classical sculpture, then of Christian icons. The contrast was dramatic, between the ghoulish rictus grins of many pagan figures, and the somber looks of the Christian saints.

The "archaic smile" on a sphinx.

T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Journey of the Magi” captures the emotional tone of his own conversion to Christianity:

“this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.”

W.H. Auden, speaking of his conversion in the “Christmas Oratorio,” writes:

“To those who have seen
The Child, however dimly, however incredulously,
The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.”

To be a real Christian is to be deeply disturbed by the world as it is, and deeply disturbed with ourselves as we are.

Calvinists might be joyful, being assured of ultimate salvation. Yet this same theological certainty predestines the vast majority of mankind, so far as I can see, to eternal damnation, through no actual fault of their own. Could a decent man be joyful over this?

Mater Dolorosa

For the rest of us, the task is as St. Paul put it to us: we are to “work out our salvation in fear and trembling.” We are not going to measure up. If we get complacent, we are doomed.

Hallelujah people?

Love is not a victory march
It’s a cold and broken hallelujah.

Love by its nature requires a broken self. "That’s how the light gets in."

And if we do not mourn at this world, we are callous souls.

Consider the words of the “Salve Regina”:

“Hail, holy Queen, Mother of mercy, our life, our sweetness and our hope. To thee do we cry out, poor banished children of Eve: to thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.”

Blessed, therefore, are those who mourn. There are not a lot of gags in Christianity.

It is not that the world is evil, in itself. It is not that we are utterly depraved. It is that, once we have seen the Beatific vision, we must realize how far short both we and it have fallen.

Should we not therefore see the death of a good person as cause for celebration? We celebrate saints on their death days, not their birthdays—on the day they entered eternal life.

Theresa Yoshioka was, by all accounts, a good person. She was a devout Byzantine Catholic.

As she was dying, and knew she was dying, as her husband wept at her bedside, she turned to him, he says, and asked, in apparent wonder, “Why are you crying?”

But her husband was right to cry, too. To cry with all abandon. Sorrow itself is holy. As Yeats summed up the human condition, “Man is in love; and loves what vanishes.”

This deep truth is the beginning of wisdom.