Lent 6
Matthew 5:4 Blessed
are those who mourn, for they will be comforted
“And soon the night of weeping”
I don’t know what it means to
cry. That’s not to say that I have no
experience with weeping. You have not needed
to sit very many Sundays in these pews to learn first hand that tears come
rather commonly to me. I don’t
particularly like it; in fact, I wish it weren’t so, but there it is: I cry.
No, what I mean by that opening comment is that I don’t know what those
tears mean. Years ago, when I drove away
from home that decisive August morning on my way to college, I was hardly out
of the driveway when I suddenly began to cry.
What was inside of those tears? I
was giddy, I was growing up, I was thrilled with the prospect of all that lay
ahead. And yet nonetheless, I was
crying.
Years later,
one Sunday morning in December of 1981, I kneeled in the chancel of my home
church in Abilene, TX while Dutch Schultz and Royce Farnsworth and Jack
Fullwiler and Albert McAllister and the rest of the elders of that congregation
laid their hands on my head as I was ordained to the Christian ministry. I’m sure it had nothing to do with physical
discomfort that prompted the tears that streamed down my cheeks, but there I
was, in the midst of one of the most momentous events of my life, crying.
A few miles
outside of
If any, those
tears make some kind of sense to me. But
if so, how do I explain those that came on a writing retreat I took by myself
when, in mid-sentence, I stopped what I was doing, threw back my head in a long
and spontaneous belly-laugh of sheer delight?
Or the tears that swelled in a backyard garden on a September Saturday
morning in front of an evergreen tree and my father as I tried to croak out the
words “I do.”
I don’t know
what it means to cry. When I’m tired I
tend to cry over everything – the sun coming up, the oven timer going off, the
particular shape and curl of the toothpaste on the brush, a song on the radio –
everything. Happy, sad, hurt, afraid,
relieved, and simply “moved”, I cry – but not always. Sometimes it happens, and sometimes it
doesn’t. I don’t know what it
means. Is it the body’s own
vocabulary? Or the soul’s distinctive
voice? Is it reflexive of some
intangible stimulation, or is it pure emotion?
I haven’t a clue.
I find but one
common thread. Geologically, there is a
phenomenon that begins deep beneath the earth.
Surface water seeps down deep below the surface until it meets the
molten stew of volcanic activity. The
superheated water then flushes back toward the surface where it erupts in a
splash of water and steam – as in “
Surface
episodes and events, that connect with the core in a transformative way, which
then return to the surface in a spray.
That sounds a bit like tears – powerful or significant influences on the
surface that seep down to and connect with the core of who we are, that in turn
manifest themselves in their own distinctive drip.
If those tears
are most often associated with grief, then little wonder. The death of someone significant to us; the
death of an idea or a relationship or a possibility that had laid claim on our
imagination quite inevitably seeps down to the depths of what makes us who we
are, and connects afresh with our bubbling essence. The loss of that which had changed us,
requires yet another fundamental change.
I often observe at funerals that it’s hard to imagine life without this
person who has died, but we must. And
grief is the birth pangs of that imagination.
According to
translators, the word that Jesus uses in the beatitude before us – the word we
translate “mourn” – “is one of the strongest words for mourning in the Greek
language. Very often it is associated
with the word which means “to weep,” and it signifies the sorrow which issues
in tears.” [1]
No gentle or
sentimental sadness, this, as William Barclay describes it, is the kind of “sorrow
which pierces the heart; poignant, piercing and intense. It is the sorrow which is visible; it is the
sorrow which can be seen in a [person’s] bearing, a [person’s] face, and a
[person’s] tears. It is the sorrow which
[people are] bound to show to the world and to show to God, because they cannot
help doing so.”[2]
Blessed, then,
are those who are touched with the kind of sorrow that pierces the very heart
of one’s being – for they will be comforted.
Blessed are those, in the language of the hymn that has served as our
guide throughout these weeks of Lent, who endure the “night of weeping.”
Now, I believe
in emotion, and I think there is much to be said – much blessing to be known –
by staying connected to the feelings that ebb and flow beneath the surface of
our lives – and sometimes flooding out into the open. We perform psychological amputation when we
ignore or suppress our emotional sides, and I have found no such thing as a
wheelchair or prosthetic to aid a crippled soul. But as significant as I believe it to be that
we honor and attend to our feelings – I’m not sure Jesus was simply defending
our more tender selves.
And surely
Jesus wasn’t celebrating long faces – as if the world didn’t have enough
grimness already.
It has been
interesting to read various interpreters’ take on this blessing. For one, the mournful for whom Jesus promises
blessing are those who are grieved to tears at the realization of their own sin
and the sin of the world. [3] For another, mourning is a sign of conviction
– the mark of those who are concerned to the point of action – who, because of
their passionate and visionary determination are as hard to stop as a speeding
train. [4] Still another concludes that those who mourn
are those who “recognize both the joy of the new age and the tragedy of the
old.” As this writer puts it, “Only
those who see the light can recognize and lament the darkness. Yet the very reality of the light gives hope,
courage, and comfort.” [5]
All of which
is true enough, I suppose. But for
awhile, now, I have been captivated by the observation of Quaker writer and
educator Parker Palmer that as we grow older – especially in our pressured,
mechanized culture that puts so much stress on image and impression – the
outside of us becomes increasingly disconnected from the inside. The “persona” that we construct – our public
face – comes to look less and less like, and have less and less in common with,
the core of who we are. He reflects on
the sad news of recent years surrounding the likes of Enron, WorldCom, Arthur
Anderson, Merrill Lynch and the Roman Catholic Church, and concludes that at
bottom, theirs is less a failure of ethics than a failure of human
wholeness. The personalities at the
center of such debacles became separated from their own souls. According to Palmer, they exercised what had
become for them a “well-rehearsed habit of holding their knowledge and beliefs
at great remove from the living of their lives.” [6]
By contrast,
says Palmer, there is “a beauty that arises when people refuse to live divided
lives” – when people begin to rediscover their hidden wholeness and reconnect
their soul to their role.[7]
I am certain
that there is more to that reconnection – to living that integral wholeness –
than mere tears, but I am just as certain that it is not less, and that it is a
critical art with which we are becoming less and less proficient. With the arid, emotional sterility of e-mail
communication; with the homogenized blandness of political correctness; with
the two-dimensional, disembodied, virtual existence of more and more companies
and their “customer service” representatives chained to their vetted scripts,
with our geographic mobility and relational truncations; with the deafening
volume and numbing constancy of our propagandized news and politicized public
servants telling only what they want us to know, which we increasingly distrust
and simply tune out…
…blessed,
indeed, are those who still have the capacity to mourn; those who still find
the time and emotional capacity to be deeply moved; those who still care enough
to notice and grieve the loneliness of a neighbor whose only companionship is the
TV, and for whom a ringing phone or a knock at the door is the sun piercing a
cloud; care enough to grieve the fearful prejudice that deprives whole peoples
of their personhood and opportunity; care enough to lament the loss of entire
communities to easily treated diseases or lack of food. Blessed, indeed, are those whose surface
experience can still seep deep into the core of one’s being and return as the
geyser of the soul. Blessed are those in
whom the capacity to grieve, to care, to celebrate real joy, to swell with
grand pride – to notice the tender fingers of life and to be strummed by them –
has not been lost, for they will know the comfort of the very embrace of God.
I don’t know
what it means to cry – except that we are alive, and that it is good.
[1] William
Barclay, the Beatitudes and the Lord’s
Prayer for Everyman (New York:
Harper and Row, 1963) 29.
[2] Ibid
[3] Ibid, p. 33
[4] Clarence
Jordan, as excerpted in Clarence
Jordan: Essential Writings, ed.
Joyce Hollyday (Maryknoll: Orbis Books,
2003) p. 110.
[5] Inagrace T. Dietterich, The Beatitudes: The Practice of Christian Community (Chicago: Center for Parish Development, 1993, rev. 1997) pp. 39-40.
[6] A Hidden Wholeness (
[7] Ibid, p. 9