Beatitudes: Blessed Are They Who Mourn

I was pitching at a church camp slow pitch softball game. A bed of red ants had chosen the pitching mound as the ideal place to build their nest, so I had to pitch and stomp dance ants at the same time. I wished I could have communicated with the ants that I really meant them no harm but just did not want them to harm me. It hit me that the only way I could do that was to become an ant myself. As I thought of that later I realized that God had the same problem with us. If He wanted to really communicate with us and show us who He was, then He had to become one of us. He had tried every form of communication possible to no avail. He gave ten commandments and we turned them into thousands of stupidly rigid rules. He sent prophets and they were ignored. Then the word became flesh and dwelt among us.

When it comes to the message to be delivered, the analogy of the ant bed fails to connect. My message would have been, “Move your bed or we will pour gasoline on you and set it on fire.” God’s message is astounding. He sat on a hill and began to teach what was evidently the most important things He wanted us to know. He began with eight statements and not a one of them were about Him or His kingdom. Not a one was demanding some behavior on your part. Not one was about His need to be worshiped. They were all about helping us find a way to live happy and healthy lives. He is a father acting more like a mother teaching her young what matters about life.

And the second statement completely overwhelms me. Of all the things He could have talked about or demanded He wanted to be sure we knew how to deal with our grief. “Blessed are they that mourn for they shall be comforted.” That may not sound like something that would make the top eight things He would want to talk about, but He knew if we live long enough we will experience grief and that unresolved grief can be devastating.

The more I study that subject the more important healthy grieving becomes. I have come to believe that unresolved grief and trauma are the root causes of many of the social problems of our day. Grief does not just go away with time, it buries itself in our souls and changes our lives.

One of the members of the first grief group I ever organized had started “seeing” a man and was bothered both by his alcohol consumption and by his being emotionally closed off. His sister told her that he had suffered the deaths of both of his children twenty years before and his life had been a downhill spiral ever since.

My friend insisted that he let her read at least one chapter from a book about grief. It took her most of the night to get him to agree. Finally, he gave in and the reading led to conversation. He had been an Olympic swimmer but had never taught his son or daughter how to swim. They were riding a horse without a saddle at their grandparents and rode into a pond where they fell off and both drowned. He shut down and refused to talk to anyone thinking he could deny the grief away. He turned to alcohol to dull the pain and suffered the almost inevitable need to increase the amount until addiction.

The conversation that night led him to dig their pictures out of a box in the bottom of the closet and at sunup they went to visit the graves. He had not been there since the funeral. He allowed himself to mourn and then and only then could he be comforted.

My life-long study of grief started when a mother reacted to a physician and her husband who were desperately trying to get her to calm down after her eighteen-month-old daughter had just suddenly died. She stepped back and said, “Don’t take my grief away from me, I deserve it and I am going to have it.” That changed my life. I realized I was trying to take grief away from people instead of finding ways to allow them the healing process of grieving. After all of these years I have ended up saying the same thing Jesus said on the mount with different words. I say, “The best thing to do with grief is grieve.” He said, “Blessed are those who mourn.”

If all of the books I have written about grief were boiled down to one thought it would be permission to grieve. Finding safe places and safe people that will allow us to grieve as long and as loud as we need is very difficult. Our friends want us to be better so they overwhelm us with platitudes, new ways to think, or scriptures that seem to indicate our faith is weak if we cry.

It is also hard to give ourselves permission to grieve especially when it seems to last much longer than we expected or longer than friends and family can tolerate.

Those who actually mourn their losses find a way to walk the journey and learn to cope. Those who hide their pain and live in denial never find comfort.

This beatitude leaves me breathless. God became one of us so He could say, “When you hurt cry. When you grieve mourn. When you are in need, let someone know and allow them to comfort. When you have needs, say so.” There is no comfort in an isolated cave of silence. “Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted.”

Attitude one: Keep your mind open

Attitude two: Be willing to accept the help and comfort of others.