Lent, Days Eighteen & Nineteen: the Mourning
“Blessed be the mourning.”
I wrote it quickly on my “day nineteen” stone as I finished breakfast and hurried into the next thing. It was what I wanted to contemplate for the day, building on day eighteen’s foray into the Beatitudes with “Blessed are the poor,” which was itself one step deeper into my “5 Wounds” contemplation.
It was a natural progression, perhaps, as one of those “wounds” had been my fear of “poverty”—such as it is—and the ways I combat it with an obsession over wealth and financial security. This unhelpful goal had recently taken a hit with a missed opportunity for promotion at M’s job that had left us (maybe just me—M seems to be handling it well) reeling. It didn’t feel like such a big ask, this bump up in responsibility and pay. Especially since things like “paying bills” and “increasing the reach of our generosity” and “additional resources for our childrens’ education” and “having money in savings for emergencies” comprised our list of things to do with financial increase.
But I meander. All this is to explain that, prompted by life circumstances and inspired by the Spirit, I found myself seeking to expand my perspective of our situation and spend time acknowledging those who are experiencing devastating, systemic poverty in my city and world.
Thus far, I have engaged in this Lenten season by generally thinking about, writing about, and talking about myself, and at last (rejoicing fills the air) I think I may have grown tired of navel-gazing. I’m trying to pull my chin sky-ward this week. Trying not to look so deeply into the self, but listen to the sounds outside and open my mind to a broader view.
It happened in haste, but “Blessed be the mourning” ended up being an interesting (subconsciously purposeful?) way for me to record the second Beatitude. When I look at the stone, I can’t see the word “mourning” without thinking “morning.” I sit in my office with the window open and listen to the birds heralding daybreak before light even appears on the horizon, and I do feel like blessing the morning.
The practice of “mourning” is sitting in the darkness, acknowledging it, and longing for light to peek over the horizon and relieve the oppression of night. I don’t mean to disparage night, which has its own kind of life and beauty, but I do mean to evoke nighttime’s associations with stillness, darkness, inactivity, waiting. Night can be a crushing weight on the chest of those who long for rest and can’t find it. The silence, the emptiness, can prove to be dangerous to those whose minds already dwell in darkness. For such as these, morning is a profound blessing—as light, as relief, as renewal, as a daily fulfilled promise of “God showing up.”
One of my favorite books, introduced to me just last year, is Passions of the Soul by Rowan Williams. Drawing on wisdom and practices of the desert fathers, Williams uses just under 100 pages (and indeed, mostly the middle 54) to masterfully explore a connection between 1. The “seven deadly sins” and 2. the Beatitudes as (1) Distortions of our created being and (2) Each one’s reversal and restoration to right-Being. My mind being drawn recently to contemplation of the Beatitudes, I decided to return to this text and was delightedly reminded that the very first set he explores is pride and its opposite: poverty of spirit. In the same chapter, he moves to discuss the sin of acedía (see also: apathy) and the “medicine” of engaging with the hard things of the world rather than running away from them.
The first two Beatitudes: “Blessed are the poor” and “Blessed be the Mourning” (according to my “Lenten stones”). I can’t say it better than Rowan Williams, so here he is unpacking the connections between these and the sins of pride and acedía:
“How do we learn to deal with pride, then? Not by artificially putting ourselves down but by putting ourselves ‘in,’ into the rhythm of God’s breath; not by pretending we are less than we truly are but by knowing where our roots are; by recognizing that God is not a rival facing off with us but the depth within that seeks constantly to let life arise more fully in us. The answer to pride is ‘poverty of spirit’—recognizing your need of God.”
“Mourning, sorrowing, is part of the life of freedom. What a very strange thing that sounds, but think of the opposite: a life in which we constantly blocked off mourning, denied our own suffering and sat light to the suffering of others. That would be a deeply unreal and dishonest life, pretending to be what we’re not, pretending that the world is what it is not; not a good recipe for freedom, which always requires a keen sense of what the real constraints are. So the opposite of listlessness [see: acedia]—the opposite of all those restless coping mechanisms, those various ways of wriggling out of boredom and frustrated self-esteem, shifting our gaze away from pain in myself or the world—is the freedom to mourn, the freedom to say to God, ‘I acknowledge my pain, my sense of loss, and I’m not hiding from it. I acknowledge that the world is scarred with injustice and suffering, and I bring it to you, knowing that I’m here to speak out aloud in your presence.’ … Christ suffers for the world. Christ suffers once and for all. Christ presents the pain of the world before God in the heavenly sanctuary. … We mourn with him; we lament for our sin and the sin and grief of the world, and we express in that mourning our trust in Christ’s freedom to be alongside all suffering and to transfigure the damaged world.”
For all the nuancing in my Lenten reflections, it is truly Pride and Apathy that have been dominating my contemplations. From “being right” to “being everyone’s savior” all the way to realizations about how deeply I have given up on self-honesty and self-love because: “what is the point; I’m hopelessly unlovable.”
This first half of my Lenten journey has been a plodding exploration of the endless caverns of my own internal pain, hurt, loss, sin, need. And now, I feel myself unequivocally being led out to the surface (an act of tender mercy) to see myself in relation to the broader world around me. Even if I can reasonably count myself among the poor in spirit, those who mourn, or any of the rest of the Beatitudes: I am not the center, not isolated, not alone in such human experiences. I am in good company, and there is much to learn from the way others are living in spite of, because of, or out of these same realities of our world.
I wish I could guarantee that the last 20 weeks of Lent will find me more outwardly focused, but I know myself too well to make such lofty promises (not that I have trouble making them, just keeping them). But right now, in this moment, I am watching light pour through trees as the sun rises on a new day, saying “Blessed be the mourning,” and feeling ready for a new kind of prayer.
Maker of this complicated world, I thank you for the light of each new day. For the way it gilds the clouds, the way it surprises with its wash of brilliant color, the way it can renew hope with its beauty.
My needs are overwhelming, but my greatest need of all is for you: the One who fills my lungs with instinctive breath that I don’t create or work for. May all forms of pride in me—thinking too much and too little of myself—dissipate like fog meeting the light and heat of this recognition: I deeply and enduringly need you.
The hard realities of human existence threaten to dull my empathy and deactivate my presence in the world. Increase my capacity to face grief and loss and plant my feet deeply in the Earth so that I do not run from pain. Please draw my eyes upward and outward so that I can place my experiences in a broader context, joining my voice with the mourning of others, on behalf of the pain of others. Help me to engage, and in so doing, be fully alive in every sense.
I want to be able to share in both the mourning and morning of the broader communities that touch my life: my family (found family as well as blood family); the “big-C” Church; my city of Greensboro; and my world, planet Earth. I am one of a greater whole, and I want to have the vision to see bigger. This is not to lose myself, but rather, to more clearly find myself as a unique contribution intertwined with a greater reality. I am one piece of a whole community you have placed me in. May we hold hands in the dark together, and then turn our faces to the coming dawn as One.
