It Begins With Mourning Series

Mourning is what happens when your eyes are opened, your heart is opened, to something so manifestly wrong with your world that you can neither bear it, ignore it, or affect it.

Mourning is the first step on the journey back to God.

I recently listened to a very interesting conversation about the popularity of horror movies in modern society. The author being interviewed suggested that it was the secular world’s attempt to deal with the reality of evil in the world without admitting that there really is such a thing as evil. It’s an attempt to have an intense feeling without real pain. And that makes sense to me. I don’t like horror movies because I don’t think fear is fun. As a child abuse survivor, I’ve spent too much of my life with fear. When it’s not fiction, it’s not fun.

The explosion of sex and violence in our entertainment comes, I think, from much the same place - from the desire to experience life intensely but without real risk - and yet it is the risk of being hurt that gives meaning both to courage and to commitment.

In somewhat the same way, most people want the joy that the gospel promises - but they don’t want to pay the price. That desire for a short cut to eternity is at the root of much of what is wrong with today’s mainline churches, and why most are having so much trouble reaching the world.

The Christian as mourner isn’t very much seen nowadays. There are several reasons for this. It’s partly a reaction against a kind of 19th c. false puritanism that wasn’t natural, didn’t come from within, and almost gave the impression that to be religious was to be miserable. There was a violent reaction against this unattractive picture, and in some places things have gone to the other extreme, with the idea that if Christians are to attract non- Christians we must always appear upbeat and cheerful. Another reason that a mournful Christian has become almost an oxymoron is that a lot of Christians, on being told that joy is one of the fruits of the spirit, try to paint it on the outside for fear of being branded unspiritual.

However, the ultimate explanation is, I think, more serious than those. The most important reason for the state of today’s church is a reluctance to deal seriously with sin. And without that, it is simply impossible to understand the true nature of Christian joy. There is a double failure. A real, deep conviction of sin is largely absent, and that leads to a superficial concept or experience of joy.

How is sin connected to this mourning that people are trying to avoid, that Jesus says we have to face?

Mourning is about loss, isn’t it, about not having something that we value. And the ultimate loss is, of course, death. I am reading an absolutely wonderful book called Sin: Radical Evil in Soul and Society, which I know will never replace Tom Clancy in your library or mine but which nonetheless I recommend, says that the root of all sin is ultimately the attempt either to deny the reality of death, or to defeat it on our own terms by devouring the life force of others. We live off of others’ lives in the pleasure we get from watching staged violence, or sexuality, or fear; we live off of others’ lives in the exaggerated reaction to celebrity tragedies like Princess Di or JFK. And all our attempts to avoid mourning are just more ways of denying the reality of death. Only when we face death squarely does life take on its deepest meaning; until we are willing to mourn, we will remain captive to the sin that feeds off of our attempts to avoid our own mortality, our own helplessness. Mourning is the first step to freedom.

Like the first Beatitude about poverty of spirit, this one immediately identifies the Christian as different. The one thing the whole world tries to shun is mourning; its whole organization is based on the supposition that sadness is something to avoid. The philosophy of the world is: forget your troubles; turn your back on them; do everything you can to avoid facing them. Things are bad enough as they are without your going to look for troubles, says the world; therefore be as happy as you can. The pleasure mania, the money, energy and enthusiasm that are expended in entertaining people, are all just an expression of the one great aim of the world to avoid having to mourn.

But the gospel says, “Happy are they that mourn.” The parallel passage in Luke puts it in a more striking manner, because he uses the negative: “Woe to you who are laughing now,” says Jesus, “for you will mourn and weep. “[Luke 6:25b]