Comfort & Mourning
Jesus’ Kingdom promises a flourishing, thriving, happy life – both for individuals and the whole community. The idea we’re pursuing in these reflections is that his Sermon on the Mount describes the kind of people who live there and the sorts of behaviours and practices they enact to produce such a life.
Those who mourn are happy, Jesus says in today’s text, for they experience comfort.
That mourning belongs to the good life strikes us as counter-intuitive. We imagine flourishing to consist not in grief or sadness, but in feelings of well-being, positivity and optimism.
It reminds me of a Sunday school song we sang when I was a child. The chorus went like this:
Let the sun shine in, face it with a grin.
Smilers never lose and frowners never win.
Open up your heart and let the sun shine in.
The idea in that song is found everywhere in the way we approach life today. In today’s view, expressing your negative emotions not only makes you a negative person, it also consigns you to a future of perennial failure. Let’s call this the “Smilers never lose, frowners never win’ ideology.
I’m talking about our cultural dogma around positivity – having a positive mental attitude: ‘think good things and good things happen’; “When you focus on the good, the good gets better”; “happiness isn’t chance, it’s a choice”. The idea is that if we want to be successful, or happy, or attractive, if we want to thrive it’s necessary to view the world in exclusively positive terms, and to ignore whatever feelings attend the tragic, unhappy, and cruel aspects of life.
You can even see it in the ways you and I speak to each other about our own difficulties: ‘look on the bright side”; “things are going to get better”; “thing could always be worse”; “chin up”. There’s a super-spiritual version too: “God works all things together for those who love him,” “count your blessings, not your problems,” “God’s purposes are bigger,” “have faith,” and so on.
What these expressions show is that we’re actually not very good at dealing with the pains and hardships life brings, which is strange, especially since so much of life involves suffering. It’s as though we believe that if we just focus on what’s good it will mean that the bad doesn’t really exist, or at least that it doesn’t affect us. Which obviously isn’t true, as Jesus advocacy of mourning reveals.
Now, I have no quarrel with the idea that we should focus on the good. When bad things happen, even horrendous things, our individual lives remain full of wonder and beauty. That’s the strange paradox of things. And we should acknowledge it. So, yes, focus on the good. But I want to suggest that acknowledging this paradox, focussing on the good, doesn’t really help us know how we should face life’s negative moments. That there are always good things to be grateful for, as far as I can figure out, is basically irrelevant when put up against the negative experiences life throws at us.
But, there’s a deeper problem to the ‘Smilers never lose and frowners never win’ ideology. Refusing to acknowledge hurts and losses actually denies the good our positive outlook pretends to value. To see what I mean, you simply have to understand that what we call ‘bad,’ what we refer to when we make judgments about negative values, relates to the way such things do harm to what’s good. What makes them wrong is that they damage some good in our lives – a relationship, our health, our sense of safety, and so on. They leave us worse off. That’s what makes them bad.
But if that’s true, you actually can’t focus on the goodness of things while ignoring the bad. Because it’s their goodness that makes the badness of life’s hardships so difficult. Which should mean that affirming the good things in life, being positive, actually makes acknowledging the bad necessary. Or put a different way, real, authentic and honest positivity, positivity in full grasp of life’s goods, requires mourning. Otherwise it doesn’t actually care about those goods – it only cares about policing the emotional dynamics of our lives.
I want to propose maybe there’s a different kind of positivity, one more mature, more truthful about life’s negative moments, one more in keeping with the vision of flourishing Jesus reveals.
The word Jesus uses to describe the outcome of mourning is παρακαλέω. It has to do with consolation, with someone putting their arm around the shoulder of a friend. Jesus’ suggestion is that you can know comfort, kindness, the God of love putting his arms around you in your suffering. It’s wonderful. But, says Jesus, you have to mourn. It’s worth questioning why.
In saying that mourning is constitutive of makarīos I think he’s proposing that mourning is the appropriate, even necessary, response to life’s brokenness. That’s certainly what today’s psychological research tells us. Mourning is a kind of adaptive emotional process; of readjusting when life is different from what we want, or need – when life harms us, or hurts us, or breaks us. It isn’t optional. It’s indispensable. And it’s not just for the big stuff either. Major trauma or trivial frustration, mourning is the emotional process we’re designed to undergo when we encounter setbacks, hardships – because without it the pain and sadness that accompany those things remains unhealed.
Mourning and healing go together, that’s the point.
When Jesus tells his listeners that mourning is essential to the abundant life, I think he’s acknowledging just how important it is to admit when things go wrong and to measure the distance between the unimaginable goodness of the lives God gives us and the negative circumstances that befall us. He’s telling us to give room to the pain we experience, to feel it all the way through to the end. That’s how we relinquish our attachment to the world as it might otherwise have been. It’s how, in time, we’re able to go forward in healing and wholeness, readjusted, restored, reinvesting our hopes and energies into the world as it is now. It’s not self-indulgent. It’s not self-pity. It’s not having a negative mind-set. It’s the process through which God created for us to heal and to adapt to the way the world changes – not always for the better.
But what about Christ’s promise of comfort? I confess, when I remember my lowest moments, moments of mourning and grief, I remember not feeling God’s comfort. I recall feeling alone. Maybe you’ve felt the same.
As I’ve thought about this, I’ve concluded that there’s a connection between Christ’s promise of comfort and the Kingdom practices we’re exploring – that being a follower of Jesus means being called to share God’s comfort with those who mourn in ways that are tangible, present, and incarnational. To belong to Jesus Kingdom entails ministering God’s kindness to those in pain, bearing their burdens (Gal. 6:2) as Christ’s hands and feet in the world. The Apostle Paul drew this connection explicitly:
“…the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.” (2Cor 1:3-4)
In Paul’s view, we are the instruments God uses to minister God’s comfort to the world – he comforts the world through you and me. And that should mean something for the way we live our lives. Jesus’ new Kingdom, I want to say, is the place where we practice acknowledging the hurts and losses we experience in life, where we discipline ourselves to accept the truth of what those hurts and losses mean. It’s the place where we seek out ways of mourning such things appropriately – truthfully and in right measure. And it’s the place where these practices result in healing, enabling us to emerge readjusted and ready to move on in hope. Or, at least, it ought to be.
But to be so, the Church ought also to be the place that practices comfort; where its members bear one another up in our mourning; where we can practice raw, unvarnished honesty around the hardships we endure precisely because we are each committed to ministering God’s comfort to one another through things like listening attentiveness, caring conversation, shared tears, warm embrace, and patient support. Such practices make for a happy life because they makes for a healed life. The alternative is brokenness and suffering, always enduring unacknowledged and unprocessed pain.
That, I think, is what’s implicit in Christ’s description of mourning.
If it’s a choice between healing, adaptation and the comfort of God’s love – and the ideology of ‘smilers never lose and frowners never win’ – for my part, I think I choose mourning.
I wonder if you’ll choose it too?