Mourn Till the Morning

    I've been thinking about mourning this week - "blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted" (Matt 5:4). I have to say, I don't have a stomach for endlessly morose, gloomy people. In Christianity, it's "rejoice - I say again, rejoice!" seems almost to confine us to endless joy (Phil 1:18, 4:4). Jesus himself says that we should rejoice, for specific reasons (Lk 10:20). On the other hand, though, there is plenty of food for mourning - Jesus says that though we will have "many troubles" - we take heart in the midst of them (Jn 16:33). So then, we hold both optimism and pessimism together. A Christian who becomes either the "solemn pessimist or the silly optimist" is off balance. 

Mourning

    G. K. Chesteron, in his brilliant book Orthodoxy, also points out that the Christian position on optimism and pessimism is is like the two extremes raging against each other. We are to constantly trying to hold these two raging forces together; he illustrates better than I ever could:

A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine.

    I think Chesterton is correct about what the Christian should display, should become. However, he doesn't explain how the Christian reaches the place where they can say, with Paul, "to live is Christ and to die is gain" (Phil 1:21). How do we adopt neither a bland blessedness or a gloomy pessimism?

I think we get there by mourning. 

Godless Laughter

    One of the passages that has caused me equal parts consternation and companionship in the last year and a half has been Ecclesiastes 7. It is the sort of passage that is worth quoting in full:

A good name is better than fine perfume, and the day of death better than the day of birth.

It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, 

for death is the destiny of everyone; the living should take this to heart. 

Frustration is better than laughter, because a sad face is good for the heart. 

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning,  but the heart of fools is in the house of pleasure.

It is better to heed the rebuke of a wise person  than to listen to the song of fools. 

Like the crackling of thorns under the pot, so is the laughter of fools. 

This too is meaningless.

    There is a great depth in this terse passage - enough meaning to occupy our minds for days, even weeks and longer. Notice how he points out that "frustration is better than laughter" - I know people who live for laughter, who cannot deal with the weight of meaning that Christ gives to all who come to him, the weight of being awake, aware. This passage identifies a kind of laughter that is desperate, hollow, like plastic displays of fruit - all the colour, none of the substance. 

There is a type of happiness that grows only from the soil of mourning and sober meditation; there is a type of gloom that only comes from the joyless, grasping laughter of fools. 

    The attitude of the world is aptly pictured as a "house of feasting," a place where there is endless amusement and diversion, where the cares of the world are forgotten, where death isn't looked at or contemplated, where eternity is in out of sight and mind. It is captured by Paul when he says of people who deny the resurrection, "let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die" (1 Cor 15:32) or as Jesus says, "As in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man" (Matt 24:37) - people prefer revelry to reflection - and the Devil presides over such feasts. We aren't exempt from these sorts of ideas, but we have to resist them. 

"Blessed are Those who Mourn"

    I think it has to be asked: in what way is this a blessed business, this practice of mourning? I do think that it is attached, in part, to the previous "blessed are the poor in spirit" phrase - is not poverty the state of humanity? We have come into the world without choice - we leave without choice, and sorrow aplenty in between? We are perpetually recipients of God's providence. We mourn over the state of the world, ruled and ruined by the Devil, our own sin and wickedness that is still being eradicated by the Spirit, and our mortality. Mourning, then, seems like it would be much more natural to us than it is - why isn't it? We do live in the age of "health, wealth, and prosperity," the age of advertisements, of glossy and glamorous social media posts - everything must be happy, perfect, pristine - its almost as if there are signs everywhere that say "NO MOURNING." Perhaps it isn't a surprise that the Old Testament, by and large, is left unread - it speaks too much to death, to sin, to despair; in short, to reality. 

Mourn Till the Morning

    The word "blessed" speaks of a future state, that there is a blessedness to come for those who abide by these rules of Christ, the same as the "blessed one" of Psalm 1 is blessed in the end, while the end of the wicked is destruction. Blessed are those who look reality full in the face, with all its disrepair. Mourning must lead to laughter, it necessarily will! How can I state that so categorically? It leads us to have faith in God. Mourning causes us look up to God - like the author of Ps 121 we cry, "my help comes from the Lord, Maker of heaven and earth!" If we mourn at the devastation of sin, if we follow it all the way, it leads us to a cross stained with blood and darkness and the shadow of death - after that, an empty tomb. It leads us to the edge of a sea - after that, a parting. Our mourning will lead to laughter like the cross leads to the tomb, like the night leads to the morning. "Soul, mourn till the morning." Mourning leads to faith, and God will not fail to answer even the most trembling of faith that is given to him.

Frederick Buechner, in his book Wishful Thinking, contrasts two laughter in this memorable and sobering way that I never have forgotten:

The laughter of faith in God is like Abraham’s laughter when God says his ninety-year-old wife is in a family way. The laughter of faith in no-God is heard in Sartre’s story “The Wall”: A man is threatened with death if he doesn’t betray the whereabouts of his friend to the enemy. The man refuses to do this and sends the enemy on a wild goose chase to a place where he knows his friend isn’t. By chance it turns out to be the very place where his friend is. The friend is captured and executed and the man is given is freedom. Sartre ends the story by saying that the man laughed till he cried.

    In the end, we will laugh - a laugh of delight, of wonder - in the meantime, water your faith with your tears and the promise of Christ: "they will laugh" - and there, amidst the laughter of the world, we will mourn till the morning.