THOUGHTS OF A MONK

Fathers' Day Remembrance: "Where's the comfort?"

June 29, 2006 

I am a child of the 60s, the 1960s that is. I was a teenager in those days. It was a time of war and anti-war protests, free love, drugs, liberation movements and the civil rights movement. However, those weren't the things that grabbed my attention. Something else was also going on during those early years of the 60s, and get ready because in 2010 I'd wager that it's going to come back again. What am I speaking about? The 60s marked the centenary of the American Civil War. Books, TV shows, newspaper and magazine articles, and Civil War games were popular, not to mention masses of people visiting the various battle sites and battle re-enactments. Back in the 1960s a few veterans of the Civil War were still alive and made the news. I also remember an article in Look Magazine by McKinley Kantor entitled "If the South had won the Civil War." And there was an old phrase still current that ran, "save your Confederate money, the South will rise again." Now the South did rise again politically, but that phrase meant that the Confederacy as an independent state would rise again. It didn't. No chance now. It won't happen, so burn the money.

Hanging on to that lost dream was something many people did. It's a very human thing to do. All of us, in many areas of our lives, hang on to things way past the time when we should be letting them go. That idea of hanging on, and its inverse, letting go, is what I would like to consider in light of the second of Jesus Christ's great Beatitudes: "Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted." Jesus is teaching us how to let go of pain, sorrow, sickness, loss, death of a loved one, hurt, sadness, diminishment of health, a change of direction in our lives. These decisions and events inevitably involve moving toward something while moving away from something else. Boiled down to its essence this beatitude says to us: "grieve it, then let it go." But that is easier said than done. We often hear the word grieve used with reference to letting go of something. In this case, grieving and mourning amount to the same thing. They refer to a process we must go through that allows us to let go. This beatitude is telling us that being comforted cannot happen if we remain in the grip of something that we need to let go of. Happiness in mourning comes because it points us in the direction of a healthier place. If the need to go there is pointed out to us we may struggle with it or even bristle at the suggestion.

Michael Crosby, a Franciscan Capuchin has a theory about this: "If you get defensive about anything, it means you are afraid to face something. If you fear anything it means something controls you. And if you do not face what controls you-your hurts, your anger, your underlying alienation from God-you will never be free. And if you are not free, the Spirit of the Lord cannot be there, because where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom (see 2Cor 3:17)."

Crosby is giving us a warning device to examine our reactions to a traumatic or life changing event. A personal injury, loss of a job, divorce, or even a change in direction of someone's life such as choosing to join a monastic community, can be that event. When we decide to enter monastic life a lot of options close even as others open. The decision to live a celibate life, not because of circumstances but by choice, removes the option of marriage. Connections with past friends are inevitably weakened and often wither away. Career goals that may (or may not) have been achieved are set aside as one's life now takes a radical new course. Even though the new course is more concretely a call from God filled with its own challenges and promise, one's response to that call cannot be complete without the past being mourned- grieved, and let go of-in order that the new life can fully occupy that inner space that was once taken by the old. This does not mean denying one self or one's past, just not being controlled by it.

Of all of the issues that involve mourning, dealing with death is the toughest: whether it's about the death of a loved one, or facing our own inevitable death. By his own example, Jesus shows us how to apply his words of the Beatitudes to the process of grieving over the death of a loved one. When John the Baptist was killed Jesus withdrew to a deserted place to mourn. When Lazarus died, Jesus wept. He didn't rush off to try and cheer up anyone, to tell them that death would not come. No, when he got to Bethany, and he looked at the tomb, he wept. And even though in Jesus presence Lazarus was brought back to life, he still ultimately died. The end of life as we know it is part of life and it comes on its own terms.

God's promise through his son Jesus is that he will be with us through it. Our hope in Christ is that after death we will be with God in that realm which is beyond death. Even so, if a loved one's life is cut short, this is not the time for others to try and cheer up those left behind so they can avoid the pain of separation or so that we can avoid our unease around their pain. The pain is there and we have to feel it, just as surely as Jesus felt all the pain of death on the cross. Our hope and God's promise are in Christ's resurrection.

In life we will experience times when we will face losses and be drawn into mourning those losses. Amazing as it might seem, the period around Pentecost marks that very reality. At Ascension the apostles mourn the loss of the risen Lord who leaves them for a second time, this time to ascend to his Father in heaven. The apostles soon discover that they feel Christ's presence even more after he is gone. Then on the day before Pentecost, we have a Memorial Saturday. It is a time to pray for the dead and in many traditions to visit and pray at the graves of loved ones. It is a time to mourn and remember and honor the saints we've known in our families and among our friends, as well as the saints the church has recognized. And that brings us to this Sunday after Pentecost: All Saints Day. The saints are the ones who have gone before us to help show us the way to live according to the precepts of the Beatitudes. They are people, just like you and I, who confronted moments of great decisions in their own lives, sometimes including sacrificing their lives, often turning away from the familiar and safe so that they could become what God called them to be.

Pentecost rises in the midst of these remembrances of the dead and the saints to point unmistakably to the Holy Spirit, the comforter, who is everywhere present and ready to fill our lives with new life, if we are but open to it, if we are but ready to rise to the occasion, not as a slogan born of wishful thinking as in the 1960s, but as a clarion call to live fully, with Christ in our midst. Amen.