In Defense of Mourning

I thought about calling this entry "Apologia Pro Vita Mourning" or "Contra Celebration of Death". What brought this on was hearing today, and even a few days before Mom's Funeral, the apparently common view that "Death should be a celebration of life" and "She's in Heaven now; she's not in pain; we should celebrate and rejoice."

Yet no such sentiments appear, do they, anywhere in Sacred Scripture. Perhaps somewhere in Sacred Tradition; but not, I feel sure, in a way that contradicts what appears to be the strong current in Scripture, and in common human experience, in favor of mourning the dead.

Jesus wept at the Tomb of Lazarus. Job, confronted by the "Job's Comforters", who did take a similar line that might be called the "celebrate pain" approach to suffering, steadfastly embraced his pain, his suffering, his grieving and mourning. And in the last few chapters of Job, we cannot doubt where God came down on this: "Job spoke rightly of me."

In the Beatitudes, we are told, "Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted." Mourning is explicitly endorsed, so to speak. And there is no implication that those who mourn will be stripped of their grief and given a clown's "Happy Face" to replace it. "Comfort": to be made strong, to be fortified. No "Happy Face" here.

Mourning is the common human experience in the face of Death.

Plutarch's description of the Death of Pompey, and the obsequies for him, are so very moving.

Similarly Homer's description of the obsequies for Achilles and so many other.

Shakespeare's Macbeth includes this deeply moving passage, in which Macduff expresses his grief upon hearing of the slaughter of his family. Malcolm tells him to be a man, to which Macduff responds in words that echo through the years.

Malcolm. Dispute it like a man.
Macduff. I shall do so
But I must also feel it like a man.
I cannot but remember such things were,
and were most precious to me …
4.3.221

All of this I recount not to say yet again what has been said a million times better than I by others ... but to remind myself of precious things in the face of the surly challenges of contemporary culture to "hurry up and get over it" or (in the modernist churchman's variation of same, "Let's celebrate death."

Nonsense. Death is an ugly gash across the universe, a stripping away of what is most precious to us in this life. The best way we can celebrate God, and the person who has died, is to mourn ... to shed tears, to weep, to don sackcloth and ashes, tear our hair, and wail before Heaven and Earth at the Death of our loved ones.

Mom ... you were ... and are ... most precious to me. I love you and I miss you ... and I mourn your passing ...

Love in Christ,

Charles Delacroix