Blog
“Mourning with Hope”
Categories: Meditations
‘Tis the season for funerals. Over the past few weeks, my family and I have been to three visitations/funerals: two for relatives of Jackson Heights members, one for the infant daughter of some friends of ours. The two men who died were not Christians; our friends are Christians, very much so.
The differences between the first two and the last one were striking. What, after all, does one say at the funeral of an irreligious man? You look backward. You have to. You talk about what a good friend and coworker he was. You talk about the memories his children have of him. The songs you play are half religious (like that country & western song about going to heaven and petting a lion, which I had never heard before moving to Tennessee and now have heard quite a bit), half not. Then the funeral is over, and you are left with your memories. That’s it.
It’s different if you’re a Christian. Admittedly, these were folks we knew better than we knew the others, but we talked to them for nearly an hour. We certainly talked about memories, but we also talked about meaning. We grappled, as Christians do, with understanding the work of God in a fallen world. We talked about what it means to be a person of faith in a time of despair.
We talked too about their daughter in the present tense. From her perspective, now is much better than a month ago was. We anticipated a tomorrow that would be better for all of us, not least because we will see her again. We will.
Between these two spiritual landscapes, a great chasm is fixed. Mourning with hope is no fun. I’ve grieved for my parents and my daughter that way. However, it is infinitely preferable to mourning without hope. It is much better to grapple with the meaning of tragedy than to be forced to admit that tragedy has no more meaning than anything else.
I know that my friends will grieve incessantly for months and periodically for as long as they live. Some wounds do not completely heal this side of Jordan, and we should not expect them to (or worse, expect the wounds of others to). Our society’s discomfort with sorrow is part and parcel of its refusal to confront the grim realities of life under the sun. We know better, and we should be wiser than that.
Neither, though, should we deny or disparage the comfort that we have been given. Christians are blessed with many gifts. The right to mourn with hope is one of the most precious.
