“Day of wrath and doom impending…” Thus begins the Dies irae, the sequence hymn sung between the readings of the old Requiem Mass. It was always a moment that stopped and startled the grieving mind. The plangent pleas for rest eternal and mercy were suddenly met with the bone quivering righteousness of our feeble place before the incomprehensible majesty of the thrice holy God Almighty. Alas, we no longer sing this dirge at funerals. God knows, perhaps sadly, that we are caught up in the socially adjudicated notion that we ought no longer to mourn at funerals. Yes, a tear may flow here and there. But we are increasingly by world, and it would seem by the church as well, programmed to celebrate a life lived. Let us, they say, look to all the good of this soul departed, to all good things this soul accomplished, to all the things this soul bore, to all the trials it overcame.
The church has even theologized this social trend. The journey of this life with its tribulations is ended. Now one travels to the world we were always intended to enjoy. Now, long last, the soul is with its Maker. Let us celebrate that Christ is risen, and by his promise we are risen up with him into his glory and rest. Sobbing, unbleached candles, and robes of black are set aside. White vestments and echoes of “Alleluia” now set the stage. Thank God this soul is at rest! How very certain are we that God has repaired all that was broken, and how glad are we that we had the opportunity to be part of it all. Perhaps a tear of “Adieu,” but if there be any grief tearing the soul apart within, let us keep that to ourselves as some dark secret inappropriate to the joy and surety of faith.
Our Lord, indeed, is risen, but that rising by the power of God cannot gloss over the fact and the terror of the cross of Jesus Christ.[i] The terror of the cross is the reality of sin, our sin and our sinfulness. Christ may bear that cross for our sake, but it is there by our making. Called to be all that we are potentialized to be, called, in brief, to be whole, to be holy, we fail at every turn. Every moment of disregard towards the potential of another for wholeness, every moment of disregard towards the potential of self for wholeness counts against us, counts against the integrity of God’s creation, counts as a condemnation against us. Those moments of disregard are not just failures to live up to a potential, to rise up to an ideal, a vision; they are sins, concrete facts of our spiritual brokenness, our psychological propensity to put self, or rather a pretense of selfhood, over and above the truth of that which we ought to be—integrated beings, harmonized into the panoply of this world as a fullness of self. Such, however, is our plight as children of Eve and Adam, as self-reflecting beings. It cannot be ignored because beyond that reality of our sin-fullness we have a Saviour, a grace of acceptance and healing that moves to make us whole. There is no point, no sense to the celebration of salvation if the aching need for that sacred gift is ignored.
We do to ourselves a grave disservice in ignoring grief and mourning. Just as there arises joy from the uniting in the psycho-somatic bonds of love and affection, so too is there pain in the severing of those same bonds. It would be a serious case of psychosis were there not. We do not appreciate the degree to which body and soul are interwoven one into the other. We gather up things and think it just a matter of having. We gather up relationships with others and relegate them to the self-esteeming world of having a cache of followers, associates, possibly even friends. We have—colleagues, confidants, lovers, partners. We ignore that they are more than buttresses to the weakness of the flailing ego, to the teetering assortment of masks and personae we have devised to wear as we navigate the everyday world. They are the very psychological foundations of the corporeal sinews and muscles that frame us as physical bodies in a world of social interconnectivity and exchange. They are not things we have; they are in great part who we are. They are our soul extending itself into otherness. How we understand these others, appreciate them, value them, interact within them is either our gain or our loss, our gain or loss of selfhood and integrity.
Pain, be it of soul or body, is there to tell us something is amiss and requires attention. To ignore, suppress, or repress the pain of grief arising from the tearing asunder of a bond of love and affection is to ignore an injury to the very structure of who we are as psycho-somatic socially oriented beings. Sorrow and grief are messengers, prophets, heralds. “Take heed! The very structure of you is damaged.” You are misaligned. Some part of you has been exscinded, cut away, wounded, maimed. It requires calm and stillness, tears and raging. The whole needs to close back upon the torn away, and seek the balm of healing. Acknowledge this. Cry. Scream. Weep. Bewail. Such is the process. It is an operation whose disruption of the normative flow cannot be escaped by some form of anesthetic, be it physical or spiritual. Faith may bolster the way through the pain, but it cannot be used to repress or supress the cross that must be carried if one would be authentic to the situation. In the face of death we are made to mourn. Such is our very constitution.
Here, as in all times and places, we need to know what we feel, to name it, to understand its source, appreciate its existence. Feelings are not to be banished because society says they are inappropriate. They are to be acknowledged as present. They may be despicable, or merely inconvenient, but their presence cannot be denied or locked away. They may be but fragments of who and what we are, yet they are parts that must be dealt with, named, met in dialogue, harmonized, integrated. If such becomes not the case, we become victims of our own obstinance, wobbling about, unbalanced by every turn of their power over us. If we cannot be honest with ourselves, with every part of ourselves, we are lying to ourselves.
The very core of us which pulses for integration of self and of self into the world despises being told a lie. It is an attempt to deny its power, to negate the potentiality of life itself. If we cannot bring to the light all that is within, how will we stand before that Light which will reveal the whole of us? When we come to stand before that perfect light there will be no shield or guard against the bare truth of who and what we are, and what we have done. Before the all-encompassing light of God there will be no shadow to hide within. There will be no surface, no depth, no aspect not fully illuminated. We will be compelled, at the critical most moment of life, to acknowledge ourselves. That is the point the Dies Irae makes. Who, within the depth of self, is unencomberedly honest with self? Who knows every sinew of soul? It is only when “heaven and earth are in ashes ending…and all creation is awaking, to its Judge an answer making” that every morsel and particle of who we are is revealed—to us. Thus, “What shall I, frail man, be pleading”?
At the end, when we stand before the finality of all we are and all we have woven into the fabric of God’s creation, who stands self-convinced of his integrity? Who of us knowing the divisiveness of the knowing of good and evil knows “no shame with anguish owning?” Every man in the ultimate acknowledgement of self must wonder from the root ground of hope “who for me be interceding”? Thus the dead must seek mercy, and those who once were his companions in this our mortal journey must sincerely mourn their own loss and its pain, and weep for absolution—not only for the departed, but for themselves. We must seek absolution for ourselves because no one holds another in perfect acceptance. There is in every degree of relatedness, because of the very fabric of who and what we are, some degree of negativity, some jot of judgement.[ii] That must be acknowledged. If—consciously or subconsciously—it is hidden away it will stain the process and the progress of mourning, and cause little fractures and fissures in the psyche, wrapping it in the toxic fumes of a lingering melancholy. Melancholy is a dark ground wherein there is no rest. The departed and the lamenting simply keep churning, burking both rest and the eternal.
The old Requiem mass created a space wherein the sin that taints and tortures every life, and wherein the lack of all-embracing acceptance that stains every relationship could be met, acknowledged, and opened to prayer. In this mourning was fostered, absolution for all was sought out, the surety of faith celebrated, and the wrath of melancholy dispelled. Throughout the flow of the prayers, in their constant ripple of petitions for mercy, it was recognized that the gifts of healing and forgiveness belong to God alone. The wisdom of the Dies irae affirmed for us that only when the departed are at rest—in God’s arms and in our hearts—can we who mourn be also at rest.
“Call me with thy Saints surrounded. Low I kneel with heart’s submission. See like ashes my contrition. Help me in my last condition. Spare, O God, in mercy, spare. Lord, all-pitying, Jesu blest, grant them Thine eternal rest.”
[i] This impulse to glissade over our sin is to be found also in the changes to the liturgies of Passiontide and Holy Week. Red vestments have replaced those of purple and black. We celebrate now the triumph of Christ, and understate the sin and its sting that caused the warring of the world he graciously undertook to resolve. Once we made our way like wearied pilgrims through the via dolorosa of Passiontide, climbed our way to trial and torture that we might come out of the bleakness of Good Friday’s blackness and into the glory of the Resurrection blazoned in white and gold. Now we move from triumph to triumph. It is all about the power and victory of God. But where is the sin that caused it? Where is the fault “that merited so great a Saviour”? We have become a society that does not like to confront the negativity within, and so we have become a society projecting and manifesting negativity everywhere we go. And in that we have rendered ourselves “touchy,” erethismic beings ready to pounce upon the slightest perceived provocation. We have lost the wisdom of acknowledging our sins, confessing our sins. If we say sin does not belong to us, we become like Eve and Adam hiding from God, hiding from Love, hiding from the truth of our very selves, and trying ever so feebly to disguise the shame we somehow inexplicably still feel.
[ii] We, like the Creator, would have others made in our image and likeness. We, often subconsciously, arrange, evaluate, and judge others according to their likeness unto us. Aristotle speaks of a friend being another self. But even in the most intimate bonds identity is lacking. If one resides in a sureness of self, one, like the Creator, is free within self to extend freedom to others. One, in such case, celebrates the free otherness of the other. If one, however, is not in full and felicitous comfort with oneself, one tends to be, again most often subconsciously, judgemental of others, or those parts of others one feels are in some manner wanting. This judgemental orientation, of course, is none other than a projection of something wanting, not so much in the other, as in the one who so judges. We ought never underestimate the myriad and mysterious levels and complexities of our psycho-somatic construction.