We have a problem. Western Christendom and Western society have both become averse to mourning when someone dies. We think we ought to not, publicly at least, cry, weep, sob, or otherwise express the depths of sorrow and pain experienced in, by, and through the death of one near and dear. This is nothing more than pseudo-stoic inanity.
A half century ago, churches in the West began shifting the focus of funeral and burial liturgies from the dread and dreadfulness of death, from terror and tears, black vestments and stark sobriety to the white clad celebratory hope and promise of life everlasting manifest in the resurrection of Christ Jesus. Orations to the Lord of Mercy gave way to proclamations of the Lord of Triumph. If individual dogmas may be looked upon in isolation from the totality of theology (dogmatic, liturgical, pastoral) this might be accounted justifiable. Baptism does constitute a ritual death to self and an assumption into the role and person of God’s Christ, and this is the fundamental expression of our spiritual commitment and life-quest. But while it is a fundamental expression, it does not enwrap the whole of the situation, a situation that is always incarnate, in progress, and penultimately finite until, by grace, by divine mercy and allowance, it is raised up into the infinite. A theology that does not deal with the reality of man in the world is merely an academic exercise in speculation and syllogisms. As long as the church is, even in part, a terrestrial body, the death of one of its members is still an occasion to mourn, for the experience of loss to the terrestrial community is not an illusion, but a reality of our finitude, of our interconnectedness, of the sense of amputation inherent in the tearing away of one with whom we have been accustomed to be-with.
In any society, the death of anyone is rarely experienced as an isolated act. We are social animals. We speak of the death of one near and dear as “a loss”. That which is lost is not only the other but also the part of us that had been connected to the other. We experience the death of the other as a surgery that exsects, exscinds, and curettes the innermost surfaces. Today, in our society so disposed to buffering everyone and everything from pain and damage, this is an operation preformed bereft of anaesthetic. The dolorous heart that once abluted the pain in tears and cries of anguish, the crucified heart that once cried out for mercy to the very Throne of Mercy, must now be idle, must now be the brave and cheerful heart, or the faith-filled and triumph-assured heart, waiving adieu, applauding a job well done, a life well lived, or singing bon voyage for a journey whose surety is the very word of God. We celebrate our dead and we bury our grief–how noble, how stoic, how insufferably absurd and devoid of health and healing.
Were anyone to be stabbed in the heart, would it not be expected that there follow blood and pain, fainting and cries for help? Would it not be expected that help and healing, recovery and reconstitution take not just time but effort? Do we no longer see the catharsis of mourning? Do we no longer believe in the terror of the last horizon? Have we, who seemingly wear every possible want and desire in open and uncensored flourish, fear this ultimate item of our finitude? Are we so stunningly afraid of death that we can no longer bring ourselves to publicly acknowledge it?
Death is cruel. It is absolute. It tears us apart. It accosts us contumeliously with our own mortality. It challenges every venue of human hope and faith. Churches cannot ignore that. They cannot turn from that, and look up to the heavens, and tell us to gaze upon the rainbows of Paradise and our promised bliss. Society cannot turn from that and tell us to remember and celebrate the limb torn from us, the heart plucked out of us, as if it were an entity unto itself. We stand in funerals, burials, interments, celebrations of life, where we stand precisely because something, someone, once vitally a part of us is now torn away. We stand by the hole in the earth because there is a hole in us. All the well-wishing, all the good cheer, all the good faith, all of it is something that does not belong. There is a gorgonian rupture in life. There is a sorrow beyond speaking. Here is the place where tears and sighs are meant to speak. Here is where the humbled and dolorous embrace alone can express with-ness, solidarity, sympathy. Here the church can speak of the Risen One only as seen in the Crucified One, for the anociative of resurrection is not the anodyne for the experience of death. Here the church can offer solace only in the cry “My God, My God, why…”, in the reiteration of the resignation “Into Thy hands…”. Here society can offer only embrace, only stand by and with as the shadow of death lingers over them that have suffered the loss. Here society can only hope that which the church believes—that the Font of Life from which we spring springs eternal and we within it. Faith may trump resignation. Hope may move us beyond the moment. Only tears and time will fill the gap that once held a life, a life now extinguished. We are mortal. Death demands we not ignore that.
The churches need vest again in black; need sing again Requiem, not Alleluia. Society must turn from celebrating life to mourning its passibility, its ultimate frailty and failing. Death is not proud. Neither ought be we in the face of it. There is a time to weep, to sit silent before the awful end of life. There is a time to acknowledge Death–profoundly.
“Blessed are they that mourn.”