“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”
Matthew 5:4
Last week I used this space to write about anger. This week I want to take a look at its relative: Grief. The two usually dwell near each other. Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross noticed this connection and identified anger as one of the five stages grief. Grief is our response to loss. Anger is one of the ways we express that grief. Our loss occasions the reactive, adrenalin-soaked reflex of anger. Yet when that adrenalin dissipates, and if we have not done permanent damage because of that reflex, we usually return to the quieter, persistent, energy sucking, dull ache of grief. Here we meditate on what is gone and is probably not coming back. Here we let go of something. Here we make decisions about whether we want to get up and keep living.
In some ways, anger is a diversion from the hard work of grief. I think Psalm 137 is one of the best examples of this dynamic. It is a prayer that moves easily between the dull ache and the rage that can characterize our loss. By the waters of Babylon, the Psalmist weeps over the loss of home, the loss of the familiar moorings that used to bring comfort. The walls of Jerusalem have fallen, the temple has been destroyed and now in exile in Babylon the psalmist contemplates his loss. His new neighbors are asking some questions about his old home. They want to hear some of the songs he knows. But the grief is too deep for him to even attempt to carry one of those tunes. Songs have the power to make us cry. And even the distant memory of these songs brings him to tears. So he refuses to sing and the fire of rage starts to well up within him.
“How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” Don’t treat me like a fixture of some interesting far off culture that no longer exists. You took away my ability to sing when you tore down the place where I do my singing. So no, I won’t sing one of our songs for you. In fact, “Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth.” And then he prays, “Remember, O Lord….” Remember how they tore down our walls. Remember their acts of destruction. I hate them because they deserve to be hated. “O daughter Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us. Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock.”
More often than not when Psalm 137 is read publicly, this last bit is left out. In fact, even the common lectionary chooses not to include it. Its seething rage and venom-filled longing for retribution and reprisal is embarrassing. Reasonable people don’t say such things. So if we feel it, God help us not to act on it. God help us to take the path of the Psalmist in Psalm 4 who chooses to step back from acting on his wrath. But we do feel it. And we are fools if we do not own it. For the attempt to keep this anger a secret from ourselves and others is futile. As James Loder used to say: “the secret secretes.” It will ooze out somewhere, and God help us if that shows itself only in violent acts that we believe to be expressions of righteous indignation.
I take some solace in the fact that in response to the waywardness of the religious systems of Jerusalem, Jesus both angrily turned over the tables of the money changers in the temple and quietly wept as he pondered the tragedy of sheep who had walked away from their shepherd. The one who asked us to consider the lilies had some trouble considering them. But he also showed us how to step back and weep. He showed us the power of lament. This man of sorrows was acquainted with grief. He took up the freedom of allowing himself to sit with that grief.
It is a mystery as to how this happens, but there is healing power in the broken heart of God. Allowing ourselves to feel the pain of those things that break the heart of God and crying out to God in lament because of those things is something that opens us to comfort and healing. Those who mourn are blessed because they find comfort in something other than their perceived solution to a wrong they have suffered. They find comfort in the one who made them for himself and in a love that will never let them go.
David Rohrer
10/24/2020