You yourself a sword will pierce so that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed. (Lk 2:35)
My mother grew up in a devout Catholic home, the third of six children. To escape the hardship of a country under dictatorship rule, all six, along with their mother, emigrated to the United States in the hopes of a better life. In terms of freedom from tyranny and poverty, those hopes came to fruition for my mother. But it wasn’t long before she started suffering in another way: as a young adult, she developed rheumatoid arthritis which caused debilitating pain throughout her body. Later she suffered cardiovascular disease, requiring her to undergo open heart surgery, and eventually, an amputation, which finally led to her death. She was always considered the “sick” and “frail” one in our family. Poor Ma.
Now her younger sister—that was my “cool” aunt. In their youth, the two women looked so much alike that people mistook them for twins. But as they got older, while my mother was becoming more and more frail, my aunt retained her young and healthy glow. My aunt always had lots of energy to participate in all the activities her children were involved in. To this day, well into her eighties, my aunt texts, drives, gardens, whips up delicious meals, and she’s just beautiful.
The thing is, under all that energy and beauty is a woman who has experienced suffering unlike anything my mother had ever known: two stillbirths and an adult daughter who died of cancer. If anyone were to ask my mother which of their two crosses in life she would choose if she could go back and do it again, she would pick the one that she had already endured, hands down.
Blessed are they who mourn, for they will be comforted. (Mt 5:4)
Now as much as my mother objectively had the “easier” cross to bear, Jesus never said, “Blessed are they who suffer from rheumatoid arthritis and cardiovascular illness.” But He did say, “Blessed are they who mourn.” Does that mean my mother wasn’t blessed? Of course not. It’s just that the reason she was blessed was not because she was sick and in pain, but because she was poor in spirit. Her poverty of spirit no doubt grew as a result of her illness and pain, but the illness and pain itself was not the reason for blessing. After all, we all know plenty of people who are sick or in pain who are bitter and grouchy! If anything, grouchiness is the normal human reaction to pain and illness. So while pain and illness can make one blessed, hardly does it guarantee it.
But not so with mourning. Mourning, unlike pain or illness, doesn’t lead to a poverty of spirit which then makes one blessed. According to Jesus, the mourning itself is the cause of blessing. Unlike other kinds of suffering which lead us to be poor in spirit, mourning doesn’t need our consent to be led there because it is a suffering that immediately and decisively crushes our spirit, whether or not we accept it or are willing participants. In fact, most of us would do anything to avoid it!
If we have any distinct concept of blessedness connected with mourning, it could likely have been that it is a blessed thing to be rid of it. Are not mourners by widely accepted definition the unhappy ones? Obviously, if a mourner is blessed, then it has to mean that he is blessed to have gotten out of this painful predicament, to have escaped from this sorrowful situation, to have fended off suffering. And so we might well have written the third Beatitude like this: Blessed are they who enjoy the comfort of not having anything to mourn about. But then we run up against the hard fact that this is just not what Christ said…We shall have to deal with the words that our blessed Savior uttered and not with the words that we think He ought to have uttered. —Mother Francis, PCC
So let’s try to understand why mourning should be a cause of blessing, when it is the thing in life we most loathe to endure. When I shared with my husband my thoughts about how my mother would compare her suffering to that of her sister’s, he said, “Yes, but your aunt would not have had it any other way.” You see, because she outlived her forty-nine-year-old daughter, my aunt was there to care for her child in the last year of her life as the cancer ravaged her body, little by little. It was an unimaginable sorrow to see her child in such agony—just as it was for Our Lady as she witnessed the agony of her Son—but not for one moment did my aunt wish that she had not lived to be there for her. It was her suffering that made the suffering of my cousin bearable. She was able to do for her what no one else could. She was able to provide the comfort that only a mother can in a circumstance that was unimaginable. It was the one gift she could give, the one thing she could do.
Mary, Mother of God, was indeed blessed among women. She was “poor in spirit,” “meek,” “righteous,” “merciful,” and a “peacemaker” (Mt 5:3-10), but it was her mourning that brought blessing to the Savior when nothing else could. Her suffering eased His pain. And if she had to do it all over again, we can conclude, she wouldn’t change a thing. She wouldn’t avoid watching her Son suffer, just so she wouldn’t have to suffer herself. Mary was humbled by being chosen for the singular honor of Mother of God. But she was grateful to be there when God needed her most. In the irony of all ironies, it was her mourning, and not just her maternity, that ended up being the greatest blessing for Jesus, just as His was the greatest blessing for all of us. That’s why we pray to enter into that mourning with Mary. That’s why we don’t want to avoid it or look away. By meditating on Christ’s passion and Mary’s sorrow, we bring soothing comfort to them both, just as surely as if we stood there with them at Calvary. We ourselves become blessed because we are a blessing to them.
And so this is the great secret that is mourning: the sorrow that we experience at the loss of our loved ones is the very testimony we have to the love that lies in our hearts. And friends, love never dies. If we have experienced mourning, that is a sure sign to us that our loved one is with us, always in our hearts.
We are blessed indeed.
So faith, hope, love remain, these three; but the greatest of these is love. (1 Cor 13:13)
Bouguereau, W. A. (1876). Pietà [painting]. Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons.
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