Holy Mourning

Living in a social networking world I think it is interesting that mourning continues to be a private matter. For the most part people don't know how to interact with mourners. The setting is akward and unfriendly. While working at DMH and even at UMCH I dealt with mourning in different settings. The first of course was in a hospital setting. Mourning happened and as an intern I glimpsed into the sadness of the world. Unfortunatley I carried that sadness around with me. Wondering when the last hug would be or the last meaningful conversation. I was not good at seperating myself from the grief.

At UMCH I worked with a different type of mourner. Since I was working with emotionally sick teenagers the mourning was more like a living state of being. These kids were stuck in a stage of mourning. Mourning their lives because they wern't 'normal'. Mourning because their mom's and dad's abandoned then, abused them, or ignored them.

As I was reading Winner's chapter on the discipline of mourning I found myself opening this discipline to all kinds of mourning. Mourning a lost job, a lost dream, a lost faith, a lost role, a lost identity. Winner recognizes that mourning is not a strong point of the modern day church.

The church is bad at mourning because, "while you the mourner are still bawling your eyes out and slamming fists into the wall, everyone else, understandably, forgets and goes back to their normal lives and you find, that you are left alone. You are without the church, and without a church vocabulary for what happens to the living after the dead are dead."(27-28).

The church has never dealt with mourning. Part of it is the way the church is structured. I know that our church has a commitee to organize funeral dinners, but beyond that, we are unequipped to deal with mourning. We don't have a follow up program, or a team of people who attends to the mourner.

The Jewish people were intentional about their mourning. While the mourner was struck by the shock of their family members death, the community came in and took care of everything. Everything seems intentional, even the mourner's process of grief. The mourner's "neighbors bring food. At the first meal after the funeral-called the seudat havra'ah, of the meal of recovery-the mourner is meant to eat an egg, whose obvious circular fertility is to begin the slow work of reminding the bereaved that she will live."(30)

The Jewish mourner has a calender which they stick too. The first week, the first month, and the first year. All these times are intentional for the mourner as they continue to seperate themselves from their loss and back into a more ordinary routine of life.

Through this year the mourner is required to say the Kaddish twice a day. The mourner cannot say this prayer alone, he/she has to be within the community.

The prayer is this, "Blessed, praised, glorified, exalted, extolled, mighty, unpraised, and lauded be the Name of the Holy One, Blessed is He, beyond any blessing or song."

The mourner is called to do the Kaddish so that "even in the pit, even in depression and loss and nonsense, still we respond to God with praise. This is not to say that the mourner should not feel what he feels-anger, disbelief, hatred. He can feel those things (and shout them out to God; God can take it). You do not have to feel praise int he intense moments of mourning, but the praise is still true, and insisting upon it over and over twice a day every day, ensures that eventually you will come to remember the truth of those praises."(36)

The church can learn a lesson or two from the Jewish discipline of mourning. We can start being more involved in the loss of our Christian brother's and sisters. We can start to admit that the loss of a person, a job, an idenity, a role, or a relationship can truly damage a person's faith. We can start being the community that can take a damaged person and help them find healing.

Let us not let the akwardness of pain and grief come between our love for the church.