Blessed are Those who Mourn

Of all the Beatitudes - this surely is the one that sounds strangest to our ears.

Blessed are those who mourn.

In the face of all that we know about human suffering and have experienced of human suffering, those words can sound terribly glib to our ears.

Blessed are those who mourn.

How? We might well ask. How are they blessed?

Where’s the blessing for the widower standing beside a grave, or the mother burying her child, or the man or woman who feels for a spell that their whole world is collapsing because of something that’s happened to them?

Where’s the blessing for those who mourn?

We might find ourselves silently seething at Jesus’ words. For a while at least.

And then we might remember the time he took himself away to a lonely place when he discovered his cousin John had been executed by Herod. Beheaded for the sake of an old man’s pride and lust. Or the time he stood at a tomb and wept because his friend Lazarus had died. Or the time his own mother stood at the foot of the cross, watching the embers slowly dying in her son’s eyes.

Blessed are those who mourn

However strange those words sound, they’re birthed out of all the pain of human experience. And it’s wise to remember that this morning, as we begin to try and understand just how those who mourn can be considered blessed.


When we think about mourning in our culture – quite naturally, the first thing we think about is death and bereavement. And I’ve never found the pain of that particular kind of loss better expressed than in this poem by Kathy Galloway, who composed it on the death of her mother. It’s called “You were here, and now you are not”.

There is nothing to compare with the pain of death.
You were here, and now you are not.
That’s all.

I search for you in old photographs, letters,
Things that you touched,
Things that remind me of you,
But they cannot fill the space you occupied.

The space is in me too,
Bleeding round the edges where you were torn away.

In the night, strange shapes haunt the space….
Regret, fear, fury,
All the things we might have done.
All the shattered dreams.

How can I go on with this hole inside me?
Partial person!
Don’t let me fill the space with the wrong things.
Don’t let me cover it up,
To eat me from within.

Give me courage to bear my emptiness,
To hold it gently
Till the edges stop bleeding;
Till the darkness becomes friendly;
Till I see the star at its heart;
Till it becomes a fertile space,
Growing new life within it.
If I had not loved, I would not have wept.
This love you have given me;
This love I have carried;
This love has carried me.

And I know that though I cannot see you, touch you,
The love does not go away.
Carried by this love,
We are not divided.
And there will be no more weeping.


Until you’ve experienced it, and we all will at some point, there’s no way to sum up the pain of bereavement.

It comes to us in different ways- for some, the mourning starts long before death as we watch a loved one decline mentally or physically. For others, it comes with a terrible suddenness through illness or tragedy.

For a spell everything seems unreal, then too real. We find it hard to focus, we feel numb. We struggle to function. We find great support and solace from the folk around us, but we know too that in a few short weeks, or even days, they’ll return to their normal lives while we’ll still be carrying the pain of our loss.

With time, and prayer, the pain diminishes and the scars heal over. But the emptiness remains with us. And we must reckon with it.

Give me courage to bear my emptiness, Kathy Galloway says.
To hold it gently
Till the edges stop bleeding;
Till the darkness becomes friendly;
Till I see the star at its heart;

She’s asking for help to find the blessing for those who mourn; the star at the heart of her empty darkness.

And in the next verse she begins to realise what that blessing might be, and where her comfort might come from. She says:

“If I had not loved. I would not have wept”.

She’s realising that the measure of her pain is also the measure of her love. She only feels such sorrow because she’s been so richly blessed in her mother.

The loss is terrible, but the loss itself awakens her to the reality and strength and selflessness of love, both human and divine. And that, in the middle of her darkness, gives her a star of hope to navigate by. A star that can guide us, like the wise men of old, into the presence of God,

Is that the blessing for those who mourn, maybe? That in the displacement and sorrow that mourning brings, we realise how fragile life is, and how much we need the comfort our eternal, compassionate God promises us?

Eugene Peterson thinks so – he translates this beatitude with these words:

"Blessed are you when you feel you've lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the One most dear to you"

As I’ve thought about this strange beatitude this week, one of the things I’ve come to understand is that mourning, in all its shapes and forms, is not always about death, but it is always about loss.

That came out in the brainstorm. People find themselves mourning for a host of different reasons.

For some, it’s the irretrievable breakdown of a relationship. After years of investment in a marriage, a couple decide they have to go their separate ways. After years of loving care, a son or a daughter makes some bad choices and cuts off all lines of communication. After years of friendship, things turn sour somehow and the relationship’s spoiled. And we mourn the loss of the way things were.

For others, it’s their hopes and dreams that they mourn. The life partner who never materialised; the child who never came safely to term; the relationship that seemed to offer so much but didn’t deliver; the job that held such promise but proved to be a dead end. The painful loss of things that now can never be,

Others find themselves mourning because of the kinds of things they see going on around them in the world. Milton wrote of Paradise Lost, and even a cursory glance at the papers or the news reminds us daily how far we are from paradise. And on a more local level, if I had a pound for every time people tell me things were better in the old days, I’d be a wealthy man. Folk mourn for changes in the way of life that nurtured them, and the countryside and the villages in which they grew up. We’ve lost something compared to those days, they feel.

And still others mourn because we seem to have lost God in our part of the world. You don’t need me to rehearse that story. Where are the young people? Where are our own children on a Sunday morning? Why don’t they feel the same way about faith as we do? Do you remember the days when this or that church organisation was bursting at the seams?

And maybe, in some of us, there’s an even deeper sense of loss which says “And you know what – I’ve been in the church all my life, and I still don’t feel as close to God as I’d like to or as I ought to. I can’t seem to shake off the flaws and sins that hold me back. Sometimes I wonder if God’s wasting his time on me, or whether I’m wasting my time on him”.

Mourning is all about a sense of loss –

Regret, fear, fury,
All the things we might have done.
All the shattered dreams.

And though Kathy Galloway’s words are about bereavement, they could just as well be about any of those situations I’ve just described:

There isn’t one of us here who isn’t, in some deep place, mourning for something.

This morning, in this beatitude, Jesus is announcing that blessing comes, even in those places. There is a star at the heart of that darkness.

Following it will take time and faith, but if you can find the courage to do so, you will find the comfort that Christ promises.

I want to finish with another poem that’s dear to me. It’s by the French Priest and Palaentologist Teilhard de Chardin and it’s called Slow Work. And I offer this as a promise of God’s comfort to everyone here today who needs that particular blessing. Whatever the nature of your loss, these words are for you.


Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are, quite naturally,
impatient in everything to reach the end
without delay.

We should like to skip
the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being
on the way to something unknown,
something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability –
and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you.
Your thoughts change gradually –
Let them grow,
let them shape themselves
without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today
what time and grace and circumstances
will make you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
And accept the anxiety of
feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.


Let us pray

God, in our mourning and our loss,
we know, perhaps more than ever, that we are incomplete.

Help us not to hide it, but to own it.
Not to evade it, but face up to it,
Because you promise us a blessing, even in our loss.

As our frailty becomes clear,
Reassure us with your strength.
As our brokenness comes into the light,
Continue your slow work of healing,
And bring us,
By the light of a friendly star,
To the comfort and rest that are found
In your presence alone.

Hear us because we ask all these things in the name of your Son, Jesus Christ,
The Suffering Servant and The Risen Lord.
Amen