Mid-Week Inspiration: Wednesday, March 16, 2022
Blessed Are Those Who Mourn
Blessed are those who mourn, for they know grief is the reality of a life that has known love. Blessed are those who mourn because they have found the courage to grieve. They are the ones who know that grief is part of love. We grieve because we love and we have been loved. Blessed are those who mourn because they know that love has been part of their lives and want love to continue.
Blessed are those who mourn because they know the pain of grief cannot be fixed. Grief is as individual as love. Blessed are those who mourn because they have known grief as a love that refuses to turn away.
Deidre Sullivan is an attorney from Brooklyn who participated in NPR’s “This I believe” series with a piece entitled, “Always go to the funeral.”
She said she learned this from her father growing up, having attended the funerals of a few family friends with her parents. For example, when she was sixteen and her fifth-grade math teacher died, she did not want to go, but her father insisted, saying, “Dee, you are going. Always go to the funeral. Do it for the family.”
She went unchaperoned, the only kid there, and stammered out, “I am sorry about all this” in the receiving line, but for twenty years following, she would run into her teacher’s mother, who always shared a knowing and thankful hello.
She came to realize that going to the funeral was about respect, about compassion, about letting one’s own life change its rhythm briefly to accommodate the sorrow of another.
Over the years, Sullivan became somewhat philosophical about her father’s wisdom, saying, “The thing that represents only the inconvenience to me means the world to the other person. Most days, my real battle has not been good versus evil; it’s hardly so epic. Most days, my real battle is doing good versus doing nothing.”
She goes on, “On a cold April night three years ago, my father died a quiet death, and his service was on a Wednesday - midweek. I had been numb for days, when for some reason, during the funeral I turned and looked back at all the folks in the church. The memory of it still takes my breath away. The most human, most powerful, and humbling thing I have ever seen was a church at three o’clock on a Wednesday full of inconvenienced people who believe in going to the funeral.”
Blessed are those who mourn, for they are willing to be inconvenienced for the sake of love.
Jamey
Happening at Gainesville First United Methodist Church
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