Radical Hospitality For Those Who Mourn

Artwork by Erin Ware

A conversion of events led me to dig up an essay I wrote for a Lenten devotional in our previous church in Austin. The coming two Sundays in Epiphany we'll focus on Jesus' most famous sermon, known as the Beatitudes, which contain this stunning promise: "Blessed are they who mourn for they shall be comforted."

Secondly, throughout January at Church of the Apostles, Brian's been proclaiming Jesus' invitation to follow Him in a life marked by radical hospitality. I remembered this idea of mourning with those who mourn as one of the most radical acts of hospitality we can ever offer and retrieving the language of lament one of the most compelling invitations we can ever speak.

The third event that led me to share this devotional piece is that in less than a month we'll be entering Lent, a season that makes space for us to consider our own and the world's suffering and sin as we remember Jesus' journey toward the cross. If you've followed my blog for a while you may remember that each year during Holy Week each year, I invite seven friends to share their own mourning stories as a way to help us imagine our own stories in a new light of retrieving lament in order to mourn well with those who mourn.

This year, I want to invite you, the Sacramental Life Patreon community, to provide those stories during Holy Week. Throughout February, I'll offer you simple invitations to consider the stories of your life through the lens of mourning with those who mourn.

For today, here's the story of a woman who refused the hospitality we tried to offer her in her devastation. I wish I at least knew her name because I'll never forget her.

We stood in the driveway, dumbfounded.  

For days we’d walked from house to flooded house, mud-caked boots tracking the streets of our river-soaked small town. Those of us with dry homes banded together offering our hands and feet, pick-up trucks and prayers. Not one person had refused our help -- until now.

Here we stood, flustered by the stubbornness of one elderly woman. She sat at the curb, inside her four-door sedan, engine running, windows closed.

We tapped on the glass, "Can we go into your house with you and help you clean out?"  

She pushed the lever to lower the window a crack, shook her head, smiled politely. "No, thank you. It's too messy. I don't want anyone to see it."

Nothing we offered changed her mind. I could tell she was ashamed, of what I do not know. She did allow us to pray with her, but what do you say? God help this elderly woman to have the supernatural strength to muck out two stories of her house all by herself. To comfort herself. To be OK all by herself.

It didn’t seem to be the right words, but what could we do? We prayed something through the partially-opened window and, unwelcome, walked away.  

The truth is we were offering more than a clean-up crew; we were offering also companionship for her despair. When she sent us away we both missed out on comfort for mourning.

We were offering to enter her experience, to join her in the physical indignity of all her belongings strewn and smelly. But our offer could do nothing without her invitation into the wreckage. Really, she needed to be open to the indignity of suffering because mourning isn’t dignified, airbrushed, or photo-shopped. Mourning is guttural, physical, visceral, sloppy, and often, embarrassing. 

Mourning with those who mourn is an act of welcome.  An invitation to the wounded to feel sorrow, fear, anger, despair, and loss without judgment.  We mourn with those who mourn when we resist the urge to impose on the suffering one a need to see a silver lining or grand plan. The mourner shares in the act when she invites others to eat with her the bread of suffering.

The mourner’s gift of radical hospitality allows others to enter barefoot -- or, in the case of that sad woman in my hometown with mud-caked boots -- into her mess.

It occurs to me all these years later, now that the houses have been cleaned out or torn down that I do not know what happened to the woman in the sedan. And her story is so small compared to the fresh disasters and tragedies wreaking havoc across the globe every day.  Like all of our neighbors influenced by the logical and enlightened Western civilization, we had little to offer that woman in the way of mourning rituals. In our culture, we wander the outskirts of grief, purchasing candles for roadside shrines because we know so few mourning rituals. People groups across time and space planned for grief, cultivating communal acts of suffering. In North America, our cultural responses to tragedy sound more like shocked indignation than liturgies of lament.  

It seems that for us to be present in this age we will need to regain a communal language and posture for mourning. We will need to re-read Lamentations and Job, re-tune our worship anthems in a minor key, reject sympathetic slogans as a substitute for silence, and remember the physical postures of mourning with those who mourn.

In hindsight, I’d like to think our dusty fingers marked the glass of that idling sedan as a reminder that she was not alone in her grief. With the barely-opened window, she offered a minor welcome into her mourning, our whispered prayer a mutual invitation of comfort for her suffering days ahead.