The Way of Mourning: A Corrective Alternative
There is so much to mourn in the world. Outbreaks of violence, the persistent ravages of poverty and injustice, all deserve grief on the way towards actions combatting them.We find it hard, of course, to keep up with the collective reports of the grievous state of humanity. There's too much to be born along, and we have neither the shoulders for the weight, or the skill in mourning to keep up. We've developed other skills instead. We deflect the grief with a variety of tactics, to various degrees of success.One road is to bypass the grief of the bad we see and experience today and to convert it immediately into fear for what could be tomorrow. This is the anxious way, one that looks past the present in exchange for fears—valid and unfounded—about what will come next. Too much of this is recognized as an emotional disorder, which plagues some 3 percent of the population, but of course many, many people live on a spectrum of anxiety about the future.Another path for dealing with the grievous reports we hear is the path of cynicism. Pop cynicism responds to bad news with mockery. It seeks neither to persuade or to provoke action—cynicism is not an outlet to change anything, but rather a style of reacting to things in a way that deflects responsibility. Cynicism says "There is nothing to be done by folks like me—the powers that be will continue to mess things up." Which may be true, to some great degree, but the cynic's route not only experiences disempowerment, but it actually chooses powerlessness as though it were virtue. It scoffs. It deflects. But it neither acts nor mourns, inserting a buffer of wit between itself and every problem.In world with overwhelming evil, cynicism is a pretty attractive option. It's a way of getting by. It allows people to live in a messed up world without feeling the struggle, and without entailing themselves in the responsibilities of action which take and take, sometimes without meaningful feedback of progress.
Grief is the sadness provoked by some negative event or state—whether personal losses or losses that we experienced empathically for others. Grief is something that comes to us, passively, whether we ask for it or not. It knocks on the door. But it can be deferred, which I think is a way of converting grief into anxiety. Or of course, it can just be sent away, deflected with cynicism.I suggest that an alternative to these ways lies in part in the practice of mourning. When we mourn, grief that we've received passively becomes something we actively experiences. We engage our grief, and express it. We lament and protest, shout, cry or weep. We actively feel, and do something with what we feel—maybe not in a way that definitely resolves the problem or loss at hand, but which converts some of that feeling, potential energy into doing movement in the world.I've been thinking more and more about mourning as a missing piece of our public discourse—there is much grief, to be sure, and too many occasions that bring about actual public mourning ceremonies. But the actual skill of mourning itself seems too distant from us as a people. Instead, we seem much more prone to defer and deflect the grief that comes our way by taking the paths of anxiety and cynicism. The story is of course more complicated and serves more nuance than I'm giving it here—fear, and the cynic's subversion of power both have a part to play in a healthy world I suppose, and a mix of them with the sort of mourning I'm thinking of is probably what we all need. Nonetheless, it seems to me that the mix is off, and we need a corrective of more mourning, and less fearfulness and less cynicism.As counterintuitive as it may be, we might all be better off with some proper laments.
(Some of my thinking about this was provoked by thinking through the sermon below.)