Allowed to feel

Kathy Escobar strikes writes again. Her post on the second beatitude "blessed are those who mourn" is worth to read! (If you don't know her and her blog yet, you can do so immediately here (her) and here (her blog)! :))

Here some of the latest post. She says it so well.

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i consider mourning allowing ourselves to feel hurt, sorrow, anger, loss, and grief. along with spiritual poverty in the first beatitude, it implies a softness of heart and an openness to feel. i believe strongly that in contemporary christian culture, the whole idea of mourning is far underrated.

i had been around the block for long enough to know that if i didn't--if i stuffed it and pretended it didn't hurt as much as it did and refused to allow myself to feel the magnitude of the pain-- it would come back to bite me like it had before. so i let myself mourn. cry. feel anger. express my sadness and loss.

Jesus is familiar with pain. he can hack it.

the question is--can we?

my experience has been that so many people i know--especially conservative christians--have a lot of trouble expressing sadness, sorrow, pain, and loss. i can only speak from my own experience and what many people have shared along the way, but i think a big reason behind it is "good Christians" somehow aren't supposed to be filled with all these difficult emotions. if we trusted enough, prayed enough, believed enough, claimed enough, then we wouldn't be feeling these things. so we stuff. we pretend. we hide. we try to will it to go away. we overwork. we do all kinds of crazy, unhealthy stuff to numb out that in the end causes us far more trouble than actually mourning.

there is so much freaking pain in this world, in our cities, in our neighborhoods, in our faith communities, in our own families. to me, part of living this beatitude out requires that we become people willing to stay in touch with pain.

it means we will have to first get in touch with our own pain & allow ourselves to mourn and feel.

we can become people & communities who learn to lament and grieve. to create a safe container for others mourning. to honor and welcome pain & loss instead of offer quick fixes & hyper-spiritualized-solutions. to hold our friends hand in the dark & let them hold ours when we need it too.