Blessed Are Those Who Mourn

"Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted." So Christ, in the second beatitude, lifts up the grieving, placing them among the poor in spirit, the peacemakers, the merciful, and the pure in heart. Jesus promises that they will be comforted.

People must mourn. Grief heals the suffering caused by loss. But sometimes people get stuck in grief. They are so devastated by their loss that they find themselves in an emotional conundrum which can lead to passivity and even self-destructive behavior. Grief is a bog in which people sometimes wallow.

The comforting of those who grieve is a ministry that has coexisted, largely unchanged, with the other ministries of the church. Grief was seen as a natural emotion that comes with tragedy and is soon put aside. Life, after all, goes on. "Wallow" was not a description of a condition, but a judgment denigrating people when they did not pick up the pieces and go on; they were considered weak and self-indulgent. Comfort was given for a "reasonable" amount of time, but then those people who were stuck in grief were left to suffer alone under the added weight of the stigma that came with not snapping out of it.

Our understanding of grief took giant steps forward during the last few years as it came to be seen as a process. In fact, the resolution of grief is far better understood than are the mechanisms which generate it. Counselors and comforters are available in almost every church to help people move through the phases of grief and to return them to a normal lifestyle. In the best of cases, they begin to work with people even before the grief inducing trauma occurs. When people are already stuck, these counselors are trained to recognize the signs and unstick them. Most importantly, comfort is no longer withheld from those who are stuck in extended grief, and the stigma has been replaced with understanding and compassion.

But there are still people grieving who are both stuck and stigmatized. They are not people with whom one would normally associate grief, but they are grieving nevertheless. They are the poor, the exploited, the politically and economically oppressed people of this country, and I suspect, of other countries as well. The description of symptoms and behavioral responses that have been developed for grieving individuals could as easily be a description of people living in impoverished communities: "Continuing, intermittent denial; physical and psychological pain and distress; compulsion to speak of and to retrieve that which is lost; aimless wandering and restlessness; a feeling of being lost, of not knowing what to do; inability to initiate any activity; a feeling of disorganization; a feeling that life can never be worthwhile again; anger, guilt, shame, helplessness, depression, and hopelessness" (A Time to Grieve, Bertha G. Simos).

That description has been used by many community organizers to describe the attitudes among people in the communities where they work. Many organizers have been stymied by the lack of response in poor communities to what appears to be obvious oppression. I have come to believe that grief is an important element of oppression and that our failure to understand it contributes to our inability to organize some groups of people. Six years ago when I began to work for the Brown Lung Association, I organized and participated in scores of house and organizational meetings. At those meetings we would always go around the room allowing each person sometime to tell their story. People would talk about work, the years they put into the mill, how they had become sick, how the mill and the doctors had treated them when they were sick, and finally, how badly they felt with brown lung disease.

We organizers were always pushing to move ahead with the work of building an organization, but in meeting after meeting, usually after a new person told their story, one by one, everyone in the room would tell his or her story again. This happened not only in organizational meetings, but in meetings with bureaucrats and legislators. One story, told to illustrate the problem, would spontaneously trigger every story in the room whether or not the timing was appropriate or the bureaucrat or legislator interested. Since the attention span of bureaucrats and legislators is very limited, we feared that the rightful demands of the organization would be lost in the midst of the stories.

By early 1977 I had heard some people's stories 20 or 30 times. As a staff we were beginning to wonder if the chain reaction story telling would ever end, especially since we had an important meeting coming up with Eula Bingham, then the head of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Bingham was going to have an important role in creating the cotton dust standard for the protection of textile workers, and the members of the association had carefully prepared to meet with her. We had been warned that her time was limited and that we would do well to be to the point.

In that meeting an amazing thing happened. Bingham came in about 15 minutes late. She told us that she had been held up on the Hill, explaining to a congressional committee why she hadn't been able to clear up in six months five years of negligence under previous administrations. Then she said, "I kept trying to tell them that we weren't talking about machines, but about human lives," and as she looked around the room, she started to cry.

Essie Briggs and Lucy Taylor, officers of the association, tried to get the meeting started, but as each of them rose to speak they too started to cry. In a moment everyone in the room was crying: Bingham, her staff, the Brown Lung Association members, and all the organizing staff. It was five minutes before people could compose themselves enough to speak, and when they had they were direct and to the point, using pieces of their stories to illustrate the association's position rather than as ends in themselves.

After the meeting we were all astounded and proud, for never before had people done so well in a meeting nor impressed any government official so dramatically with their testimony.

I have spent a lot of time reflecting about that meeting because it was a turning point in the life of the association. The people who were at that meeting all continued as leaders in the Brown Lung Association, teaching newer members about the association and how it worked. In my wondering about that meeting I made a connection between it and the pastoral counseling training I had had in seminary. It struck me, finally, that the reason people told their stories over and over again and the reason people who had cried together had changed so dramatically, was that they had all been grieving.

All those meetings in which people repeatedly told their stories were occasions for them to display behavior common to people who are stuck in grief. They had feelings of loss and guilt, hopelessness and helplessness, that combined with their physical pain left them without the strength to work toward resolution. The time we spent listening to their stories and the catharsis of weeping that was triggered by Eula Bingham's tears freed them from the pressing weight and the oppression of their grief. I believe that my experience with the Brown Lung Association is applicable to other impoverished and oppressed communities and that if people look they will find grief playing some role in their organization. The resistance we find among poor people to organizing to free themselves from oppressive circumstances is the end effect of unresolved political grief. And, tragically, the stigma which used to attach itself to people suffering personal grief continues to add to the oppressive burden of grief suffered by the poor. In the first year of the Reagan administration much of the social legislation enacted over the past 50 years was dismantled precisely because poor people are seen as weak and self-indulgent, or unwilling to pick up the pieces of their lives and carry on. The same failure of sympathy that used to characterize people's treatment of individuals stuck in grief is now being applied en masse to the poor, the elderly, the disabled, and the oppressed in this country.

If we accept that the poor are stuck in political grief, then we can understand (as many moderates and conservatives cannot) that no program of self-help can succeed until the process of grieving is worked through.

Consider again, for a moment, the members of the Brown Lung Association; people who worked long hours at low pay, usually with their spouses beside them, earning just enough money to get by. They were proud of the work they did. And after Roosevelt doubled their wages, they were proud of the economic advances they made as a result of their hard work. What happens to people like that when they are slowly incapacitated by a disease that no one can identify; when doctors say to them, "Do you want to work, or do you want to loaf"; when they get so weak that they can't even dress themselves; when, finally, they have to depend on children and welfare just to survive? They are bereaved by the loss of their vitality. Yet no pastor, friend, relative, or organizer can help them deal with the grief since none of these people recognizes it as such. They fail to recognize it because political grief is caused by systemic loss rather than one-time individual loss.

Political grief resembles individual grief but differs in its cause and solution. Political grief is characterized by the persistence of the cause of grief. It is as though someone close to you died every day. The appropriate griefwork must not only apply the process of resolving grief to the group of individuals—it must eliminate the persistent cause of the grief. To successfully resolve political grief, political change must accompany the process of griefwork.

The amount of grief in our impoverished communities is uncharted. While pastors are trained to deal with grief, organizers aren't; and while organizers are trained in effecting systemic change, pastors aren't. Thus the two groups of people most inclined to help are the least able to do so.

To evoke an adequate effort to deal with political grief we are going to have to forge an amalgam of the pastor and the organizer. I would like to make some preliminary suggestions toward this goal.

Pastors and organizers must begin by recognizing the power of grief to paralyze a community of people. Paralyzed by grief, poor people have not responded to incentives offered by government bureaucrats and corporations or to the appeals of organizers. First they must be unstuck from the grief and helped through the grieving process. Griefwork must be made available in communities as it is now available to individuals.

Political grief is another potent reason for solidarity with the poor. Political and economic oppression can in themselves, be resolved by the poor through organization building. Grief, however, requires intervention if the person or group is to become unstuck. In Suffering, Dorothee Soelle talks about solidarity with the suffering as meaning actually going and standing among them. Working with people stuck in political grief is an occasion for solidarity. Thus the first step in resolving political grief is for pastors, organizers, and other faithful people to commit themselves to stand among and beside the poor.

We learned from the brown lung experience that grieving can be a collective process. The repeated telling of people's stories was, in retrospect, the beginning of their becoming unstuck from grief. At the same time those meetings were an opportunity for us to extend our love and care for the members. People I worked with really believed that they could not help themselves because they had too little schooling; after all, they had been called "lintheads" most of their lives. In those meetings, as we listened to people's stories and talked about what to do, we became advocates for their own self-esteem. We insisted that their life experience made them experts; that surviving the mill and building a family was plenty of education; and that it was a work-related disease, not personal failure, that caused their disability.

Developing the tools to help people move through these first two stages of political griefwork is what the pastor has to offer the organizer. It is the organizer, however, who has the resources for teaching pastors how to move groups of people through the third phase of political griefwork.

However many stories we listen to, however much self-esteem we seek to build, as long as the causes of political grief persist so will the effect. Political action aimed at eliminating the causes of the grief is the third phase. Grieving people have to be able to confront the individual and societal structures that are responsible for their bereavement. Seeing things change for the better helps heal people. Members of the Brown Lung Association have been paid $10 million in compensation and have witnessed the initiation of fairly strong health standards for the protection of future generations. They have also forced the principal industry in the region to be accountable in new ways to its employees.

As part of Christian commitment to the least among us we are all called to participate in the resolution of political grief. It is a twofold effort: first to remove the stigma attached to groups of people stuck in grief just as we have removed the stigma attached to individuals who are griefstruck; and second, to commit our resources and concern to standing in solidarity with those stuck in political grief to help them through the phases of resolution.

We Christians have an important choice to make: whether we will participate in the abandonment of the poor or contribute to their liberation by making personal commitments to stand beside them, share their suffering, become advocates for their self-esteem, and find political ways, in which they can participate, of eliminating the systemic causes of their grief and social oppression.

Of all the beatitudes with their promises, only the second, "Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted," does not absolutely depend upon God's intervention for its fulfillment. We can be the agents of comfort for those who mourn, helping fulfill God's promise as well as receiving God's blessings for ourselves. Comfort is something we can give as well as get. By broadening our understanding of grief we broaden our participation in Christ's ministry to those who mourn. We Christians are called to toil in these fields. There is much work and too few comforters.

Michael B. Russell directed the Workers' Rights Project, one of the programs of Southerners for Economic Justice, a grassroots organization in Greenville, South Carolina, when this article appeared.