Mourning in the Company of God
The following is a lightly edited manuscript for a talk I gave on the theme blessed are those who mourn. It was shared along with an imaginative prayer practice for UNDIVIDED at their monthly gathering.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Matthew 5:4
These words are written in view of the raw places where the world is unraveling. The work of mourning is not self-indulgent. It is not navel-gazing or escape. In a time of relentless urgency, attending to the soul is a reorienting disruption within and without.
When we turn inward—not to wall ourselves off, but to become attuned—we deepen our capacity to truly be with one another. To weep with those who weep. To notice what power or convenience tells us isn’t ours to carry or even care about.
Interior attention is how compassion gets shaped. Mourning is a sacred refusal to forget what Love remembers.
Mourning and Weeping
The word Jesus uses in Matthew’s Beatitudes, mourn (pentheō), speaks of deep, spiritual sorrow that leads to transformation. It is mourning in response to our own entanglement in brokenness—an existential, inward grief that opens us to God’s comfort and healing.
But in Luke’s version of the Beatitudes, the weeping is no longer only inward; it is vocal, visible, embodied. Luke uses a different word: to weep (klaiō). This is the present, physical weeping of the poor, the oppressed, the suffering—an urgent, bodily cry of distress for justice and deliverance.
Mourning is an interior posture, often accompanied by tears. Tears are the body’s unspoken testimony—fluid, uncontrollable, born from places too deep for words. They break us open, not just for catharsis, but for theosis: the sacred becoming that transforms us into sharing the likeness of Divine Love.
And yet, for some, like myself, tears may not come so easily. That, too, is holy and is not a sign of failure, but an invitation to gentleness. Mourning may look like stillness, quiet, or simply showing up. The absence of tears is not the absence of sorrow, nor the absence of God. The Spirit groans with us in tearless places.
Visions of mourning
This vision of mourning has woven its way through the centuries of Christian tradition. The desert mothers and fathers spoke of holy tears that soften the heart and open it to God’s love. Not weakness, but grace, what some called a second baptism.
St. Catherine of Siena names five kinds of holy tears in her work The Dialogue: repentance, fear, consolation, compassion, and sublime divine union.
In St. Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercise he describes holy tears as a sign of consolation—a movement toward God that softens and enlarges the soul. He is careful to add that not all tears come from the Spirit. True mourning is not merely emotional, it is spiritual, a movement of the heart toward God.
Our tears are never passive. They can clear our sight so we can begin to notice where we are resisting the demands of love. In mourning we awaken to solidarity, stirring compassion into companionship.
Jesus Mourns
This sacred pattern of grief—holy, embodied, and communal, finds its truest expressions in Jesus himself.
In the Gospel of John, Jesus arrives at the tomb of his friend Lazarus and finds Mary overcome with grief. He did not attempt to explain it away—he entered it. He joined her sorrow with his own. He made her grief his own. This is the kind of blessing of comfort the blessed are promised. It is not the removal of grief, but the nearness of God who joins us graveside before resurrection comes.
This sacred mourning is not a separation from the world’s pain. It becomes the ground where union with God meets solidarity with others.
In Matthew 23 Jesus mourns over Jerusalem. In Luke’s telling he weeps (Luke 19:41–44). This was public, vocal, even foolish-looking lamentation. He wept over the stony hearts of those who preferred religious performance over compassion, humility, and justice—charlatans who made a living off of burdening others with rules they themselves did not keep, who exploited faith for status and control. His lament was grief for a people who could not recognize the visitation of Love in their midst, who clung to power instead of mercy, and who, in guarding the letter of the law, had forsaken its spirit. This is not an isolated moment.
Again at the crucifixion Jesus weeps in his dying, crying out to God asking for forgiveness on the behalf of those who murdered him because they do not know what they do. In my holy imagination I hear him saying, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do to themselves.” They may know what they are doing for the state, for the religious authorities. But they do not (yet) see how this dehumanizing act is also a violence against their own souls. Jesus’ companionship with his enemies takes my breath away. Even as they strip him of dignity, he insists on theirs.
Where are our tombs today? Who weeps there alone? What does it look like to bear witness with tears that refuse to look away or let grief be hidden? We live in a world of interrupted breath. A world where mothers mourn children lost to violence and starvation, where the land itself groans with drought and fire. Jesus wept. And Jesus still weeps in every place where life-snatching harm is made ordinary and inevitable and the world looks away. Mourning is a holy refusal to grow numb. A holy refusal to turn away. And a holy remembering of what Love refuses to forget.
Attending to our own souls
Mourning is also a holy attention to our own souls. This is why I’m so moved by the story of Abba Arsenius—the weeping monk. He was a Roman tutor to Emperor Theodosius I sons in the 4th century. A man of power who was compelled by God and chose the desert instead to live a life of silence, simplicity, and spiritual surrender.
It was said of him that he had a hollow in his chest channeled out by the tears which fell from his eyes all his life while he sat at his manual work. When Abba Poemen learned that he was dead, he said weeping, ‘Truly you are blessed, Abba Arsenius, for you wept for yourself in this world!’ (Arsenius, 41)1
To weep so often that even your chest remembers? This is tenderness etched in bone. Abba Arsenius’s tears weren’t performative. They were steady. Unrelenting. A lifelong outpouring of sorrow, repentance, and holy longing.
But more than sorrow, his tears became communion. They were not just for God, they were with God. Each tear a prayer. Each fall of water a softening. And the hollow that formed in his chest? A wound of love etched by years of yielding to the Presence that does not dismiss, but remains. His life, like so many of the desert mystics, reminds me that mourning is not dramatic. It is faithful.
To mourn is to make space for transformation. Like water on stone, softened not by force but by time, patience, and presence. Mourning becomes the meeting ground where God steps into our sorrow not to erase it, but to carve through it an opening for tenderness and communion.
Comfort is not the end of mourning. It is the nearness of God—and the strength to stand alongside others in sorrow, refusing to let grief be forgotten.
A Prayer of Blessing
You have kept count of my tossings, O God.
You have gathered my tears in your bottle.
Are they not written in your book?
(Psalm 56:8)
God who mourns,
You do not erase our sorrow.
You meet us in it
not to fix or dismiss,
but to remain beside us.
You are the One who blesses those who mourn
who weeps with us,
who lingers graveside,
who listens without turning away,
who holds with us what we cannot carry alone.
May we know your nearness
in each other,
and in our tears.
CANCELED
Pentecost Creative Attention
If this speaks to something stirring in you, and you’d like to explore it through drawing and erasing, I’d love to invite you to the next Creative Attention on Sunday night, June 8 at 7pm EST. We’ll be anchored in themes of wholeness, attention, rhythms as we continue in celebrate the feast day of Pentecost with tears and with joy.
You can sign up below.
If you’re navigating financial strain or job loss and would like to join, I’d love to offer you a spot—just send me a message.