If I was a bird, I'd go out on a limb, shake off my wings and get off the grid. Carlos Arzate

Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.  Matthew 5:4

So yesterday afternoon I was ripping through some books from next year’s curriculum in the waiting room, waiting for Wali to get out of surgery. And one of the books I had been planning to dump was Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, a book that the eleven-year-old me had remembered as being pretty dopey.  

Probably because I didn’t get it.  

“We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?”

Somehow Fahrenheit 451 rang more frightenly accurate than all of the other dystopia novels on our to-read lists such as the 1984s and Brave New Worlds sorts.  Because the evil is quiet and unarticulated and from within.  Because the people were too comfortable and distracted to ever be bothered.  About something important and real.  

And of course Fahrenheit 451 feeds my deep set resentment of television inherited from my parents and confirmed once again as mom and I flipped through more than a hundred cable stations in our last-night-in-Montana hotel last week and found nothing deemed worthy of even being background noise.  So we read.  Which keeps both Ray Bradbury and myself employed, so there could be a bit of self-preservation in our copped ‘tude.

People want to be happy, isn't that right? Haven't you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well, aren't they? Don't we keep them moving, don't we give them fun? That's all we live for, isn't it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these. All to the heart-grinding keyboard soundtrack rolling in the background. And our preoccupations are very full of real people cooking and buying and traveling and styling.  Except they aren’t so real, really. We can’t love them.  Not in the Jesus way.  The Jesus way is not distant and not sliced and diced and not by-the-way-can-you-click-on-my-link love. The Jesus love costs; the Jesus love hurts.  

And Jesus declares that the Spirit of the LORD is upon Him, and that He is anointed to comfort those who mourn, to pour the oil of gladness over their head and into their hurts and bring true healing. 

For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death.

The repentance in Fahrenheit 451, turning and seeing life in a new light, led to a salvation of sorts, in that if you drown, at least die knowing you were heading for shore, while worldly grief was a dark, unarticulated pain that did indeed produce death, death by overdose of sleeping pills, death by driving just a little too fast, death by disappearance. 

And what a blessed happiness it is indeed, to mourn, to feel the pain of a broken world including me, if Jesus is the One who gathers me up under His wings and comforts me.  

It’s the real thing.

Wretched

Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.  Matthew 5:4

Keeping with the context and flow of this passage, this is not a mourning over loss or circumstances, but those who mourn for their sins.   Too often we brush by our broken state, sprinkling grace and forgiveness a bit too glibly.  It is one thing to admit our spiritual poverty; the next step is to grieve over it.  “Oh wretched man that I am, who will free me from this life that is dominated by sin and death.”

Unless we confess our sin with tears and heartbreak, the great gift of love from God is diminished.  But ah, the comfort: There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.  We do not have to live in our lonely hut of mourning.  Last night, Alan and I watched Get Low about a man who chose to live in wretchedness, an isolated hut with broken windows and Keep Out signs.  He had committed a great sin that resulted in the flaming death of the one love of his life.  A priest had told him the Truth, to confess his sin to God and man, and live in peace.  But he clung to mourning rather than God’s comfort.  Only after thirty bitter years did he accept the warm embrace of forgiveness.

The dinner conversation with Jack and Mary Anne drifted to another mourning that needs to take place, the American church’s need to repent.  How hard our heart has become- how profoundly we have disgraced the name of our LORD.  And this indeed is a corporate sin. 

Let not those who hope in you be put to shame through me, Lord GOD of hosts; let not those who seek you be disgraced because of me.  Psalm 69:7