for they shall be comforted.
It occurred to me to reread the Sermon on the Mount. I think all the beginning phrases are riddles. I am working on several of them, but I think I understand this one.
For myself, my grief has tended to be expressed as anger. Much of my writing on this blog is motivated by anger. Yes, I think it is righteous anger. Yes, I think my views are mostly correct, and certainly defensible.
But no, I am not really expressing goodness here, most of the time. It may slip through here and there, but most of it is infused with tension I am trying to diffuse.
This is of course a common problem, one which I am likely much less guilty of than most. I am, at least, very reflective. I feel what I am doing, even if I don’t, or even can’t, always stop myself.
But the proper response to grief is sadness. There is such a thing as a happy sadness, an appropriate sadness, a gentle summer rain that on balance feels good and clears the air.
Those who do not allow themselves to feel this sadness, who do not truly mourn, will never be comforted. It will never end.
And I will append a comment that I think the Sermon on the Mount has obviously been monkeyed with. Jesus himself was a law breaker, so why would he counsel his disciples and audience to obey all laws without hesitation? Why was he so worried about divorce?
Throughout the Bible there is signal and there is noise. There is wisdom, and there is stupidity. To my mind, it is not helpful trying to see in that text perfection. As one obvious example, in my understanding the kosher laws about separating meat and milk products (I think it is) comes from a passage that is repeated twice. Since the Bible, in Jewish eyes, is perfect, long ago Rabbinic scholars concluded that the same words must mean two different things, and the contextual logic led to that specific practice.
That, in any event, is my recollection from a series of lectures on Jewish history I listened to a while back.