Glory Comes in the Mourning

You’ve heard it said: Joy comes in the morning. But sometimes it feels like the morning will never come.

Something I love about the way the world works is that you can always count on morning. It will come with its day breaking light, even if hidden by clouds. No matter how long the night feels like it’s taking, you can be assured it won’t last forever.

This makes for a good metaphor in our lives. St. John of the Cross used the phrase ‘dark night of the soul’ to describe our seasons of anguish. Sometimes it feels that the darkness is overstaying its welcome.

Maybe it’s personal, or maybe it’s the state of the world. Maybe it’s grief, loss, or suffering in any area of our lives, or maybe we don’t even know why we are experiencing the torment of nagging, dragging darkness. We all go through seasons where it would be fake to act joyfully. The light just won’t seem to come.

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These dark times are the times for lament. Lament is when we are no longer confused about or scared of the reality of darkness, and so we let God have a piece of our minds about it. Lament sounds like, God, it isn’t right that your people die of diseases, poverty, and the hand of one another. Lament sounds like, God, the world is hurting and I am suffering and it doesn’t look like you’re doing much about it! Lament sounds like, Why, God?! and How long, O Lord?! Lament sounds like tears or silence when there are no more words.

Lament isn’t rude or disrespectful toward God. Lament is a biblical practice, and God isn’t offended by it because God already knows the reality of the pain in the world. Lament is a sacred form of truth-telling that gets us on the same page as God. Lament means we’re not going to pretend everything is okay when it’s not.

A lot of people are scared of lament because we’re afraid it will make us look faith-less. Yet nothing could be farther from the truth. When we admit what is wrong with the world, that implies two faithful things. One, it means we know the difference between justice and injustice. We know how the world should be according to God’s love, but we rightly discern the effects of sin. Secondly, it inherently means we know God should and can do something about it. We are brave enough to tell God about it because we know only God can fix it. Lament is despair but not without hope.

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Seasons of darkness and lament don’t offer much by way of joy. But when we lament and mourn, we are binding ourselves to truth. And truth makes way for the glory of God.

Glory is one of those words that is used all over the Bible and all over churches, and yet we have a hard time putting a definition on it. Sometimes God’s glory is about God’s splendor, majesty, and honor. Sometimes it’s refers to God’s reputation and fame. Often the Bible uses “the glory of God” to get at the revelation or realization of God’s reality. No matter how exactly, God’s glory is always in some way marked by God’s presence.

If you ask those of us who grew up Pentecostal, “the glory of the Lord” probably would make us think about the moments that were marked by a weighty awareness of God’s presence with us. The glory of God is when God reveals God’s own Self to the creation and makes the Divine presence known. God’s glory is experiencing the reality that God truly is Emmanuel, the God who is with us.

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So I have come to think about glory as God’s ‘with-us-ness.’ And, perhaps more than anything else in the whole world, I am thankful that God’s with-us-ness does not only come with the morning light. God’s with-us-ness endures through the night, sticks close by in the darkness, and stubbornly stays in our messiness.

Before the joy and the morning ever come, the presence of God is to be found in our mourning. And— let’s be very clear— God’s presence does not come to us despite our suffering, but because of it. The Holy Spirit isn’t called the Comforter because she shows up after everything gets fixed.

Not all the wrongs get righted. Christianity never says that everything will work out and nothing bad will ever happen. The Faith of our foremothers and fathers tells the truth: pain is going to come, and when it does, so will our Lord.

Christ is no stranger to suffering. He has experienced his own, and so he is not afraid of ours. It is not that tears will never fall; it is, rather, that he will wipe them. Christianity doesn’t promise everything will be okay. The promise of Christ is that we will never be alone.

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Sometimes painful sorrow carries a concealed blessing of convincing us how deeply we are loved. There is a certain way that mourning, lament, and suffering reveal those in our lives who are loyal. And God will always be found faithful. When we learn to recognize God’s presence in our pain, we learn even more how we are loved. It soothes not only our pain but also our insecurities.

In the beginning of creation, when yet there was only darkness and void and deep, it was there that the Spirit of God hovered. If you are experiencing darkness and void and chaos, you can trust that the Spirit is hovering nearby. The Man of Many Sorrows who is well acquainted with our grief will come to us in an unmajestic glory.

Blessed are those who are brave enough to lament, for they will experience God’s stick-with-us-ness. If joy doesn’t come in the morning, glory comes in the mourning.

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If the Lord don’t come and the creek don’t rise,

Casey