Part IV: How Shall We Comfort Those who Mourn
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
SOCGRAD MINI-LECTURES
by
The overwhelming tragedy at the Pentagon and at World Trade Center has left most of the USA in mourning for all the workers in the World Trade Center; for all the firemen and for police officers who died in collapse of the Center as well as those in the Pentagon who were the targets of violence...
How shall we comfort and be comforted in all this sadness.
There are things to be done and things not to be done.
We take comfort when our friends and neighbors reach out to us in our despair and take upon themselves, some of the ineffable burden of loss of a father, husband, wife or child.
We take comfort when the entire nation stops for a moment to acknowledge and to honor those who died in strange and new ways.
We take comfort when the New York Philharmonic offers the Brahms German Requiem on PBS for the dead; a requiem which does not mention the Christian god but offers a human...and beautiful... blessing to them that mourn. It is entirely appropriate for those who grieve to be comforted in Christian services if they indeed Christian...but so many of those who died in the World Trade Center were Islamic, Jewish, Hindu and, one supposes, non-believers...for all including Christians, the Requiem offers a blessing on them that mourn; it serves as a voice of all those who play and all those who listen to it.
We who mourn must not take comfort in the prospect of death of those in Somalia, Iran, Afghanistan or Pakistan who die from American bombs in retaliation and in revenge. Such military action honors neither those who die nor those who live. It only spreads the grief and widens the horror of unexpected and unearned death.
As a nation, we can best comfort the widow(er)s and children of those who live by seeing to the needs of those who survive; housing, food, education, and health care which comforts them in the depths of their anguish and solitude.
The Treasury Department has already simplified the claims process of the survivors of the AFT employees who died in the Twin Tower catastrophe. Red Cross and other voluntary groups had taken donations which help in the short term for the families which survive the death. Congress will, doubtless, do something helpful after they take care of the airlines and the financial companies hard hit by the attacks.
But we do not honor the dead by appropriations for a sustained war against the wretched of the earth even if they do take some small and grim satisfaction at the blow suffered by the richest country in the world.
We can comfort those who live by sharing our lives and our bounty with them...simple human contact is the best balm we can give to those who grieve.
And stories about the goodness and kindness of a lost parent are good for both the child and the teller of those stories...I have written dozens of stories about their mother for her children...stories only I remember and which only I can tell...and they weep while they heal as do I for the memory and the love of their mother.
We do not comfort the children when we make other children in other parts of the world to weep for the loss of their mother, sister, brother or father...we only make ourselves smaller and turn our own grief into shameful thing.
Group therapy is good for both child and adult who have lost those they love. I'm not sure how much professional counselling; one on one, works....but I do know that weekly meetings in a small group will help one survive the death one mourns. Friday morning discussion meetings at the campus ministry worked well for me that first year of loss. And a few meetings with others dealing with collapse of a marriage or illness of a spouse taught me that my grief was ending while theirs continuing.
But news from remote places about the wreckage done by high-tech weaponry will not comfort those who grieve; such news do bring satisfaction to those who grief has turned toward hate but hate will not heal the wound nor replace the dead. It only makes us small in spirit and in deed.
The use of religion to comfort those who mourn is a fine and good thing; the healing peace of Jesus or the soothing lessons of the Buddha uplift the heart and sooth the troubled mind but the use of the god concept to bless an evil crusade is blasphemy...and a mockery of all that's best in a religion. We should put away such childish uses of the god concept and seek to find a better use.