{"id":27258,"date":"2026-07-07T07:32:40","date_gmt":"2026-07-07T11:32:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=27258"},"modified":"2026-07-07T11:22:31","modified_gmt":"2026-07-07T15:22:31","slug":"27258","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=27258","title":{"rendered":"Blessed Are Those Who Mourn"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"&quot;Silence of God&quot; by Andrew Peterson (LYRICS)\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/KLHAa2Hb_Ms?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Tuesday, July 7, 2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/email.cac.org\/t\/d-l-wotjud-dkgktyktu-y\/\">READ ON CAC.ORG<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\">\n<p>Blessed are those who mourn: They shall be comforted.<br>\u2014Matthew 5:4<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Father Richard reflects on the sacred nature of our ability to grieve\u2014our own pain and that of the world:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In this beatitude, Jesus is describing the state of those who weep, those who have something to mourn about. They feel the pain of the world. Jesus is saying that those who can grieve, those who can cry, are those who will understand by coming closer to the heart of God.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jesus praises the weeping class, those who can <strong>enter into solidarity with the pain of the world and not try to extract themselves from it.<\/strong> Weeping over our sin and the sin of the world is an entirely different mode than self-hatred or hatred of others. The weeping mode, if I can call it that, allows us to<strong> bear the pain of the world without looking for perpetrators or victims. <\/strong>Instead, we recognize the tragic reality <strong>in which both sides are trapped. <\/strong>Tears from God are always&nbsp;<em>for everybody<\/em>, for <strong>our universal exile from home<\/strong>. [1]<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine describes how Jesus\u2019s listeners would have heard echoes of the Hebrew prophet Isaiah\u2019s message of consolation:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The beatitude has a particular resonance for Jesus\u2019s followers that also draws from the Jewish tradition\u2026. The passage Jesus partially cites as part of his address to the Nazareth synagogue in Luke 4, reads,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\">\n<p>The spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me \u2026; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners \u2026 ; to comfort all who mourn; to provide for those who mourn in Zion\u2014to give them a garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit\u2026. [Isaiah 61:1\u20133]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>[Isaiah] comforts the mourners in Zion by telling them that theirs is not the last generation, that what they may not see to fruition, their children and their children\u2019s children will. To mourn in Israel means that we are not alone; we have not only our friends and relatives but also the previous generations and the generations to come. And we take comfort in that. [2]<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Father Richard recognizes mourning as a quality that connects the Ten Commandments and the Beatitudes:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Mourning might be thought of as the prophetic \u201cway of tears,\u201d a letting down of our defenses, i<strong>n stark contrast to our more common ways of heroic willpower, commandment, obedience, force, anger, and legitimated violence<\/strong>. <strong>It takes an initial tender vulnerability (\u201cwounding\u201d) to defeat our ego and to open us to full consciousness\u2014which must include the scary unconscious<\/strong>! It is a movement, frankly, from the Ten Commandments to the eight Beatitudes. A movement that the prophets illustrated for us twenty-five hundred years ago, and that we need\u2014out of desire and desperation\u2014to recover today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>================<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h1 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a href=\"https:\/\/substack.com\/app-link\/post?publication_id=2894235&amp;post_id=204330325&amp;utm_source=post-email-title&amp;utm_campaign=email-post-title&amp;isFreemail=true&amp;r=2dkj2&amp;token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjozOTkyMzY2LCJwb3N0X2lkIjoyMDQzMzAzMjUsImlhdCI6MTc4Mjg0OTg1MiwiZXhwIjoxNzg1NDQxODUyLCJpc3MiOiJwdWItMjg5NDIzNSIsInN1YiI6InBvc3QtcmVhY3Rpb24ifQ.8dbrMTBpXrbtHaEHn1OEmMB5FTKNH4pd8JYH78vTPKI\">Sacred Storytelling<\/a><\/h1>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">All the world\u2019s a stage&#8230;and the church is too.<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-table\"><table><tbody><tr><td><a href=\"https:\/\/substack.com\/@brianzahnd\">BRIAN ZAHND<\/a>  JUN 30<\/td><td><a href=\"https:\/\/substack.com\/@brianzahnd\"><\/a><\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><a href=\"https:\/\/substack.com\/redirect\/76c2e3a2-648c-424c-a6f6-d826bbfc9ad7?j=eyJ1IjoiMmRrajIifQ.ND0qR5RKsmVnltuWgIlyr3BY7uwq2Kt9ZzX29UJK4cg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/substackcdn.com\/image\/fetch\/$s_!kK_d!,w_1100,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep\/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F920f90ba-4a03-4d4f-ad4d-6ee69ed219ef_4024x3264.jpeg\" alt=\"\"\/><\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-table\"><table><tbody><tr><td><\/td><td><\/td><td><\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<pre class=\"wp-block-preformatted\"><em>All the world\u2019s a stage.<\/em>\n\u2013William Shakespeare<\/pre>\n\n\n\n<p>We humans are story-crafting, storytelling, story-loving creatures. What we do best with the gift of human language is to tell a story. And this storytelling appears to be something of a miracle. I say a miracle, because the origin of the human capacity for complex language is a mystery that continues to baffle philologists, philosophers, and anthropologists, leading some thinkers in the field to claim that the reality of complex human language cannot be explained as a gradual, emergent phenomenon. Increasingly it appears that life, mind, and language did not and cannot arise from a purely materialist cause; rather it is a gift from elsewhere. In&nbsp;<em>All Things Are Full of Gods<\/em>&nbsp;David Bentley Hart writes,&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\">\n<p>No anthropologist, no matter how diligent, has ever discovered some intermediary form of communication . . . no philologist, no matter how clever, has ever been able to fabricate a plausible pre-linguistic system of signification, or even a primitive form of language lacking the essential features of fully developed tongues.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>In other words, language doesn\u2019t seem to evolve from the ground up, it seems to be bestowed from above. In whatever way it came into being, the capacity for complex human language is unquestionably central to what it means to be human. We humans are the storytellers. While other animals are capable of communicating basic information about danger, food, courtship, and the like, the human animal is composing the&nbsp;<em>Iliad<\/em>,&nbsp;<em>Hamlet<\/em>, and&nbsp;<em>Moby Dick<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We spend an enormous amount of our life telling, reading, hearing, and watching stories\u2014from grand fantasy epics like&nbsp;<em>The Lord of the Rings<\/em>&nbsp;to the mildly interesting anecdote told to co-workers at the office. All we have to do is hear or read the words \u201cOnce upon a time\u201d and our interest is piqued with the hope that we can once again be enchanted by some captivating tale. We\u2019re always game for a good story. That\u2019s why at this very moment all over the world hundreds of millions of stories are being disseminated and consumed\u2014a bit of embellished family folklore repeated by grandma for the umpteenth time, a young girl in her bedroom reading&nbsp;<em>A Wrinkle in Time<\/em>, a commuter on a subway listening to a&nbsp;<em>Harry Potter<\/em>&nbsp;audiobook, the twelve movies showing at the local cineplex, the masses scrolling through Netflix trying to decide what story will entertain them tonight. This is what we do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There is a reason why Homer, Shakespeare, J.R.R. Tolkien, and J.K. Rowling are some of the most famous people in history: they rank among our greatest storytellers. Why are Tom Hanks, Morgan Freeman, and Meryl Streep so well-known, so beloved, and so well-compensated? Because they are so gifted and skilled at playing roles in some of our favorite stories. We have an innate love of stories and a remarkable ability to remember stories. If we hear the names Romeo and Juliet or Bonnie and Clyde, an unbidden narrative immediately arises in our imagination. To remember something all we need to do is hear it in the form of a story. From forty-thousand-year-old paleolithic cave art to the Theatre of Dionysus in ancient Athens to the flat screen television in your living room, storytelling has always occupied a central place in the human experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>All of this indicates that our love for story comes from a deeper place than a fleeting desire for a bit of entertaining diversion. Our love of story is rooted in our search for meaning. Having been summoned out of the dread void of nonbeing we find ourselves hurled into the astounding phenomenon of existence. We have come to be. We are here. We exist. But what does is it all&nbsp;<em>mean<\/em>? Is there a purpose to it all? To avoid the despair that S\u00f8ren Kierkegaard called the sickness unto death, we need to believe that our life is more than an absurd and meaningless cosmic accident tumbling out of a random assortment of atoms. We have our physical senses by which we experience the world around us; we have our self-consciousness through which we can contemplate on a deep level our own existence; but what do we make of this? Coherence requires some sort of narrative structure. To prevent life from being just one damn thing after another we need a story. Story is the essence of meaning.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We want our life to have a narrative, and we want our story to be part of something beyond our own atomized existence. We want to belong, to have our part in some bigger story. Absent a metanarrative to interpret our reason for existing and our place within history, the yawning abyss of nihilism awaits. In Fyodor Dostoevsky\u2019s dark novel&nbsp;<em>Demons<\/em>&nbsp;the nihilistic Alexi Kirillov is constantly asserting that nothing matters, and nothing makes any difference. So we are not surprised when Kirillov kills himself.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Most of us would rather cling to any story, even a tragedy, than to fall into the black hole of meaninglessness where suicide takes on its own logic. In\u00a0<em>The Lord of the Rings<\/em>\u00a0the reason the ever-optimistic Samwise Gamgee doesn\u2019t succumb to despair even in the dark depths of Mordor is because he can muse, \u201cI wonder what sort of tale we\u2019ve fallen into?\u201d Sam can bear up under most any burden as long as he knows he\u2019s part of a story worth telling. <strong>Storytellers aren\u2019t mere entertainers, they are evangelists.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is why <strong>post-Enlightenment Christians in the postmodern West need to be reminded of the true nature of the gospel: It\u2019s a\u00a0<em>story!\u00a0<\/em>The gospel is not a set of spiritual laws or abstract theological principles or debated atonement theories. No. The gospel is the story of Jesus Christ.<\/strong> In its most abbreviated form it\u2019s the story of Jesus\u2019 death, burial, and resurrection. A fuller telling of the story takes us from a manger in Bethlehem to an empty tomb in Jerusalem. The biblical Gospels\u00a0<em>are<\/em>\u00a0the gospel. The director\u2019s cut edition is the big story the whole Bible tells\u2014<strong>the story that takes us from Genesis to Revelation, from paradise lost to paradise regained, from the alpha of creation to the omega of new creation. To tell the story of Jesus is to preach the gospel.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What we do in church on Sunday morning is not just singing songs, praying prayers, and preaching sermons; rather we are telling a sacred story that others are invited to participate in. There is a sense in which church is a theater for our sacred story\u2014but a theater where everyone is invited to join the performance.<strong> Evangelism at its best is akin to the art of storytelling. The possibility of faith arises as we tell the beautiful story of Jesus Christ. <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">We don\u2019t need to cajole or threaten, we just need to tell the story.<\/span>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The gospel story itself carries with it the capacity to evoke faith. \u201cSo faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the word of Christ.\u201d (Rom 10:17) <strong>A good sermon is not a didactic lecture but a well-told story where Jesus is the hero. And because the gospel is the best and greatest of all stories, the church should seek to excel at storytelling\u2014storytelling in sacrament, sermon, liturgy, and even architectu<\/strong>re.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><a href=\"https:\/\/substack.com\/redirect\/ef5bb11b-fcdb-43f9-b673-3a68aa6c2779?j=eyJ1IjoiMmRrajIifQ.ND0qR5RKsmVnltuWgIlyr3BY7uwq2Kt9ZzX29UJK4cg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/substackcdn.com\/image\/fetch\/$s_!BLy4!,w_1100,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep\/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7561cc42-8e8d-4055-9164-eb79615e4606_1200x675.jpeg\" alt=\"\"\/><\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-table\"><table><tbody><tr><td><\/td><td><\/td><td><\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Wake Up Dead Man<\/em>&nbsp;is the third film in the&nbsp;<em>Knives Out<\/em>&nbsp;detective mystery series. It\u2019s a brilliant dark comedy that surprisingly carries a profound and beautiful Christian message. At a crucial point in the film, the private detective Benoit Blanc meets the young priest Father Judd Duplenticy for the first time. The meeting takes place in the sanctuary of a neo-Gothic Catholic church in upstate New York. As Benoit Blanc admires the architecture, Father Judd asks what he senses in the sanctuary. The agnostic detective demurs in his southern drawl, \u201cIt\u2019s like someone has shown a story at me that I do not believe.\u201d Rather than be defensive about Blanc\u2019s critical observation, Father Judd responds like this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\">\n<p>You\u2019re right. It\u2019s storytelling. And this church is not medieval. We\u2019re in New York. Neo-Gothic nineteenth century. Has more in common with Disneyland than Notre Dame, the rites and rituals and costumes, all of it. It\u2019s storytelling. You\u2019re right. I guess the question is, do these stories convince us of a lie? Or do they resonate with something deep inside of us that\u2019s profoundly true? That we can\u2019t express any other way . . . except storytelling.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Wake Up Dead Man<\/em>\u00a0writer and director Rian Johnson places in Father Judd\u2019s mouth the perfect answer to a world skeptical of the Christian gospel. Of course, it\u2019s storytelling. But what does it convince us of? A lie or profound truth? Everyone has to decide that question for themselves. <strong>The gospel story can bring us to the precipice of decision, but the leap of faith remains within the realm of our own freedom.<\/strong>\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>C.S. Lewis as a scholar of literature recognized the mythic qualities in the Christian gospel, but he eventually crossed the chasm of his own skepticism by understanding the gospel as true myth. Alan Jacobs says of Lewis, <strong>\u201cHe became a Christian not through accepting a particular set of arguments but through learning to read a story the right way. And maybe others could move closer to Christian belief by the same path.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>T<strong>o preach the gospel is to tell the story of Jesus\u2014not to explain it, but simply to\u00a0<em>tell<\/em>\u00a0it.<\/strong> The magic of\u00a0<em>The Lord of the Rings<\/em>\u00a0or any other great epic is not found in literary analysis, but in the story itself! The same is true of the gospel. Rather than explaining the gospel or making it \u201cpractical\u201d or telling hearers how to \u201capply\u201d it to their life, the primary task of evangelism is to simply tell the evangel as the compelling story that it really is. We don\u2019t need to fully understand the gospel to be drawn into its beautiful mystery. <strong>The gospel is not an axiom, it\u2019s an epic\u2014the adventure of God joining humanity in Christ.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>After a lifetime of hearing, reading, and studying the gospel I can\u2019t explain all of it, but I love the story and I believe it. And most important of all, the gospel story has been and is being woven deeply into my own story, which is another way of saying I am being saved.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>BZ<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tuesday, July 7, 2026 READ ON CAC.ORG Blessed are those who mourn: They shall be comforted.\u2014Matthew 5:4 Father Richard reflects on the sacred nature of our ability to grieve\u2014our own pain and that of the world: In this beatitude, Jesus is describing the state of those who weep, those who have something to mourn about. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27258"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27258"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27258\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27265,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27258\/revisions\/27265"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}