Mourning has broken

"Anger is the besetting temptation of those who have begun to see things clearly." (Evagrius)

"Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted." (Jesus)


Of course, I am not angry. I am just an Asian American Christian male, who has been told by my culture and sub-cultures that I cannot be angry, that I cannot even be sad, and that I have to keep it together. Angry just doesn't cover it. I am repressed, lonely, and seething. I am wretched. Lord have mercy.

I am discovering that I haven't learned to mourn, that I haven't learned to cry. I have never learned to accept myself, or to believe in myself. These things I have had to learn only pretty recently, and I found that I am poor student. A poor student in the deep, personal things.

I don't want to rant or to bleed sentimentality. But I know that if I tell the truth, then I somehow find myself in the chorus of voices that whisper the truth. I know that humility only comes through honesty, or rather that there is no difference between honesty and humility. Christians talk about humility, and I want to talk humble. I want to tell you who I am, but I cannot do that fully. At least not yet.

I did a google image search on "mourning," and I kept finding pictures of these butterflies called "Mourning Cloaks."

Their name reminded me of something. They reminded me of those veils women wear when in mourning, which had always struck me as slightly ironic. I had thought it was an effort to "hide" one's mourning, which, however, would only draw more attention to themselves. But that is a perspective of someone outside the veil. Perhaps the veil is not for the world, but for the mourner. What I am saying is, seeing through a veil from the view of the mourner is seeing, paradoxically, clearly. Partially blind and through a grim, fragmentary mesh, the world seems dim and broken. Incomplete. And that is largely the truth.

And maybe this is a stretch here, but if brokenness is on the way to wholeness, and honesty on the way to brokenness, then this veiled picture of the world, of society, of myself is exactly the semi-opaque chrysalis into which I must go before transformation will happen.

Okay. My sentimentality just dipped into poetics. I can't help it. I am a jar. And mourning has broken.