Blessed are those who mourn...

Every one flies from sorrow, and seeks after joy, and yet true joy must necessarily be the fruit of sorrow. - Adam Clarke

"Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.  -Matthew 5:4

How can mourning render one happy?  This is especially the case when Vincent's Word Studies defines this type of mourning as "signifying grief manifested; too deep for concealment. Hence it is often joined with κλαίειν, to weep audibly (Mar_16:10; Jam_4:9).

Blessed are those who fall apart outwardly and weep aloud?  Blessed are those undone with their grief? This is an exact emotional state that I work hard to avoid.  When I break down in tears, it means that I am at the absolute end of my resources, at a complete loss of what to do.  These types of tears come when I am personally defeated.

But perhaps this kind of sorrow is not primarily a self-focused type of sorrow. McNeil in the RWP notes that this kind of sorrow “is most frequent....for mourning for the dead, and for the sorrows and sins of others."  Other see this sorrow as the type born from a sense of one's sin, a contrite state of grief.

This “mourning” must not be taken loosely for that feeling which is wrung from men under pressure of the ills of life, nor yet strictly for sorrow on account of committed sins. Evidently it is that entire feeling which the sense of our spiritual poverty begets; and so the second beatitude is but the complement of the first. The one is the intellectual, the other the emotional aspect of the same thing. It is poverty of spirit that says, “I am undone”; and it is the mourning which this causes that makes it break forth in the form of a lamentation - “Woe is me! for I am undone.”  -Matthew Henry

from Mel-is-a-fan

I like Henry's point here--that this type of sorrow inherently brings our souls to knock at the door of God for help.  Wallowing in one's grief is not the same thing at all.   This type of grief has a purpose and a point---"for they shall be comforted."

There are so many sorrows in our world--deep ones.  I think most women, like myself, avoid looking at the sorrows of the world too closely precisely because we sense their danger---that they could swallow us whole if we let them.  We push back and keep things in out of a sense of self-preservation.

The happiness here is not the sorrow itself, but the promise of comfort.  The truth that we will be comforted transforms the landscape of grief, but we must have the grief to experience the need of comfort:  “There can be no comfort where there is no grief” (Bruce).  Those who mourn are blessed because of the full circle that comes from the truth that the sorrow will be accounted for and transformed by His comfort.  

This explanation doesn't scratch my every itch.  If I had my way, I'd banish the tears before they hit the cheek.  I would keep them from forming in the first place.  But it's His economy, not mine.  I don't get to make the rules, but I don't have the weight of solving the equation myself either.  In His broadest wisdom, He has chosen to embed the joy of comfort, of release, within the blueprint of the world's sorrows.