Call for the Mourning Women:

Ancient Wisdom for a Grief-Illiterate World

"Thus says the Lord of hosts: Consider, and call for the mourning women to come; send for the skilled women to come." —Jeremiah 9:17

In the ancient Near East, when death visited a household, families didn't turn to funeral directors or grief counselors. They called for the professional mourners—women who had mastered the sacred art of lamentation. The prophet Jeremiah, often called the weeping prophet, knew something we seem to have forgotten: that grief requires witnesses, and some people carry a particular gift for holding space in our darkest hours.

The Forgotten Profession

Professional mourning was one of the few occupations available to women in biblical times that carried both respect and recognition. Unlike typical women's work—cooking, cleaning, childcare—this role demanded a different kind of expertise. These women weren't merely performers putting on a show. They were specialists in the landscape of loss, guides who could lead others through the treacherous terrain of grief.

What made women particularly suited for this sacred work? Perhaps it was their intimate knowledge of life's fragility, gained through centuries of watching children die, experiencing the dangers of childbirth, and navigating a world where women's security was always precarious. There's something deeply authentic about the idea that women who had walked through the valley of the shadow of death could then serve as companions for others making that same journey.

This pattern persists today. In modern grief counseling and support groups, those who facilitate healing are often those who have endured profound loss themselves. Pain becomes wisdom; experience becomes service.

How many times have I watched the faces of mothers on television—mothers who lost children to police shootings, to school violence, to senseless gun deaths—and seen that unhinged, grief-stricken look in their eyes? In those moments, I've hoped and prayed that after the cameras left, there were women in their lives who knew how to sit with that kind of devastation. A band of mourning women to surround and attend them. To mourn with those who mourn.

Forty years of journaling have captured plenty of disappointments and heartbreaks I have endured, but this last season of journaling has been different. For five years I have been working to rebuild from a personal crisis that made me question everything I thought I knew - a sustained reckoning with betrayal and grief that shattered my world. On one of those days I wrote in my journal: I can't believe I could be so wrong. The tears won't stop flowing. I have been existing for the past few years in a subliminal state of what can only be described as divine madness... Divine Madness, I prefer that term. Mad. Enraged. Crazed. Unhinged. But in equal parts. Depressed. Broken. Inconsolable. Adrift. To paraphrase a piece of biblical poetry, I am a woman of grief, acquainted with sorrow.

Reading those words now, I recognize something the professional mourners of Jeremiah's time understood: grief has its work to do.

This divine madness struck deeply as someone who thinks of herself as a keeper of women's wisdom. My mind reflected on the countercultural wisdom of women and marginalized peoples who appear "mad" for resisting oppression or following a divine call that contradicts societal norms. Think of Toni Morrison's Sethe in Beloved, whose "madness" is simultaneously condemned and sanctified—a mother's love so fierce it defies comprehension, a response to trauma so profound it reshapes reality itself.Our Grief-Illiterate Society

We live in a culture that has lost the art of grieving well. We've forgotten that the capacity to mourn is our birthright, as essential to our humanity as the ability to love or laugh. Grief visits us not only when death comes calling, but throughout our lifetimes—when we move away from home, when marriages end, when illness changes everything, when injustice wounds our souls, when time slips away, when the world itself shifts beneath our feet.

True healing requires that we examine everything we once held sacred, everything that gave our lives meaning. It demands that we sit with uncertainty and let it transform us.

Today, we carry not only our personal losses but also our collective grief over the world we once knew. The reality we thought we understood—our democracy, our sense of justice, our shared values—feels increasingly fragile. It was never perfect, but what we're witnessing now feels unthinkable. Our bodies weren't designed to wake each morning and fall asleep each night to the relentless scroll of catastrophe that has become our daily bread since January 20th.

But here's what I discovered in my own season of what I can only call "divine madness": sometimes what looks like breakdown is actually breakthrough. Sometimes the very thing that appears to destroy us becomes the portal to wisdom we never could have accessed any other way.

The ancient mourning women knew something about this sacred transformation that we've forgotten. They understood why the prophet called on their particular gift when his nation needed to wake up from its collective delusion.

You see, Jeremiah wasn't just asking for tears. He was calling for truth-tellers. When a people are drowning in denial—when they refuse to see the consequences of their choices, when they've convinced themselves that their crumbling world is still solid ground—sometimes it takes the raw, unfiltered voice of grief to shatter the illusion. The mourning women possessed something that reasoned argument and political rhetoric could not: the power to make people feel the reality they were desperately trying to avoid.

The sound of women wailing at the top of their lungs stands a chance of piercing through pretense. Their keening just might crack open hearts that have hardened against truth. In a culture of comfortable lies, professional mourners are professionally committed to disturbing the peace and exposing an uncomfortable reality.

Next week, I'll explore what they knew about divine madness, why grief can be a form of resistance, and how the wisdom of "wailing women"—from biblical times to today's podcasters—offers us a path through our current darkness.

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What grief are you carrying today? Who hurt you? Where do you hurt? Who do you need to come alongside you to help you keen your way through to the other side? What is your grief teaching you?