There are parts of scripture that should come with a warning label, the kind they sometimes flash at the end of a movie which reads: No animals were harmed.

One such text is a story in the Book of Judges (11,29-39). It’s the story of a king named Jephthah who is at war and makes a promise to God that if God lets him win the war, he will sacrifice as a burnt offering to God, the first person he meets when he gets back home. God lets him win the war and Jephthah returns home and the first person he meets is his own daughter, who is in the bloom of youth. On seeing her, he deeply regrets his vow. However, his daughter agrees to let herself be offered as a burnt offering, but she asks for one thing first, to be given two months to go to the mountains “to mourn my virginity with my companions.” Her father grants her the favor and she goes off with her companions to mourn the fact that she will die a virgin. She returns and is sacrificed as a burnt offering to God.

Taken literally, this is simply an awful story – a foolish promise made to God, a God who accepts such a vow and grants a favor because of it, child sacrifice, an undertow of callous patriarchy.

But that’s not what this story is about. No one dies in this story. It’s not to be taken literally, but as a metaphor, and its message is not about God granting favors in exchange for human sacrifice. Its real message has to do with the young woman in the story, with her asking for the chance to mourn the fact that she will die a virgin, her life in some deep way incomplete.

What’s she asking for? What does it mean to mourn one’s virginity? How does one mourn this?

What lies inside this metaphor is the fact that every one of us, woman or man, married or celibate, long life or short life, will ultimately die a virgin, without having had the full symphony.

In its more literal modality, we see this played out in someone who has never married, is single, has never had a partner with whom he or she became one flesh, and who will die in that state. Like Jephthah’s daughter, he or she will die a virgin. Sometimes when leading a retreat for priests or nuns, I will ask them this question: Have you ever mourned your celibacy? Have you ever grieved the fact that you will go through life without sexual intimacy, without children, without being a grandparent?

But there are less literal modalities of this. The “virginity” that Jephthah’s daughter needs to mourn is something we all need to mourn, even if we have sexual intimacy, children, and grandchildren.

I was once at a faculty gathering where a number of priests on faculty were discussing celibacy when a colleague, a happily married woman, challenged us with these words: You celibates feel too sorry for yourselves. Do you know what’s worse than sleeping alone? Sleeping alone when you’re not sleeping alone. Sexual intimacy, even at its best, doesn’t take away your aloneness.

She’s right. No one gets the full symphony. Karl Rahner once replied to a friend who had written to him lamenting that, while he was in a good marriage, he still felt deeply alone in many ways. Rahner advised him not to blame his wife nor his marriage for his loneliness, but rather to learn to accept that “here in this life there is no finished symphony.”  All of us will die with some unfulfilled dreams; none of us will find full, abiding, ecstatic embrace this side of eternity.

However, we can still live happy, full lives despite this absence. But there’s a condition, the one Jephthah’s daughter expresses, namely, we need to mourn our incompleteness so that we can die at peace with our partial symphony.

If we do not recognize that incompleteness and mourn it, our non-acceptance will work in stealth to color our lives with disappointment, anger, and depression. Worse still, if we cannot make peace with the fact that life cannot give us the full symphony, we will have an unconscious propensity to be too hard on others (our marriage partners, our families, our friends, our churches, and life itself) because they cannot measure up and give us the full symphony.

And how might we mourn our incompleteness?

We mourn in our own way, but all mourning begins with recognizing what’s lost, what’s been taken from us. So, we begin mourning our “virginity” by recognizing and accepting what Rahner told his friend, that here, in this life, there is no finished symphony.

How do we mourn that? Some might take it to spiritual direction, psychological therapy, or some ritual practice, but all of us must consciously take it to prayer and then, like Jephthah’s daughter, spend some months in the mountains giving free range to our tears.