Speaking Our Grief
March 10, 2013 | Edna Froese            

The Book of Lamentations is not usual fare for Sunday morning, except for the few verses that have become favorite songs: “The Lord’s compassions never fail. / They are new every morning; / great is your faithfulness.” Beautiful words, indeed, but they live in the middle of a prolonged lament.

Lamentations is aptly named. Its opening verse begins with a shocked catch of breath:  [slide]
How deserted lies the city,
   once so full of people!

And it ends with fatalistic resignation:

Mount Zion . . .lies desolate,
    with jackals prowling over it.
. . .
You, O LORD, reign forever;
   your throne endures from generation to generation.
Why do you always forget us?
   Why do you forsake us so long?
Restore us to yourself, O LORD, that we may return
   renew our days as of old
unless you have utterly rejected us
   and are angry with us beyond measure.

Even Job ends more happily than that, but then Job was an attempt to figure out why bad things happened to one good man. Lamentations is a gut response to national tragedy, on the scale of brutal conquest and occupation. Its setting is likely the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BCE and the deportation of Judah’s prominent people—everyone, in fact, who could possibly stir up resistance to occupying forces. If that seems like ancient history for us, we could think of the survivors of many current conflicts, from colonial oppression and the slave trade to all the 20th-century attempts at ethnic cleansing. Or 21st –century attempts, for that matter. The need for lament is not over; if anything, it is more necessary than ever. 

Lament, however, is not intended to offer answers. In the face of overwhelming grief, explanations are beside the point. Lament doesn’t include comfort, either. What can be said in response to unfathomable suffering, whether individual or national? How does one speak the unspeakable? In poetry, that’s how. That is the first lesson that the book of Lamentations gives us. Its five separate poems are intricately beautiful, 4 of them carefully crafted acrostics based on the Hebrew alphabet. Their repetitive images are designed to engage our imagination through all our senses and to intensify our emotions as we become increasingly involved. Reading Lamentations slowly and carefully is like being drowned in sorrow and bathed with beauty, all at the same time.

As any account of brutal oppression makes clear, one of the worst consequences is the loss of dignity and humanity. That cannot be endured unless there is a simultaneous search for meaning. Thus, the poems in Lamentations show us the necessity and power of the human creative spirit. To create beauty out of chaos is what God did at the very beginning. And we have been granted creative power to do the same—to shape beauty out of chaos. Such creative acts give us dignity. Evil degrades and dehumanizes, creativity restores humanity. As long as there is poetry, there will be meaning, not through nice answers or happy endings, but through the deepening of human experience.

The second lesson of Lamentations unfolds gradually through its different speakers and its structure; it’s like a reflective drama, in five acts.

The first act, Chapter 1, includes two speakers: one is an observer-narrator, who sounds like a news reporter on location; the other is a woman, a personification of the city of Jerusalem. The two do not speak directly to each other. Like observers everywhere, this narrator can’t describe the disaster without also assigning blame: “Jerusalem has sinned greatly / and so has become unclean. / All who honored her despise her, / for they have seen her nakedness” (Lam.1:8-9) The image of the city as a woman (common in ancient eastern literature) makes the guilt seem even worse, especially if, as in this case, the naked woman is filthy and promiscuous. This victim is entirely responsible for her own shame and degradation.    

Nevertheless, she still claims the right to be heard, rudely interrupting the narrator, “Look, O LORD, on my affliction, / for the enemy has triumphed” (Lam. 1: 9) The narrator resumes his story as if he hasn’t heard her, but he gets only a stanza before she bursts in again, “Look, O LORD, and consider, / for I am despised. / Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? / Look around and see” (Lam. 1: 11-12). She demands God’s attention, but then quickly gives up and instead begs passers-by to listen. Can’t they see what has happened to her? Her story is painful to hear because we’d rather not identify ourselves with such a story-teller, especially since the Daughter of Zion agrees with the narrator’s assessment of her blame. In the midst of her “torment,” she confesses, “The LORD is righteous, / yet I rebelled against his command” (Lam.1:18).

That is one way of making sense of disaster. It’s better than imagining that events are simply random. If I deserve all this, then the world is still meaningful and my suffering makes sense, as long as everyone else who sins also suffers. No wonder that she ends the poem with a bitter plea that God “deal with them as [he] has dealt with [her] because of all [her] sins” (Lam.1:22).

Act 2 has the same two speakers, the narrator/reporter and the Daughter of Zion. What has changed is the narrator’s stance. He continues his description, but now God is the agent of destruction, not the Babylonians: “Without pity the Lord has swallowed up / all the dwellings of Jacob; / in his wrath he has torn down / the strongholds of the daughter of Judah. . .” (Lam.2:2). And if God has done all of this, then “The Lord is like an enemy” (Lam.2:4, 5).At that realization, he can no longer control his emotions: “My eyes fail from weeping, / I am in torment within, / my heart is poured out on the ground / because my people are destroyed.” “O Virgin Daughter of Zion – who can heal you?” (Lam.2:11,13). He’s involved now and calls on the city wall itself, what’s left of it, to weep for Jerusalem – and for her children. At first, the talk had been all of soldiers, leaders, priests, who had been cast down. Now, the narrator speaks passionately about children and infants fainting in the streets. When the Daughter of Zion herself finally steps in to say a few more words, it is the innocent young who concern her most: “my young men and maidens have fallen by the sword. . . . you have slaughtered them without pity” (Lam.2:21).

Act 3 introduces a new speaker, this time a strong man, probably a soldier. Interestingly, he speaks for himself, not as a figure of Jerusalem, not as a reporting bystander: “I am the man who has seen affliction / by the rod of his wrath. . . . He has made my skin and my flesh grow old / and has broken my bones.”  “He has walled me in so I cannot escape; / . . .  / Even when I call out or cry for help, / he shuts out my prayer” (Lam.3:1-4, 9). The conflict between him and his God is exceedingly personal, for God has a bow & arrows and makes this man his target, dragging him from the path, mangling him and leaving him there without help (Lam.3:10-12).         

Nevertheless—and this is a huge nevertheless—, he remembers more than his misery: “I have hope,” he says, “because of the LORD’s great love we are not consumed, / for his compassions never fail. / They are new every morning; / great is your faithfulness.”  This strong man is good at positive thinking: “I say to myself, ‘The LORD is my portion; / therefore I will wait for him” (Lam.3:21-24).   

I wish that I could end here, but the strong man isn’t done yet. Because he believes that God “does not willingly bring affliction . . . to children of men” (Lam.3:31-33), he attempts to make sense of calamity by seeing God’s hand in it:  “Who can speak and have it happen / if the Lord has not decreed it? / Is it not from the mouth of the Most High / that both calamities and good things come? ” (Lam.3:37-39). If we’re going to give credit to God for good things, then we must also give God credit for nasty stuff. And if God is just and compassionate, then awful events must be the result of our sins. Therefore, if we are faithful and righteous, then all will be well. Using his own experience of rescue from personal enemies when he called for help, he now admonishes the whole community to “examine [their] ways” and “return to the LORD” (Lam.3:40-41). Nevertheless, he still weeps because his people have been destroyed, and he weeps especially for the women of his city. By the end of his speech, the hope in his voice has given way to anger and to a desire for revenge: “Pay them back what they deserve, O LORD, . . . Put a veil over their hearts / and may your curse be on them!” Lam.3:64-66).

Act 4 returns to the reporter’s perspective, but he’s less passionate now, almost matter-of-fact, as if his voice is husky from too many tears. There’s less focus on the catastrophe itself, as if he’s returned weeks later to check on the survivors living in the ruins. What he sees is ghastly, for people have become less than animals. The dehumanization is complete. Children are begging in the streets; homeless people roam about, blacker than soot. They’re all dying of hunger, and even women have begun to turn their children into food. All the survivors, not just women, are unclean (Lam.4:3-4, 8-10). And why? “Because of the sins of her prophets / and the iniquities of her priests, / who shed within her / the blood of the righteous”  (Lam.4:13). The blame has shifted. It’s the leaders who are responsible, while the innocent suffer, the children, the women, the poor people too lowly to have taken up arms or instigated policies or influenced religion. Now these helpless poor are refugees, not wanted anywhere.

In Act 5, this community of destitute survivors addresses God directly: “Remember, O LORD, what has happened to us; / look, and see our disgrace” (Lam.5:1). They simply want to be remembered, seen, heard. No more is said about buildings or temple or walls or former glory. Their plea to God is a list of daily indignities. Just to stay alive is a struggle because even water and wood have to be bought. Women have been ravished and elders mistreated. There is no more music or dancing (Lam.5:4, 9, 11-15). How shall they find meaning without creative expression?

The final words of the book still assert that God is all powerful and eternal, but—such an agonizing “but”—there is no confidence that God will ever remember his people again: “Restore us to yourself, O LORD, that we may return; . . . unless you have utterly rejected us / and are angry with us beyond measure” (Lam.5:19-22).  Although this final poem is addressed most directly to God, there is no reply from God. In this book, many voices speak, but God himself remains silent. Those who suffer know about such absence.

Among the human voices heard in Lamentations, none is privileged. All have attempted to find some meaning, some explanation, without concluding anything definite. Each has told his or her tragic story, disorganized and repetitive perhaps, but the stories must be told. That is the second lesson of the book. Lamentations gives us not only words to speak our pain, but permission to do so, even encouragement. One commentator has observed, “Giving voice to chaos brings affliction into the light and creates a space where healing may be possible” (O’Connor 1035). There are different perspectives on suffering, individual ways to make sense of it. All should be fully heard, however illogical or heretical, and the ache of loss should not be stifled with determined cheerfulness. The words of comfort should not be spoken too soon.

When we do voice our pain, especially in a safe community that is willing to listen, we will find that we are not alone. That is another gift that Lamentations offers us. To suffer is bad enough; to suffer alone and imagine that no one else has ever made such a mess, no one else has ever gotten such a raw deal, is worse. As the narrator in Chapter 2 says, “With what can I compare you, / O Daughter of Jerusalem? / To what can I liken you, / that I may comfort you?” Somehow the ones I want beside me in a dark time are those who know what my kind of darkness is like and will neither brush aside my feelings nor offer pat answers. Lamentations depicts such bleak devastation that even the worst madness that goes on around us can find a comparison. We who weep are not alone.

As a final gift to us, Lamentations assigns two actions to the non-griever. The first is to bear witness, to give dignity to those who mourn by refusing to diminish their pain. It’s hard to listen because our impulse to fix everything quickly is so strong. We also can’t help wondering “what if this happens to me?” So we cut off the chaos story and want to hear no more. Lamentations reminds us to listen and to keep listening until we too become passionate enough about injustice to demand justice.

And there is the second action for the listener. Nothing in Lamentations directly admonishes us to bring evil-doers to justice or to stop oppression or even to feed the hungry. Yet just as the strong man in Chapter 3 assumed that God could not see prisoners crushed underfoot or people deprived of justice without acting, so other speakers in Lamentations demand to be seen and heard because they assume that compassionate bystanders will be moved to act. Thus, through the beauty of poetry that involves us in the emotions of those whose worlds have fallen apart (perhaps through their own fault, perhaps not), Lamentations calls us to bear witness, to offer dignity to all our fellow human beings, and, in our silent weeping with, also to consider how to replace evil with good, how to redeem the suffering. That is our calling. May God help us to accept it.

Sources:
NIV translation of Lamentations.
Alter, Robert. The Art of Biblical Poetry. New York: Basic Books, 1985.
O’Connor, Kathleen. Reflection on Lamentations. The New Interpreter’s Bible. Vol. 6. By David L. Peterson, Anthony J. Saldarini, Christopher R. Seitz. Abingdon Press, 1999.