Advent Four: Reality, Grief, Hope

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light's delay.
     (Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1885)

The darkest days of the year are here. As I gather food for dinner, a great horned owl calls from the tree behind my house. Later, my husband heads out in the dark to deliver compost to the pile beside our shed. The owl calls again, alone in the dark.

Saadallah, Aleppo

In Aleppo more than 400,000 people have died since fighting began in 2011.  My mind balks at the number:  that's more than the population of Iceland, or Belize.

More than all the towns and cities of my county combined.

More than Pittsburgh. Or Cleveland.

Yesterday, driving home from the grocery store, I caught part of President Obama's final press conference. 

The world as we speak is united in horror at the savage assaults by the Syrian regime and its Russian and Iranian allies on the city of Aleppo,” he said. “We have seen a deliberate strategy of surrounding, besieging and starving innocent civilians. We’ve seen relentless targeting of humanitarian workers and medical personnel, entire and neighbors reduced to rubble and dust. There are continuing reports of civilians being executed. These are all horrific violations of international law.

 Someone from the press pool asked: "Do you feel responsible for the deaths in Syria?"

What an awful question.

I could hear the grief in his voice as he answered: 

I always feel responsible. I felt responsible when kids were being shot by snipers. I felt responsible when millions of people had been displaced. I feel responsible for murder and slaughter that’s taken place in South Sudan that’s not being reported on, partly because there’s not as much social media being generated from there. 

There are places around the world where horrible things are happening and because of my office, because I’m president of the United States, I feel responsible. I ask myself every single day, is there something I could do that would save lives and make a difference and spare some child who doesn’t deserve to suffer? So that’s a starting point. There’s not a moment during the course of this presidency where I haven’t felt some responsibility.

What I heard in his voice was the helplessness so many of us feel.

In the face of atrocity, what can we do?

President Obama described the agonizing hours, days, weeks spent reviewing political realities, realistic options, uncomfortable conclusions.

As he said, more than once: in the face of evil, there are no magic bullets.

In a complex, dangerous world, darkness sometimes seems to win.

I have friends who tell me evil isn't real. Moral agency is one of those figments of our religious imagination. Things happen. No one's to blame.

I disagree sharply. People choose.

Yes, there are people who get trapped in ways they couldn't predict, small people held hostage by forces they can't control. They fall prey to evil and find themselves caught. Are they evil themselves, or simply prisoners of evil? Either way: evil exists. If you need evidence, I have plenty.

Then there are people who embrace evil, revel in it, leverage lies, prioritize power, mindlessly trample the weak. 

Hitler, by any measure, was evil. Stalin. Mao. Pol Pot. Bin Ladin.

Bashar al Assad? Putin?

Donald Trump?

Here's how Jeremiah defines evil:

Like cages full of birds,
    their houses are full of deceit;
they have become rich and powerful
and have grown fat and sleek.
Their evil deeds have no limit;
    they do not seek justice.
They do not promote the case of the fatherless;
    they do not defend the just cause of the poor. 

If we see a proliferation of evil leaders, what does that say of the people who promote and defend them?

As the days grow darker, I've been turning back to books that have helped me in the past.

Walter Brueggeman's Reality, Grief, Hope describes three essential callings.

The first is to bear witness to broken systems and distorted ideologies, to speak truth in a time of deception, to name the injustice and exploitation too often accommodated or embraced.

The second is to confront a culture of denial with insistent lament, "to embrace, model and practice grief in order that the real losses in our lives can be acknowledged."

Third, in the face of honest despair, is insistent hope, a hope beyond human agency, a hope that acknowledges and moves beyond our human helplessness.

Those themes are entwined throughout the prophetic books as God's messengers denounce a hypocritical religion that pretends to seek God while ignoring the requirements of justice and mercy: 

Woe to those who call evil good
    and good evil,
who put darkness for light
    and light for darkness.

Behold, in the day of your fast you seek your own pleasure,
    and oppress all your workers.
Behold, you fast only to quarrel and to fight
    and to hit with a wicked fist. . .
“Is not this the fast that I choose:
    to loose the bonds of wickedness,
    to undo the straps of the yoke,
to let the oppressed[b] go free,
    and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry    and bring the homeless poor into your house.

 More than a year ago Tyler Wigg-Stevenson, author of TheWorld Is Not Ours to Save, wrote of the suffering in Syria. He wrote of the need "to bear witness to the images of drowned refugee children washing up on Mediterranean shores  – even though most U.S. publications couldn’t, wouldn’t, and perhaps even shouldn’t publish the pictures."

In a raw, honest reflection, Wigg-Stevenson fiercely confronted the challenge of reality, grief and hope: 

Alan Kurdi, photo taken by Nilüfer Demir

There is no politics that will give these children another life that does not end in terror and despair and cold water. (God, God, how does one write words like this?) There is no politics that will give their parents anything but the end they had: of going into the dark knowing that their dear ones were lost forever. 

All this is permanent. It is done and cannot and will not and will never be undone. And while I am all for good politics, which is to say I am all for a good future, and so I am all for doing better by the refugees that yet live, I also refuse to let the past go as if it were merely the gravel under the sub-foundation of whatever shiny tomorrow we happen to build next.

There is no politics that can redeem what time has irretrievably taken. To stand as witness to the past is to stand either in utter nihilism and despair, or in the desperate, desperate hope that in the end a Redeemer will walk upon the earth, who will bring forth those whose flesh was destroyed, to see and be loved forever by God.

In Advent we pause and name the darkness around us, grieve at the power of evil, the foolishness of the blind, the heavy weight of injustice, the mounting loss of life and liberty.

We work for solutions, pray for repair, live in resistance with kindness and grace.

And stand in determined, insistent hope: light is coming. 

Evil will one day be defeated.

In our service today we sang a refrain we've been living into this Advent season:

Although we are weeping
Lord, help us keep sowing
The seeds of Your Kingdom
For the day You will reap them
Your sheaves we will carry
Lord, please do not tarry
All those who sow weeping
Will go out with songs of joy.

We weep.

We sow.

We wait for songs of joy.

Sacrificial love, once born as a fragile baby, will someday have the final word.

The people who walked in darkness
    have seen a great light;
those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness,
    on them has light shone.

For to us a child is born,
    to us a son is given;
and the government shall be upon his shoulder,
    and his name shall be called
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
    Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

This is the fourth is an Advent series of four.

Earlier Advent posts:

Advent One: Post Truth?, Nov. 27, 2016
Advent Two: Shepherds and Strangers, Dec. 4, 2016

Advent Three: Repentance and Return, Dec. 11, 2016

Advent One: Hope beyond Terror, Nov. 29,2015

Advent Two: Listening in the Desert, Dec. 6, 2015

Advent Three: Blessed Singularity, Dec. 13, 2015

Advent Four: For You, Dec. 20, 2015

Advent One: Hope is Our Work, Nov. 30, 2014

Advent Two: Peace is Our Promise, Prayer and Practice, Dec. 7, 2014

Advent Three: Love is the Air We Breathe, Dec. 14, 2014

Advent Four: Joy is the Song We're Given, Dec. 21, 2014

Advent One: Rethinking Portfolios, Dec. 1, 2013
Advent Two: Resisting Idols and Injustice, Dec. 8, 2013
Advent Three: Redefining Home, Dec. 15, 2013

Advent Four: Rejoicing in Mystery, Dec. 22, 2013

Advent One: How Do I Know? Dec. 2, 2012
Advent Two: Outsiders In Dec. 9, 2012
Advent Three: Question. Fruit. Dec. 16, 2012
Advent Four: Sing Alleluia, Dec. 23, 2012

Advent One: What I'm Waiting for, Nov. 26, 2011
Metanoia,  Dec 4, 2011
Voice in the Wilderness,  Dec. 11, 2011
Common Miracles,  Dec. 18, 2011

Why Kneel?

As part of my Lenten observation this year, I'm taking a break from writing new blog posts and updating and re-posting earlier material. Today's post was first shared on March 20, 2011.

Jesus Christ, Garden of Gethsemane, artist unknown

       Haiku:

         
      The taste
                  of rain

        —Why kneel?

         (Jack Kerouac)

For some reason, kneeling and Lent seemed connected in my mind. Thinking back on the very non-liturgical faith tradition of my childhood, I can’t remember kneeling, or any mention of kneeling. We stood to sing, sat to listen. Our most demonstrative act was to shake someone’s hand after the service.

The first time I remember kneeling was when my grandmother had a heart attack, the spring I was 16. In grief, then prayer, I knelt beside her bed. It seemed the only thing to do, and in my kneeling and prayer, I experienced God's presence and love in a way I had never imagined.

 A few years later I witnessed a frightening domestic dispute, with threatened violence and verbal abuse. By the time the abusive party drove off, all I could think of was to kneel with the shaking injured party, and cry, and pray, and wait for God’s comfort and wisdom.

The first time I took communion in an Episcopal church, kneeling at the altar, I found myself feeling deeply at home, spiritually fed in a profound and unexpected way, and thankful for the opportunity to kneel. There are times when kneeling seems the only thing to do, the best posture for meeting God, the safest place to be. After the tragic events of 9-11, our church held a prayer service, and I remember kneeling with so many others, thankful to kneel in God’s presence.

Why kneel? What are we doing when we kneel?

For me, kneeling can be a physical expression of lament. I kneel when life is too much, when the pain is too great, when there seems no place to turn. Nahum, describing the fall of Ninevah, says “Hearts melt, knees give way, bodies tremble, every face grows pale”  (Nahum 2:10). In Hebrew, the word for grief (כרא- kara) sounds exactly like the word for knee, kneel, smite, sink, fall, bring low (כרע - kara’). 

The Prodigal Son, Salvatore Rosa, Italy, 1650

Kneeling is also an expression of repentence. The prophet Ezra, made aware of Israel’s sin, tore his tunic and cloak:

and fell on my knees with my hands spread out to the Lord my God  and prayed:

I am too ashamed and disgraced, my God, to lift up my face to you, because our sins are higher than our heads and our guilt has reached to the heavens. From the days of our ancestors until now, our guilt has been great (Ezra 9:5-7).

Beyond grief and repentence, kneeling is an expression of submission, and supplication. We are small and God is great. In kneeling, we set ourselves in God’s hands. Lepers, seekers, desperate parents knelt as they called out to Jesus for help. Jesus himself knelt in Gethsemene, praying in submission and sorrow before his journey to the cross. 

I sometimes find myself returning, when I kneel, to the words of TS Eliot’s “Little Gidding,” part of his book-length Four Quartets. Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, but became a British citizen, and an Anglican, in 1927. Fourteen years later, he served as an air raid warden and firewatcher in London during the Blitz, when German bombers targeted London for 76 consecutive nights. Between September, 1940, and May, 1941, forty thousand British civilians, half of them in London, had been killed by bombing. More than a million houses in London were destroyed or damaged.

"Little Gidding" is about many things, but in large part it’s about the pain of living in a ruined city, in a time of great devastation, and the challenge of living in faith when hope seems gone. In a letter to a friend, Eliot noted that the memorable line “Ash on an old man's sleeve” referred to the debris of a bombing raid hanging in the air for hours afterwards. "Then it would slowly descend and cover one's sleeves and coat in a fine white ash."

In the section before that, Eliot writes of kneeling, and of prayer: 

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion….
…You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying. 

We come to our knees through different routes, through pain, guilt, grief, helplessness. And once there, we set aside “sense and notion,” all the games our minds play, all the willfulness so hard to escape.

In kneeling, we speak to God in a way that goes beyond “the order of words, the conscious occupation of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.” Certainly we can pray in any posture, but in kneeling, in a physical way, we declare our need, our dependence, our submission.

Psalm 22 says “all who go down to the dust will kneel before him— those who cannot keep themselves alive.” Contemporary Americans tend to be control freaks, desperate to fortify ourselves against the hazards that surround us. But despite our efforts, we, like all who have lived before us, are “those who cannot keep themselves alive.” Independent though we are, resourceful as we like to think ourselves, a moment of honest reflection will remind us that we are in need of resources and wisdom beyond our own.

The famous poem “Invictus”, poet William Ernest Henley’s one claim to fame, boasts “I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.”

The truth is something different. We are not masters of anything. We are frighteningly dependent. Watch the evening news and be reminded of how fragile this life is.

In kneeling, we find our place again, as people of the Lord’s pasture, small sheep in his care: "Come, let us worship and bow down, let us kneel before the Lord our Maker; for he is our God and we are the people of his pasture, the flock under his care." Psalm 95

We kneel now, in penance and petition, but we are also told there will come a time when all will kneel.  Isaiah tells us: "Before me every knee will bow;  by me every tongue will swear." (Isaiah 45) Paul repeats this in Romans 14:  “‘As surely as I live,’ says the Lord, ‘every knee will bow before me; every tongue will acknowledge God.’

Adoration of the Lamb ~ Jan Van Eyck

In Philippians 2, Paul expands this vision, to both a present reality (Jesus is already exalted, already give a name above every name), and a time in the future when we will kneel to acknowledge him:

 Therefore God exalted him

to the highest place

and gave him the name

that is above every name,

that at the name of Jesus

every knee should bow,

in heaven and on earth

and under the earth,

and every tongue acknowledge

that Jesus Christ is Lord,

to the glory of God the Father.

          Philippians 2

Jack Keroac, in his 'western haiku', questions the value of kneeling. What is your own experience of kneeling? How would you answer his question "Why kneel?"

 Please join the conversation. Your thoughts and experiences in this are welcome. Look for the "__ comments" link below to leave your comments. 

Like a Motherless Child

I confess, I am not overly fond of Mother’s Day, much as I love being a mother. And now grandmother.

As a kid, I hated Mother’s Day. That’s a strong word – but true. Mother’s Day was the day to remember that mine had vanished before my second birthday. A day to note, up close and personal, that not every family looks and feels like a typical Hallmark card.

I pause to think and pray for the friend who this year lost dearly loved mother and mother-in-law in the space of a few short months. The friends who lost their mothers too soon and still carry the weight of “motherless child.” The friends whose mothers weren’t there, or only rarely, carried away by mental illness or addiction. The friends whose mothers linger but no longer know their names, or recognize them when they visit. The friends whose mothers could never quite affirm them, who carry their mothers' critical voices like embedded shards of glass, sharp points of pain that never heal.

There’s no shortage of pain. What of those who would love to be mothers, but aren't? Those mothers who have lost a child to accident or illness, or are losing a child to estrangement or addiction.  I think of the mothers and fathers I know who will spend Mother’s Day grieving the loss of a child to suicide. 

As Job’s comforter Eliphaz said, “Man is born to sorrow as the sparks fly upward.”

Or – to quote Frederick Buechner:  "Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen.” Enjoy the dogwoods and azaleas. But remember those in pain.

How do we walk alongside those in pain without doing harm ourselves?

I travel back to the spring I was sixteen. My grandmother complained of chest pain and went off to the doctor, from there to the hospital, leaving my brothers and me on our own.

Sifting back through memories of that difficult time, I find no conversations with caring adults. No one who sat us down and said “your grandmother’s had a heart attack, and this is what that will mean.” It was clear our lives would change, but how? When? Where would we be?

Kind people dropped off dinner: Roast chicken. Unfamiliar casseroles.

Kind people offered rides, wrote down the dates we needed to arrive at the camp jobs we had planned, promised they’d get us there.

But I don’t remember any real conversation about how we were doing. What we were feeling.

Resettled Farm Child, Dorothea Lange, New Mexico, 1935

And stranger: I don’t remember anyone praying with us. I know people prayed. But not with us.

Looking back on that season of my life, I am overwhelmed again by how alone I felt.

And overwhelmed, again, by how God’s presence became real, in a way I have never since doubted.

In the years since then, I've walked with others in pain, and my prayer is always that they know God's presence.

There are plenty of things people say when trying to comfort those in trouble: “It will all work out.”

Really? And what if it doesn’t?

“It’s all for the best.”

No. God can redeem even the ugliest event. But no – I refuse to believe bombs, massacres, kidnap, suicide are “all for the best.” Never.

“God needed her in heaven.” Please. No. Don’t.

Our attempts to sweeten, lessen, minimize pain just make the pain worse, just push the questions deeper.

Why did God allow a loving mother to die when her children were still young?

Why did God allow children to be gunned down by a mentally ill young man?

Why cancer, why psychosis, why heroin, why . . .

Here’s what I know for sure: we live in a broken world. We live in a world that staggers under the weight of folly, that shudders in the grip of sorrow.

And in the midst of our grief, we are not alone.

What I want to offer, to those in pain, is God’s presence. 

But that’s not mine to give.

What’s mine to give are prayer, and my own presence.

So somehow I want to say: you’re not alone. If you want to talk, I want to listen. If you need a hug, I’m here, nearby. If you’re angry – that’s okay. Go shout at God. He doesn't mind. Some days I shout too.

And if you’re sad – go ahead and cry. As long as you want. As loud as you need. I'll cry with you if you let me.

I’m not planning to tell you what to think, how to feel. I just want you to know: you’re not alone on this dark road you’re traveling.

But most, I want to pray. Over coffee, in a car in the driveway before you jump out and go inside, standing by the door as you leave for the hospital, deep in a couch that’s lost its springs.

On a crumbling cement stoop with neighbors walking by.

Under a tree on a summer day. 

Around a late night campfire.

 Over the phone. 

After you’ve said what you need to say, shared your fear, put the questions into words, here's mine: "Do you mind if I pray?"

How many times have I asked that question?

On a battered city porch.

In a glass strewn park.

On the end of a dock, feet dangling in cool water.

In the prayer alcove of our church, or right there at the front, with the worship band playing loud.

Do you mind if I pray?

I want to pray for God’s presence to be known. For his love to be felt. For his goodness to be visible.

Sometimes when I pray, I’m overcome by the sadness the other person carries. I set a hand gently on her shoulder, and the grief travels through me – like a tide of darkness, flowing up my arm, through my heart, weighting me to the floor.

I hold that darkness out toward God, pour it, like dark water, into his waiting hands.

Sometimes when I pray, I’m overwhelmed with the sense of God’s great love pouring through me toward the person beside me. It wells up through me – warm, bright love – wrapping us both, setting our hearts pounding, spilling across us like golden sunlight after a winter rain.

Sometimes when I pray, words come un-thought. Words of blessing, forgiveness, of mercy, of hope. People come back, weeks, months later, and say “When you said that, this happened.”

Those were not my words.

Once, praying for a girl who had just lost another father, I felt all those things: the weight of her pain, the warmth of God’s love, the words of blessing. As I prayed, she sank to the floor, sobbing. Someone moved to comfort her – and I said, softly, “No. She’s crying in the arms of her father.”

We moved away and left her, sobbing on the floor. Later, she asked, “How did you do that?”

Do what?

She thought we’d been sitting there, rubbing her back, in a way that made her feel very warm, very loved, very held.

She was comforted. Joyful. Radiant.

That was God, pouring love and strength right through her. I pray she remembers that presence when she feels like a motherless, fatherless child, a very long way from home.

The prayer I pray often is this:

For this cause I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. (Ephesians 3) 

The family I’m part of might not look like a Hallmark card, but it’s a family of great love, love that flows through our places of pain and draws us deeper to an eternal, unfailing embrace.

And for you, part of that family or not, motherless child or not, walking today in pain or beauty or both, I pray that you feel God’s presence, that you see his mercy, that you grasp, in some small way, his love far beyond our understanding. 

I pray that you travel through the dark times, and the light, knowing you’re not alone. 

Road to Emmaus, William Strang, Scotland,  ca 1900

The Poor in Spirit and Those Who Mourn

Jesus’ first recorded words, out in the Galilean hillside, were these: 

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. 

The Sermon on the Mount,
 Albert Decaris, France, 1953

In the world of literary interpretation, there are few pieces of writing that have promoted more discussion, analysis, explication than the beatitudes. The first one alone: when Jesus spoke of the “the poor in spirit,” did he mean the actual poor? If material prosperity is a sign of God’s blessing (isn’t that what we’re told?), then surely “poor in spirit” must mean something other than physical poverty?

The word “poor” that Jesus used, the  Greek Word ptochos, describes a beggar, “desitute of wealth, influence, position, honour, . . . helpless, powerless to accomplish an end." (Studylight)

Most interpretations assume it’s not real poverty Jesus was speaking of, not genuine destitution, but an attitude of receptivity:  

"The kingdom of God can only be received by empty hands. Jesus warns against (a) worldly self-sufficiency: you trust yourself and your own resources and don't need God; (b) religious self-sufficiency: you trust your religious attitude and moral life and don't need Jesus." ( Michael H. Crosby, Spirituality of the Beatitudes: Matthew's Vision for the Church in an Unjust World) 

So – don’t trust your wealth. And don’t trust your self-sufficiency. We can manage that. Kind of.

And most interpretations assume this isn't an ongoing state, but a one time occasion: the prodigal son, turning toward home, convinced of his failure and unsure of his welcome. The thief on the cross, asking “Lord, remember me.” We acknowledge our poverty of spirit as a step toward salvation and eternal life. 

But what if Jesus meant something different? What if this “poverty of spirit,” this utter dependency, is the permanent state of those who claim to follow him?

N. T. Wright argues that the first beatitude, and those that follow, are an ongoing sign of God’s kingdom here on earth:

“‘Blessings on the poor in spirit! The kingdom of heaven is yours!’ doesn’t mean, ‘You will go to heaven when you die’. It means you will be one of those through whom God’s kingdom, heaven’s rule, begins to appear on earth as in heaven. The Beatitudes are the agenda for kingdom people. They are not simply about how to behave, so that God will do something nice to you. They are about the way in which Jesus wants to rule the world. He wants to do it through this sort of people—people, actually, just like himself.” (Simply Jesus) 

Too often, Christians are known as the ones with the answers: judgmental, arrogant, quick to find fault. Insensitive. Unwilling to listen. Certain we’re right, and others, always, are wrong. 

We hear the part about God wanting to rule the world through us, but miss the reality of what that looks like: waiting in humility for God to work. Listening, with open hands, for a way better than our own.

I like Oswald Chamber’s description of this:  

“As long as we have a conceited, self-righteous idea that we can do the thing if God will help us, God has to allow us to go on until we break the neck of our ignorance over some obstacle, then we will be willing to come and receive from Him. The bed-rock of Jesus Christ’s Kingdom is poverty, not possession; not decisions for Jesus Christ, but a sense of absolute futility: “I cannot begin to do it.” Then, says Jesus, “Blessed are you.” That is the entrance, and it takes us a long while to believe we are poor. The knowledge of our own poverty brings us to the moral frontier where Jesus Christ works. (Studies in the Sermon on the Mount)

Blind Beggar, Richard Hedley, UK, 1897

This poverty of spirit is both entrance and arena: an expansive frontier where change becomes possible. In a culture that prizes resourcefulness, independence, “can-do” attitudes, confident certainty, we tend to run from that place Chambers points toward: the wilderness where our answers fall short, our neat logical categories shatter. I catch glimpses of it when I’m willing to walk beside people in pain and confusion, to listen with compassion to views not my own.

The more I try to understand what it is to be “poor in spirit,” the more I see it linked to the sentence that comes after: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.”

If “blessed” means “happy,” this makes no sense at all.

But if "blesssed" means, as I suggested last week, "rightly placed, set in right relationship with earth, other humans, and God as well," then mourning takes on new meaning.

This isn't the mourning of personal loss, grief for our own individual sorrows, although that can certainly be part of it. It's the grief of seeing how far we are from the kingdom God invites us to demonstrate, sorrow over the distance between the just, generous world we are called to model and the systems of injustice and destruction we accommodate in everything we do.

Gregory of Nyssa, (c. 335 – c. 395) wrote "It is impossible for one to live without tears who considers things exactly as they are."  Many centuries later, Bible scholar M. Eugene Boring expanded on this idea: 

"One of the characteristics of the true people of God is that they lament the present condition of God's people and God's program in the world…This is the community that does not resign itself to the present condition of the world as final, but laments the fact that God's kingdom has not yet come and that God's will is not yet done." (The People's New Testament Commentary)

I want to run from sorrow as much as I want to run from helplessness.  But the first step toward change is acknowledgement of where we are, and acknowledegement of our inability to fix it. Walter Brueggemann has written extensively about lament, and the force of lament in the face of denial. He describes laments as “refusals to settle for the way things are. They are acts of relentless hope that believes no situation falls outside of Yahweh's capacity for transformation.” And he speaks of grief as a subversive, transfomative act, an act of "tearful defiance thrown in the face of empire. The weepers in their weeping said, 'We will not be silent. We will not swallow our tears. We will tell the truth about loss.'"

Oswawldo Guayasamin, Ecuador

I've spent much of my life working hard to manage grief, trying hard to be resourceful and resilient. But maybe there’s a time to stop, look closely at the world, and speak out in tearful defiance, to say, with the prophets, "Like an empty-handed beggar I am helpless in the face of all that grieves me, but I won't be silent. And I won't pretend that all is well."

So I grieve.

Intractable mental illness in a culture impatient with human frailty.

Disordered family systems in a world where investment in children is rarely rewarded.

Twelve million children unsure of their next meal in a country that spends billions each year on nuclear weapons, billions more locking non-violent offenders away. 

I grieve industries dependent on child slavery for profits. 

Children lost to preventable disease, lack of clean water, war, young men with guns.

Communities lost to religious violence, rising flood waters, unmanned missiles, mudslides, fires.

I grieve the loss of real dialogue about the challenges that face us, the secret money that shapes policy,  shouts down dissent,and leads us in directions we should never go.    

A century ago, our grandparents talked about the war to end all wars.

They looked toward an end to disease.

Knowledge would save us.

Reason would pave the way toward peace.

Our knowledge has brought us new diseases, new weapons, sorrows unimagined a century ago.

And reason, reasonably applied, can only show how helpless we are in the face of our own failures.

Surely we should grieve? And wait – poor in spirit – for the comfort promised. For God to work. For his people to take their place as blessed: agents of the kingdom, humble recipients and bestowers of grace, in that wide open space where we leave our shoddy tools behind and listen for an answer. 

Recònditas Señales, Eduardo Kingman, Ecuador, 1969

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away—
. . . I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.                               
 

. . . In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not. 
                             (T S Eliot, East Coker, Four Quartets)

This is the third in a series on Lent and the Beatitudes:

    An  Alternative Narrative: February 10
    Seeking Blessing in a Fracture Land: Februaray 17

Lenten Reflections from 2012:

     Looking toward Lent
     Lenten Sorrow : Lament and Nacham
     Lenten Silence: Charash, Be Still
     Lenten Sweetness: Tasting Towb    
     Lenten Submission: Rethinking Hupotassō
     Lenten Song: Remembering Ranan