Lamentations 2:1-9
“How the Lord in his anger has humiliated daughter Zion!” (Lamentation 2:1)
Reading Lamentations is tricky business. Reading it is risky.
On the one hand, whenever catastrophe strikes, we find some sense of relief in reading that God is in control of it. I mean, how scary would this COVID-19 pandemic be if we thought it was running wild, beyond the grasp of God? On the other hand, if God is in control of it, we struggle to reconcile the anger of God with our normal image of Him as love. Do we want a God who can’t control or a God who can get angry and harm things and hurt us? It’s a spiritual catch-22.
Reading Lamentations is holy business. Reading it is therapeutic.
Nowhere in the text does the cognitive dissonance – that catch-22 – ever get resolved. Instead, while reading the entire thing, we slowly just come to embrace the paradox and pain of it all. And in learning to do that with the text, we gain the skills and resources necessary to do this with all the pains of the real world.
Pain and suffering are interesting things. The more unaddressed they go, the more they hurt. This is one of the reasons people scream when they stub their toe or put a hammer right on their thumb. The yell releases the pain in a way, it acknowledges it for what it is.
In a similar manner, I once had a counselor who also worked with recovering addicts. This was during the height of the opioid epidemic and the people he worked with were often in legit pain, but also had abused prescription painkillers. They were in their own catch-22. They needed relief from the pain, but they couldn’t take the easiest relief. So, he taught people to focus on the pain. If it was a bad knee, for example, he’d sit with them and ask them to describe the pain. To focus on it and it alone. Was it dull and throbbing? Was it sharp and electric? Did it persist or come in waves? As he got them to focus on the pain in greater and greater detail, it slowly relieved itself. Not all the way, but enough that they no longer felt like they needed prescription painkillers.
And yet in another similar way, victims of traumatic events are often guided by counselors to go back to the event and describe it in as many details as they can. What were they wearing? What was the weather? Who else was there? What were they doing? What were they thinking? What happened? How did it feel? How did they respond? They go deeper and deeper into the painful event as a way of truly working through it and not just going around it.
This is what I think Lamentations is all about. It’s a way of articulating the pain and trauma rather than ignoring it. Ignoring pain always makes it seem bigger than it is, but putting a story to it – even a story where God appears less than loving – has a way of diminishing the suffering and even, eventually, finding mercy in it.
In these times – both Holy Week and during the pandemic – we should keep Lamentations close at heart. It isn’t the place where we will seek our theology of God’s character so much as where we will learn how to cry out in holy ways and how to receive God’s mercy in the midst of suffering. Amen.
