LENT 2020: Day 34

• Lent 2020: Day 34 Saturday, April 4, 2020:
  Psalm 31:9-16; Lamentations 3:55-66; Mark 10:32-34

     I called on your name, O LORD
          from the bottomless pit.
    My voice you have heard
          Do not shut your ear to my sigh, to my cry.

Lamentations is not a book we flip to very often, in large part because our lives are pretty good. But we also tend to avoid the negative, preferring to look on the bright side, often in order to disguise our pain and to keep from being vulnerable.

As a result, though, we lack the skills needed to grieve well. 

Of course, we experience pain and sorrow regularly, but most of the time we can get by. But when a crisis hits, we don’t know how to respond.

According to Walter Brueggemann, ancient Israel faced the same reality following the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BCE.

And Brueggemann argues that the prophets responded in a threefold way — first with REALITY, then with GRIEF, and then finally with HOPE.

Those three responses to crisis, he says, are needed today:

• “the articulation of reality that is too often disguised by our ideology of exceptionalism,
• the performance of grief about loss in response to the denial that the denial of exceptionalism is unsustainable,
• articulation of hope in response to despair that variously produces moralism, hedonism, and violence.”

As we confront this pandemic, hope is needed. But hope is hollow if it is not based on reality and does not allow for grief.

We would do well to turn to Lamentations, which Brueggemann calls “the most compelling performance of grief that precludes denial in the ancient tradition.”