Main Feature
‘Looking Down’: Appreciating the Poetry of Crisis in the Book of Lamentations
Margaret Mill,er, Vancouver
Volume 32 Issue 1, 2 & 3 | Posted: March 15, 2018
I know I am not alone in feeling unmoored and disoriented these days. The world is mired in social and environmental crises, with extremes in politics matched by extremes in climate. People are aware that the familiar patterns of their lives have shattered and are being rearranged in unknown and alarming ways.
Feeling adrift, I find myself casting about for wisdom during walks on the beach and in conversations with friends. Then, one day I learned there was going to be a course on the book of Lamentations at the Vancouver School of Theology.
As a student of the Hebrew Bible, and thinking that reading Lamentations might bring on the kind of insight and healing that can come from listening to the blues, I signed up.
* * *
I know I am not alone in feeling unmoored and disoriented these days. The world is mired in social and environmental crises, with extremes in politics matched by extremes in climate. People are aware that the familiar patterns of their lives have shattered and are being rearranged in unknown and alarming ways.
Feeling adrift, I find myself casting about for wisdom during walks on the beach and in conversations with friends. Then, one day I learned there was going to be a course on the book of Lamentations at the Vancouver School of Theology.
As a student of the Hebrew Bible, and thinking that reading Lamentations might bring on the kind of insight and healing that can come from listening to the blues, I signed up.
* * *
In the Hebrew Bible, poetry is the language of grief, cutting through denial and numbness to reveal and express great pain. In order to express the depth of the disaster, the poets of Lamentations draw on a range of poetic techniques. For instance, they have combined two genres of biblical poetry, the communal dirge and the personal lament prayer, creating a form that has the capacity to address a crisis that is catastrophic in the extreme. And all five chapters are to some degree alphabetic acrostics (the first four chapters have a stanza for each of the Hebrew alphabet’s twenty-two letters; the fifth has the same number of verses as the alphabet), which are a way for the poets to express completeness – the acrostic’s function within Lamentations is to imply that the experience being described evokes the full range of human grief and desolation. As one of the scholars on our bibliography, Kathleen O’Connor, says, the acrostic also creates a kind of container that gives “order and shape to suffering that is otherwise inherently chaotic, formless, and out of control.”1
* * *
Lamentations was written in response to the catastrophe of 586 BCE, when the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the city of Jerusalem and the Temple, brutally killed and terrorized its citizens, and forced thousands into exile and slavery in Babylon. Theologically speaking, the book of Lamentation names that it is because of the peoples’ transgressions that God has caused the city to be destroyed:
Her foes have become the masters, her enemies prosper,
because the Lord has made her suffer for the multitude of her transgressions;
her children have gone away, captives before the foe. (1:5)
Traumatized, the survivors are experiencing acute emotional, physical, and spiritual distress. They are in deep mourning for their families, their community and their God.
My eyes are spent with weeping; my stomach churns;
my bile is poured out on the ground because of the destruction of my people,
because infants and babes faint in the streets of the city. (2:12)
Time and again we are told that Daughter Zion has been utterly abandoned, with no one to comfort her.
. . . her downfall was appalling, with none to comfort her. (1:9; cf. 1:2, 16, 17, 21)
Perhaps worst of all, God does not respond to their cries.
But you, O Lord, reign for ever; your throne endures to all generations.
Why have you forgotten us completely? Why have you forsaken us these many days?
Restore us to yourself, O Lord, that we may be restored; renew our days as of old –
unless you have utterly rejected us, and are angry with us beyond measure. (5:19-22)
In contrast to the book of Job, where God eventually responds to Job’s entreaties, in Lamentations there is only a deeply troubling and unexplained silence.
The professor said that given the book’s emotionally difficult content she was expecting 2-3 students in the course and was surprised when 10 students registered.
* * *
During our 11-week course, which ran as a seminar, students were assigned passages to translate from the original Hebrew into English. Reading the poetry in the original language gave me insights that I would have missed if I had only read the English translations. For example, repetition is an important rhetorical device in Hebrew poetry, used by the poets to drive home a point; translations into English typically use a range of different words when a Hebrew poet is actually repeating the same word over and over. In Lamentations words and phrases like “adversary,” “no comfort,” and “see” are used repeatedly. In addition to our translation work students prepared presentations based on our bibliography.
Scholars are in general agreement that the book is composed of five independent poems written by five different poets. While they share common themes relating to destruction, each poem has a distinctive tone and set of images. A range of voices (including Daughter Zion, a narrator, a “strong man,” and a community voice) give different perspectives on the destruction of the city.
As for the date, it is unlikely that the poems were written during or immediately after the destruction of the city; studies of writings by trauma survivors show that the kind of trauma described in Lamentations (which includes rape, starvation and cannibalism) takes time to be expressed. So it seems that they were written during the exilic period, probably towards its end in 538 BCE.
* * *
With its genius for describing human experience, Lamentations touches upon the hope that can emerge in even the most desperate situations. But this hope is glimpsed only briefly and fleetingly; to say the survivors of the disaster somehow ‘find hope’ is to profoundly devalue and misinterpret their experience. In spite of that lack of hope (and, in a sense, because of it) I found that Lamentations, and the poetry of lament, does offer guidance on how we might proceed during our own fractured times.
One such guidance is that Lamentations reminds us how during troubling times lament poetry has the potential to mark a new beginning. In her study of lament, Lyrics of Lament: From Tragedy to Transformation, theologian Nancy Lee describes reading and creating lament as first steps towards empowering individual community members and the community as a whole:
I am convinced that a turning point for a new era among communities of faith and our societies is to go beyond the simple but necessary reaffirmation of the idea of lament. It lies not only in recovery of the reading of lament texts and homilies and praying lament….
The most vital link, in my view, is the process of creating laments.2
She argues that each person must find their own voice that expresses that suffering and brings them into the heart of their community. In addition to laments in the biblical tradition, Lee presents laments written by people who have experienced the Holocaust, Sarajevo, Rwanda, and other atrocities. One of her examples is “Lament of Victims of Genocide” by Rwandan poet Suzanne Nyiranyamibwa:
I arrive in Rwanda. I lose all sense of direction
It’s as if my heart has broken free and my body is drained
While my chest is filled with strange sensations
Wild grass has hidden the county paths
The beautiful hills of yesteryear are covered in ruins
There where children frolicked and played
Are places where vultures now roam
The tears of orphans give you no relief from pain
Mothers have had their children ripped from their breasts
Too many widows trapped between life and death
….
Yet she concludes her poem in a spirit of looking forward:
Our people are now in the hands of Imana
Save us from desperation for it is unhealthy
Together let’s fight hate and triumph over misery.3
The work of Nyiranyamibwa and other poets suggests that if there is any hope to be found in trauma it is that the process of standing with and crying out against suffering can initiate healing and inspire action. As Kathleen O’Connor says, “Without the practice of public lament, collective work for justice is blocked, paralyzed, unable to begin…. Laments are the beginning of action, a rejection of passivity, and so they can invert despair. Across the spectrum of pain, across intersections of personal and political domains, lamenting releases life for life.”4
Another sort of guidance is that Lamentations insists we pay attention to what is going on around us, that we be alert to suffering. Daughter Zion tells us that her pain has been made worse by her awareness that no one is there to see it and give her comfort:
“For these things I weep; for my eyes flow with tears;
for a comforter is far from me, one to revive my courage;
my children are desolate, for the enemy has prevailed.” (1:16)
As O’Connor reflects, expressions of pain like this create an ethical imperative, and they “command us to live as compassionate witnesses to suffering, our own and that of others.” (O’C 137) In difficult times we may be sorely tempted to turn away from the world, but Lamentations tells us that living with our eyes closed is not an option.
* * *
At the same time as I was studying Lamentations, I was reading Great Tide Rising: Finding Clarity and Moral Courage to Confront Climate Change, in which American philosopher and nature writer Kathleen Dean Moore looks at why it is unethical to “wreck the world” and why we need to take action to stop further environmental destruction. At the heart of her book is her awareness of the magnificence of the natural world and her sense of unbearable loss and outrage as she sees it dying around her. In the following passage she imagines how her future self will describe the present world – the world of today that is being lost – to her grandchildren:
I buried my face in my hands, even as I stood in the water with the current shining against my shins. Oh, we had known the music of salmon moving upstream. When the streams were full of salmon, crows called again and again, and seagulls coughed on the gravel bars. Orioles sang, their heads thrown back with singing. Eagles clattered ….
Ring the Angelus for the salmon and the swallows. Ring the bells for frogs floating in bent reeds. Ring the bells for all of us who did not save the songs. Holy Mary, mother of God, ring the bells for every sacred emptiness. Let them echo in the silence at the end of the day. Forgiveness is too much to ask. I would pray for only this: that our granddaughter would hear again the little lick of music, that grace note toward the end of a meadowlark’s song.
Meadowlarks. There were meadowlarks. They sang like angels in the morning.5
Like the poets of Lamentations, Moore has a sense that the whole world, ‘from A to Z,’ is being destroyed and that soon we will be living in the miserable remnants. But also like the ancient poets she knows that now more than ever we need to pay attention. “I’m starting to understand how an attitude of attentiveness to the natural world can be a matter of moral significance – that it may in fact be a keystone virtue in a time of reckless destruction, a source of decency and hope and restraint.”6
Living as we do in a time when nature is being decimated and when cities and their people are systematically being destroyed (think Aleppo, Mosul), Lamentations forces us to remember that we cannot take the easy way out and hide away.
* * *
As our course came to an end I found myself reflecting on all of this. It seems to me that we are living in times when for many of us the temptation to turn away from the crises engulfing the world can be irresistible. As Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine say,
Today, humanity is up to its neck in denial about what it has built, what it has become — and what it is in for. Ecological and economic collapse unfold before us and, if we acknowledge them at all, we act as if this were a temporary problem, a technical glitch…. [W]e find ourselves, all of us together, poised trembling on the edge of a change so massive that we have no way of gauging it. None of us knows where to look, but all of us know not to look down.7
‘Looking down’ – confronting the bleakness of what is happening to us – can indeed be terrifying. We live in a culture that seems to be constantly looking for ways to escape when we see pain coming. But the poets of Lamentation are not afraid to look down. Survivors in a post-apocalyptic world where an enraged deity has let them down in a most profound way, they do not sugar coat or deny what they are experiencing. Rather, they have an extraordinary ability to dwell in a place of hopelessness – as it exists in themselves and in their world. So it may be that sitting with Lamentations will help us today to confront our own pain and alienation, as a first step towards acknowledging the confusion in our own world. And then, perhaps, taking it from there. In addition to Lamentations being an exceptional poetic achievement, the deep honesty and truth telling of the poets could be, for us, deeply healing during these times.
1 Kathleen O’Connor, Lamentations and the Tears of the World (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002), 17.
2 Nancy C. Lee, Lyrics of Lament: From Tragedy to Transformation (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010) 15.
3 Lee 168-9.
4 O’Connor, 128-9.
5 Kathleen Dean Moore, Great Tide Rising: Towards Clarity and Moral Courage in a time of Planetary Change (Berkley, CA: Counterpoint, 2016), 325-6.
6 Moore, 75.
7 The Dark Mountain Project is “a network of writers, artists and thinkers who have stopped believing the stories our civilisation tells itself.” To learn more go to http://dark-mountain.net.
Margaret Mill,er, Vancouver