On September 12, 2001, while the haunting and heartbreaking chirping sounds from the personal alert safety systems worn by buried firefighters could still be heard under the rubble at Ground Zero, the first line of the book of Lamentations was read during a prayer service in New Jersey just across the Hudson River from Manhattan.
How lonely sits the city that once was full of people.
If the word “lament” carries connotations of a sad cry, a “lamentation” seems more a primal shriek.
The curtain opens in chapter one of the book of Lamentations with a destitute widow dressed in rags, trudging through the ashes of Jerusalem at midnight. Her people have been carried off into exile—what is evoked in Exodus but in reverse. Where there was freedom, now there is enslavement. Where there was singing and dancing, now there is desolation. Where there was a covenant with God, now everything is in shambles.
He has broken my teeth with gravel;
he has trampled me in the dust...
My splendor is gone,
and all that I had hoped from the Lord.
Intense sorrow often strips away our ability to communicate. Lamentations offers us a model to recover this capacity, in poetry, in raw verse. There’s a thoughtful complexity embedded in the original Hebrew, as well: an alphabetical acrostic pattern as a scaffold on which the poet seems to try to rebuild.
Remember, Lord, what has happened to us,
look, and see our disgrace...
Joy is gone from our hearts;
Our dancing has turned to mourning.
Kevin Young is the editor of a book called The Art of Losing. In his introduction to a collection of poems about grief, he writes that elegiac poetry is beckoned by need. “Necessity is what drives most of the poetry that matters,” he writes. Consistent with this notion, there’s a vital urgency to Lamentations. It had to be written to bear witness to the shattering form of suffering the poet and his people were experiencing.
This is why I weep and my eyes overflow with tears.
No one is near to comfort me,
no one to restore my spirit.
My children are destitute
because the enemy has prevailed.
Given how immersed our Scriptures are in the details of the human condition, it’s not surprising to find a book about acute sorrow in the Bible. What's more intriguing, given the zero-dark-thirty tone and grizzly content of this book, is that the poet continues to insist that God is still present with him all the way through. God is there to wail to, to shake a fist at, to complain about. God is there to hear the poet’s profound regret, his utter disbelief about what’s occurred, and then to sit with him in silence.
While nothing is tied up nicely with a bow at the end, the key takeaway of Lamentations is that God is a reliable companion through suffering. At the book’s conclusion, the poet looks into the abyss and with praise falling from his lips, delivers a haunting and heartbreaking last line.
You, 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, Lord, that we may return;
renew our days as of old
unless You have utterly rejected us,
and are angry with us beyond measure.
The book of Lamentations is not devoid of a more conventional form of hope, either. In the midst of all the calamity, there is a fragment, just a bar or two, of familiar light, a melody barely audible off in the distance. You have to strain to hear it, but it’s there. Twenty-five hundred years after the book was written, this glimmer gave rise to a hymn, one that offers us a bright, lyrical, and lasting kind of hope even now.
This I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope.
It is of the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed,
because His compassions fail not.
They are new every morning: great is Thy faithfulness.
Never forget that this sorrowful book is voiced by a survivor. Despite its subject, it’s recited in a kind of heroic idiom, one that’s very familiar to us.
Great is Thy faithfulness,
O God my Father,
There is no shadow of turning with Thee.
Thou changest not, Thy compassions, they fail not,
As Thou hast been,
Thou forever wilt be.
God, thank You for Your companionship through all suffering. Amen.
