UNAUTHORIZED, UNOFFICIAL LECTURE NOTES

"Lamentations and Losses: From New York to Kabul"

Daniel Berrigan, SJ, April 11, 2002, College of the Holy Cross

Lamentations; the word speaks for itself. Something terrible, something literally beyond imagining, has befallen Jerusalem and its people.

'Befallen'. Exactly. The skies have fallen in. A proud clan, a proud city, lies in the dust. The temple is gutted, the walls of the holy city a rubble. Prophecy is stilled, at least for a time - a time that seems an eternity. The elders and priests, those proud links of tradition and sacrifice and psalm - are vanished from the scene, driven like cattle into slavery and exile.

National identity, or more exactly, imperial identity, is shattered.

It rested on unsteady piers, as was evident after the fact; note the fact well, the symptoms of the Fall in Jerusalem; militarism, a rigid class system of the prosperous and the deprived, worship emptied of concern for 'the widow and orphan and stranger at the gate'.

And perhaps most damaging of all, a naive assumption, common among the elite, that come what may, come war and greed and cruelties against the victimized - God was 'on our side'. Familiar?

The conviction was simply taken for granted - irrefragable.

And why not? The temple was a world wonder, the sacrifices spectacular in their scope and artistry, song and dance and solemn proclamation of the law. World trade flourished, coffers of palace and temple were bulging.

The sky was the limit, literally. All signs pointed to divine approval.

But wait. God had news for the empire. On the horizon, a storm was gathering; its name was Babylon.

*************

It bore a truer name, a more awful: Divine fury. Jeremiah, his voice lost on the winds, was relentless. The temple, he raged, was a coven of idolaters. Let priests and people vaunt as pleased the ego, one day they would cower. The deity was outraged.

But the words of the prophet served him, and the city, as well, precisely nothing. The authorities cast over him the pelt of a scapegoat. He was a weaver of dire fantasies, in effect a turncoat against his own. He must be dealt with.

First he was ostracized, his writings publicly burned by the king. Then, cast in a dry well, he narrowly escaped death.

Nonetheless, the truth was out: "The oracles of Jeremiah were on the mark, cruelly, surgically so. Disaster swiftly descended, as Lamentations attests.

***************

Given time, the book became a liturgical text, a yearly reminder of sin, grief, chastisement and restoration.

God's love had taken an unutterably cruel form. But that love would weather the storm. Jerusalem would rise again, the exiles would return, rebuild the temple and city walls. The faith of the remnant shone anew, chastised and purified.

**************

'Lamentations' also cast a long shadow forward in time. It became a precious midrash of Christian sensibility. On Good Friday each year prior to Vatican II, the service of 'Tenebrae' resounded in churches and chapels. Lights were extinguished, as evening came on. In the sanctuary a mounted triangle held a series of beeswax candles alight, topped by a single white taper, the light of Christ.

As each verse of Lamentations was announced, the grieving resounded in the dusk. A lighted candle was snuffed. Finally, only the topmost candle remained.

Then it too was removed and hidden behind the altar, where it glowed mysteriously, as though in a closed tomb; Christ had died.

Now darkness enveloped the church and world.

But that was not the final act. In a sublime, fragile gesture of hope, the candle was brought forth and restored in place, an augury of a further, unimaginable Event. Death was denied the last word. In silence, the worshippers departed.

The symbolism, the threnody, the stripped altar and empty tabernacle, its door swung wide as though in final desolation - these formed an immensely moving mime. Lamentation indeed.

****************

Unknown authors, singers, poets, survivors, strung together our hoop of songs. The sequence strikes one as both contrived and inspired, with the opening word of each strophe a letter of the Hebrew alphabet, from first to last.

The device lent discipline and continuity; wild grief was contained, made bearable.

It is as though the exiles were also prisoners (which they were), chanting their grief through the bars of a cell or stockade.

Layer upon layer, contrasts and likenesses contend in the verses; despair, hope, resolve, bewilderment, anger, appeasement. The losses were unbearable - no, somehow they could be borne. Was not God still God - though God had turned about and spurned God's own?

**************

Why, why, why this disaster?

The text poses the tormenting question, and more; it ventures an answer.

Thus: sin, our sin, has shaken the pillars of empire. What has befallen, we have brought upon ourselves. The moral universe stands vindicated. This is the word that comes through the text, clogged with grief and loss. Despite all, a word of truth. And the bare bones of hope as well.

*************

Why, why the awful events that befell the United States in autumn of 2,001?

For this cause. An awesome 'yang' has followed on a repeated, unrepented 'yin'. What has befallen us at the Twin Towers and the Pentagon - repeatedly and in more grievous measure, we have inflicted on others.

Daring to ask 'why'. Daring an answer, wounding as it may be to pride and ethos and national myths. Letting a harsh, wounding truth strike home.

Thus the saving themes of Lamentations; remorse, repentance, hope of reconciling. Anger as well, against a God who has turned on God's own.

Shall the like become possible to ourselves, a people reeling and wounded?

**************

C. 1, vv. 1-ff. At the start of Lamentations, we are plunged into a scene of woe. The 'bride of God' is widowed. Grief sits on every face; life is stricken to heart. No more pretense, no vaunting or show of power; days of wine and rose are vanished on the winds of war.

Drink the bitter cup to its lees.

*************

The American vintage of wrath was grown, harvested and mixed elsewhere, by other hands. From the opening verse, more than the autumn disaster in New York and Washington is at stake.

Our sin is that of the Jerusalem of Jeremiah: idolatry. The World Trade Center (the name implies the sin) together with the Pentagon, are quite literally places of worship. There, world domination, monetary and military, is cozened, calculated, paid tribute.

Such worship has exacted a horrendous price, for generations. And always (until a day now seared in memory), the price was paid by others than ourselves.

Thus the lamentation, rightly taken, falls from the stricken lips of the victimized, the invaded and sanctioned and bombed peoples who fall (too bad for them!) afoul of the American hegemony.

Only tardily, only a comparatively few Americans claim the threnody, take it to heart and lips. From those at the highest level of authority, from media and military, another mood and word, another spasm - a clamorous outcry for vengeance and retaliation.

Confession of sin, questioning of our behavior, submitting to chastisement - these are emotions foreign to the national soul, a lost language of Ur

*************

In the lament, undoubtedly we read of less than admirable reactions of malice and the seeking of vengeance. But this is a background clamor. The major theme is other; lingering grief, confession of sin, purpose of amendment.

It is the word of God, instructive, meant for our own lips, our chastening and healing.

The opening symbols are of prebirth and post partum, both;

How lonely she is now,
the once crowded city!

Widowed is she,
who was mistress over nations;

The princes among the provinces
have been made toiling slaves.

In magical New York, the cynosure of the eyes of the nation, the self proclaimed 'capital of the world', mighty towers were toppled.

Let it be confessed, the first, indispensable, humiliating admission. The ruin we have wantonly sown abroad has turned about and struck home.

*****************

'How lonely...' We Americans are more and more isolated on the world scene. The Bush administration has rejected the Kyoto agreement on global warming, rejected an agreement to regulate the trade of small arms, distanced itself from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and the Biological Weapons Convention.

Yet more of this isolating pride: The US has refused to ratify the proposed International Criminal Court of Justice. To nullify the effort, the US proposes something to be known as The American Service Members Protection Act. This will authorize military force, to free any American soldier taken into International Criminal Court custody. "Touch us not!" is the message.

***************

After bombing eighteen countries in the last decades, after incursions and manipulations and lethal sanctions and the seizure of world markets and the reduction of multitudes to economic enslavement -- after all this. the towers were struck, ejecting their human cargo like a rubbish. And the Pentagon was breached.

To such horrendous effect, was there no cause attached? The question is odious, is out of order: is one for us or against us?

Enormous sums were spent to insure 'national security,' to punish enemies - and what an illusion! How vulnerable are the mighty, we the 'mistress over nations'.

****************

Bitterly she weeps at night,

tears upon her cheeks,

With not one to console her

of all her dear ones;

Her friends have all betrayed her

and become her enemies.

The scene is of utter desolation, a dark night of the spirit. The reigning images of an omnipotent warrior god have dissolved, fled the soul, the temple, the grandiose cityscape.

Likewise overthrown is a pier of identity jealously set in place, guarded and exploited through the ages; we, 'the chosen'.

Brutally, against all tradition and expectation, the tribe is - unchosen.

Worse. In a crushing irony, as Isaiah testifies, Babylon the merciless claims the divine favor snatched from Jerusalem.

****************

Friends become enemies; those once trustworthy and near turn traitors. Whatever the reference, the grief lies deeper than grief; sanity and good sense are crushed out of recognition.

What sorer loss, than that of trust between friends?

We humans flourish through trust and friendship - or we die for lack of these. The web of life is woven close; survival demands fidelity to the design, hands and eyes carefully, skillfully weaving and repairing.

*****************

V.3.

Judah has fled into exile

from oppression and cruel slavery;

Yet where she lives among the nations,

she finds no place to rest.

All her persecutors come upon her

where she is narrowly confined.

Despite the rather clumsy translation, 'exile' is clearly one with 'oppression and cruel slavery'. We are mourning in exile, a historical reality and a spiritual as well, an ancient uprooting and 'non- belonging'; and a modem too - or a post modem, which comes to much the same.

**************

This is the sensibility Paul actually commends to the believing community. 'Be not conformed to this world', he warns.

The warning has never been more exactly to the point, bespeaking the vocation of Christians in America.

'Con-formity' with this world implies several metaphors; a kind of grafting on to worldly ethos, a non-argument with its ideologies and appetites and violence, a falling in step with its projects.

Or a disappearing into its vortex. Drowning there, suffocating.

**************

As in the spring of 2002, Bush's war proceeds apace against the all but decimated, impoverished people of Afghanistan.

An immediate 'statement' was issued by the Catholic bishops. The stipulations of the 'just war theory' once more were hauled out, fiction and fact, "Mr. president," in effect, "full speed ahead!"

****************

And I thought, in a mood veering between dejection and recognition; deja vu - with a difference.

Vietnam had endured fifteen years of American napalm and bombs. A number of us spoke up, wrote, marched, destroyed draft files and went to prison. And the bishops were mum as a midnight graveyard.

In an ironic way, their silence was fitting. Quite literally, they had nothing to offer.

Year 2001, yet another war. And the bishops, not to be caught napping, issue 'a statement'.

They have nothing to offer - and they lack the grace to keep silent. They offer - nothing.

An old lesson, and a new. The bishops willy nilly, are fulfilling the metaphors suggested by Paul. They are grafted on to the world, that 'tree of the knowledge of good and evil', and its ambiguous fruits. They have no argument with the ethos of mass killing. They fall in step with a vile project, enlisting themselves (and us?) 'for the duration'.

And what of an echo of the gospel teaching, 'Love your enemies?'

Astonishing, and weirdly instructive; the bishops' statement made no reference, even in passing, to the teaching and example of Christ.

Thus our verse, "Where she lives among the nations, She finds no place of rest", is (not so subtly) altered, in denial of Christ and Paul, to something like;

Where she lives among the nations,

She finds a place of rest.

'A place of rest' indeed.

********************

I submit that the final strophe of verse 3, "finds no rest among the nations," presents the normal ('normal,' underscored) situation of the believing community. This is not lightly stated.

The 'finding rest among the nations' is the abnormal, the weird. In truth, the betrayal.

Here a drama, cruel, exact - normal. One translation has it thus:

All her persecutors overtook her
in the narrow places.

Indicating as well, that the Hebrew is uncertain.

Another version has roughly the same idea:

All her persecutors come upon her
where she is narrowly confined

In either version, one notes a constriction, I thought, as though of prisoners held in a kind of holding tank.

A war is declared, believers resist. Speedily they are under duress, convicted of serious charges, imprisoned.

The one follows the other, war, then prison - as night the day.

In sum, for years my friends, my brother and I have resisted the cause which the bishops support.

With the integrity of the gospel in question (one almost thought, in jeopardy), let us ponder with Bonhoeffer; who is leading whom, who is misleading?

********************

V. 4

The roads to Zion mourn,
for lack of pilgrims going to her feasts;
All her gateways are deserted,
her priests groan,
Her virgins sigh,
she is in bitter grief.

Ecology takes up the plaint. The rhythms of worship, the great days that awakened remembrance, rejoicing, confidence in the saving acts of God, interventions of renewal and healing and return - no more of those.

The stones of the road find voice; 'no more, no more..'.

Could it be imagined that catastrophes of war, bombings, massed forces moving against the innocent, misery and displacement and death - that these leave our worship untouched?

Or that - a worse case by far - if the priests react to the moral disaster with silence or a 'statement' of approval - shall that worship speak for the God of peace, for Jesus, capitally condemned by the empire?

Another task is called for. Let priests who are faithful to the gospel speak up, let them resist the infamy of state and church marching to a war drum. Let them 'groan'.

*****************

AS REFUGEES SUFFER, SUPPLIES SIT UNUSED NEAR AFGHAN BORDER

Refugee camps are dotted all over this city, bedraggled lines of rags and blankets over thin poles amid thick mud and frozen pools of water. There are an estimated half a million displaced people in northern Afghanistan, some of them with no more than a piece of sacking over a pole for shelter....

But help lies just a 45-minute drive away, where tons of supplies sit just across the border in Termez, Uzbekistan. Delivery of the supplies to the desperately needy here is blocked by the Uzbekistan government's refusal to allow it into Afghanistan.

(NY Times)

****************

Jerusalem is mindful of the days
of her wretched homelessness,

When her people fell into enemy hands,
and she had no one to help her,

When her foes gloated over her,
laughed at her ruin.

Memories do not rebuild walls, nor restore a people destroyed. Generations passed, the exile went on, brutish, unending.

In the present, in the eyes of the conquerors, this is a 'former' nation, Zion, its memories fictive and fading.

Of what point this dwelling on the past? It is lost, done with. To those born in Babylon, as to those born in the wilderness after Egypt, memories count for less and less. They are old wives' tales, a fog dispersed by every sunrise.

************

Still, a contrary current gains voice in the verses. It can never be entirely stifled. Let us not allow the memories to die; memories of the great ancestors, their teaching and worship, the year's rhythms, kosher discipline, daily prayer. Even in despair, turn toward Jerusalem!

Memory is a bitter herb: 'foes...gloating... homelessness… ruin'. Sharp on the tongue, in the mind, memory heals; it confers the will to endure.

''****************

(Harold Pinter; address at the University of Florence; nb, 9/l0/0l)

Arrogant, indifferent, contemptuous of international law, both dismissive and manipulative of the United Nations - this (the US) is now the most dangerous power the world has ever known - the authentic 'rogue state' - but a rogue state of colossal military and economic might.

And Europe, especially the United Kingdom is both compliant and complicit; or as Cassius in 'Julius Caesar' put it, we 'peep about to find ourselves dishonorable graves'.

************

In Lamentations, the later default of Christians also stands revealed. American religion, in the space of the American empire, provokes no quarrel, no questioning. Instead of uttering a prophetic outcry, the leaders fall in line. By compliant silence and complicit word, the church shows herself a reliable collaborator; the god is on our side.

************

Then, in our verses, a long, personal, impassioned plea is underway. No mere description of the impasse will do.

Instead, a daring, lyric leap; judgment is reversed. God must be summoned vis-à-vis;

'Look 0 God and see,
how worthless I have become!'

Exactly; worthless, the price tag tied to the flesh of the living. Multitudes, in the estimate of Mars, are better dead; and soon will be dead. Without worth in any case, living or dead.

It is wartime. Humans are expendable. So is the human itself, a sense of one's own humanity, of the foe's.

Human life, cheap if not worthless.

*************

V. 12.

Come, all you who pass by the way,
look and see

Whether there is any suffering
like my suffering,

Which was dealt me
when God afflicted me
on the day of blazing wrath

*************

(Catholic Worker, October 2001)

In the first few days after the destruction of the World Trade Center, as we strive to understand as we continue to work, search for hope and pray, we also ask again and again for forgiveness. Please forgive us, as our civilizations continue to unfold their long histories of violence.

Forgive us our anger, hate and drive for retribution. -Forgive us our confusion and failure. We pray for the grace to maintain our faith and live out our pacifist convictions. We ask forgiveness for our sins.

***************

According to our text, there are those who suffer greatly; exiles, refugees, slaves, bare survivors. They are given voice here, the voiceless, the wretched of the earth.

Thus the bible, its God, its prophets and witnesses speak for those pushed to the verge of the world, those who live and die anonymous, unsung, statistics in the ledgers of the Olympians.

But God is not mocked, the God of 'widows and orphans and strangers at the gate'.

**************

V. 17.

Zion stretched out her hands,
but there was no one to console her.

God gave orders against Jacob
for his neighbors to be his foes;

Jerusalem has become in their midst
a thing unclean.

The scene: a woman's hands are extended. She is a suppliant in a male world.

The world is hardly to be thought her world, responding to her need and that of her children, practiced in tenderness. Nothing of this. Too bad for her - she must make do or not, in a world of warriors.

For centuries during the era of the kings, feminine images were rare indeed. Only now and again, through the prophets, is a woman heard from, or her God.

Now, in defeat she 'stretches out her hands'. In the days of glory, hands had other uses. They were invariably male, they brandished a sword.

Males seldom yielded before the supplications of women.

Now, 'she' must endure a like heartlessness; no mercy. It is as though her cry served only to aggravate blood lust. The response is lethal, heartless.

****************

The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) wrote that 'the fundamentalist terrorists (the Taliban) would devour their creators'.

Let Americans be warned, wrote the women,

Their prediction was appallingly verified on 9/11.

After the tragedy, the Afghan women sent another message of condolence; its words were remarkable, one thinks, for psychological acuity:

'We send words of deep sorrow and solidarity with the American people. We believe however, that attacking Afghanistan and killing its most ruined and destitute people, will not in any way decrease the grief of the American people.'

Previously, RAWA had written:

'The most treacherous, most criminal, most anti-democracy and anti-women fundamentalists...the Taliban, have committed every possible heinous crime against our people. They would feel no shame in committing such crimes against the American people... in order to gain and maintain their power...

*************

The mourner seems caught in a dilemma, of two minds. Whence came the catastrophe? Is it of God, is it of the Assyrians?

V. 21.

'Give heed to my groaning;
there is no one to console me.

All my enemies rejoice at my misfortune;
it is You who has wrought it.

Bring on the day you have proclaimed,
that they may be even as I.'

It is of both God and the Assyrians. But faith forbids that she call God to accounts.

The same faith, it seems, hardly forbids the summoning of vengeance. Quite the contrary. Intensely the theme continues;

V. 22.

Let all their evil come before You;
deal with them

as You have dealt with me
for all my sins;

My groans are many
and I am sick at heart.

We have an equation strongly presumed. God, she confesses, is just. May that justice vindicate itself; quid pro quo, equal treatment under law. This; 'An eye for an eye'

But a question intervenes like a halting hand, raised: Will destruction of enemies, in the name of God's justice - will this mitigate our own sufferings? Or is there another way than vengeance, a better?

On this serious subject, Christians have a midrash of note. It takes the form of a strong charge:

My command to you is;
love your enemies,

Pray
for your persecutors.

Thus
you will show yourselves

sons and daughters
of

your
heavenly
Father....

(Mt., c. 5, w. 44, 45)

******************

From a letter to the Chicago Tribune, 9/25/01;

My husband, Craig Amundson of the US army, lost his life at the pentagon on Sept. 11...

Losing my 28 year old husband and father of our two young children, is a terrible and painful experience...

I have heard angry rhetoric by some Americans, including many of our nation's leaders, who advise a heavy dose of revenge and punishment.

To those leaders, I would like to make clear that my family and I take no comfort in your words of rage... Your words and immanent acts of revenge only amplify our family's suffering, deny us the dignity of remembering our loved one in a way that would have made him proud, and mock his vision of America as a peacemaker in the world community...

Craig would not have wanted a violent response to avenge his death. And I cannot see how good can come of it. Mohandas Gandhi said; 'An eye for an eye only makes the whole world blind' ...

I call on our national leaders to find the courage to respond to this incomprehensible tragedy by breaking the cycle of violence...

(Amber Amundson)

****************

C. 2, v. 1.

God in wrath
has detested daughter Zion,

has cast down from heaven to earth
the glory of Israel,

Unmindful of God's footstool
on the day of wrath.

What a strange faith! Do we conclude that a totally unknown terrain, little light is shed?

The faithful one wavers uneasily between the agents of her downfall. Whom to blame, whom indict? This one, no; that one...

For now, in this mood, let it be said as clearly as word and trope can convey; God has wrought this horror.

But no. It was formerly and just as strongly stated - our sins have brought this horror:

God has punished her
for her many sins.

(c. 1, v. 5)

And again;

Through the sins of which she is guilty,
Jerusalem is defiled.

(V. 8)

Yet again;

God has kept watch
over my sins.

(V. 14)

**************

'God... has detested daughter Zion'. 'A detested daughter' - could a perversion more offensive to nature be imagined?

To the father, a daughter is the very apple of his eye, a pride and joy. Even in a culture of male bonding, the affection (not, to be sure, the primogeniture and portion) abides strongly. But here?

The hardening of heart, the casting out, is awful, unbearable. It cannot be squared with logic, cannot be undone by summoning affectionate memories. It stands there, a text turned icy, a testimony; rejection, the beloved put to the door.

Summon a trope then; one that bespeaks a heart mortally wounded. Daughter, and detested. Mourn and mourn.

*************

Another image in this pharmacology of tears:

'Cast down from heaven to earth...'

How more strongly, poignantly - more wrongly stated!

God has consumed without pity the dwellings of Jacob.

V.2

Has torn down in anger
the fortresses of daughter Juda.

Has brought to ground in dishonor
her kings and her princes.

Is God after all, to be held to accounts? Does the verse refer to grief or judgment, or something of both? 'Without pity... in anger...'. The emotions are like hands tightening about a throat. They choke off reason.

The losses are cumulative, from rubble to human bones; 'dwellings... fortresses... kings and princes...' One cannot but note; the poet is charged with the fury he seeks to locate in God.

*************

V. 3. Fire again, a leading image of total destruction.

And a God who goes counter, no longer standing with God's own; implacably against.

What then of the refrain of Genesis, repeated like a song of sweetness and Love:

'And God saw that it was good'.

Six times repeated, in favor of light (C. 1, v. 4) of earth and seas (v. 10) of vegetation (v. 12), again of light (v. 18), of living creatures twice (w. 21, 25).

And culminating in the human, with a superlative approval upon all;

'And God
saw

everything
God
had made,

and
behold,

it was
very good.'

Now, apparently, roles are reversed, friend, creation, covenant, spouse…

Song of Songs, is become - 'the Enemy'. The steadfast Lover. Protector, Provider of manna and water in the wilderness, the Shekinah of the wandering years, is now - 'the Foe'.

Daring, risky faith! Thus does this unaccountable God appear to the defeated exiles.

*************

God, Friend or Foe? A modem poet has notably recorded the like, thorny question:

Thou art indeed just. Lord, if I contend
With thee; but, sir. what I plead is just...

Wert thou my enemy, 0 thou my friend,
How could thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost
Defeat, thwart me?...

(GM Hopkins)

**************

V. 5. The woman-victim is lost, bereft, shocked. Shall she absorb the catastrophe, and go on? Easier said than done!

She has known much of enmities - how else could that 'glory' have arisen, except through wars and a prevailing most costly?

Still, amid chaos and carnage, the heavens stood firm. God was with her.

Or so it was said, and affirmed by priests. So too, the grand liturgies of the sanctuary assured.

Now all, all is changed. The heavens have fallen. God has declared war against the once 'chosen'.

And the threnody of loss and alienation continues, obsessively.

***************

V. 5.

God has become an enemy,
has consumed Israel;

Consumed her castles,
destroyed her fortresses;

For daughter Juda
has multiplied
moaning and groaning.

**************

Memory scalds. Can the defeated so much as dream of recovering former glories, will they see once again the beloved horizons of home?

More tormenting by far; will their God ever again be known as - Friend, Brother, Lover, Spouse? Can the exiles again befriend their God, and stand, confident, befriended?

**************

The questions need not hang on the air like a sword suspended.

For Christians, at a stroke Someone has answered; 'Yes. Stand confident, befriended'.

Someone has healed and reconciled and died, that the Yes! may live on;

As the Father

has loved Me,

so

I have loved

you.

Live on

in My love...

This

is My commandment;

love one another

as I

have loved you.

There is

no greater love

than this;

to lay down

one's life

for one's friends...

I

call you

friends,

since I

made known

to you

all

I heard

from

My

Father...

(John, c. 15, w. 9, 12, 13, 15)