Reflection on Lamentations

Super-belated. Sorry.

Lamentations 1:15
“All the mighty ones in my midst the Lord has cast away; He summoned an army against me to crush my young men; The LORD has trodden in the wine press virgin daughter Judah.”

I was just a few days into my first year of college on September 11, 2001. I’ve never seen my student Mass as full as it was the Sunday after that cataclysmic day. I have a powerful image of coming in late to find that I could barely make my way inside the doors, as the church was packed to standing room only, all staring with more than usual intensity at the presider.

In the face of terrible events of such great scope, people often ask how a believer still believes. This wasn’t an issue for those Massgoers that day, and it wasn’t a question after Jerusalem fell. The Hebrews knew that any event so greatly tragic didn’t disprove God: God was clearly bound up in something so huge. Their interpretation was that God had caused this tragedy to happen: perhaps they couldn’t imagine humans capable of such great destructive power.

I was greatly moved throughout the book of Lamentations by the image of the broken nation as a daughter. In many languages today, we call our countries mother- or fatherland: Uncle Sam, la patrie, Mother India. This parental image implies that our nation owes us something, is more powerful than we are, and that perhaps—as all children secretly suspect—we ourselves know better than to do the foolish things our country does.

Contrast this with the image of nation in the book of Lamentations. It grieves a parent deeply to see a child suffer, perhaps more than an injury to oneself. And fairly or not, a parent feels responsible for a child’s wrong behavior. The inhabitants of Jerusalem saw this connection clearly: they felt that where their nation had gone wrong, each of them was responsible. The prophets of our own day are shouting to make this message heard again.