No Honest Song Besides These Blues

by Hannah Paasch

1961. New York City. The scene opens on an ill-lit, smoky bar, crowded with mesmerized listeners huddled around cafe tables and bottles of beer. 

Our protagonist sags back in his seat, shoulders slumped and leaning to the right, a mess of black curls falling from his forehead. He’s played the same little spotlight the night before, and as he watches some square with a guitar finger-pick some chords and breathily eek out something akin to a folk song, Llewyn looks askance at this self-pronounced artist, his drooping gaze heavy with world-weariness and a certain amused disdain. 

The chords are the same as his, and the lyrics, though virtually indecipherable might be as well - but the soul is just not there. It’s a mere shell, a discarded exoskeleton of a folk song clinging to a springtime tree; a smiling Stepford archetype of the real thing. It is a fraud – admittedly a harmless, airy sort of fraud - and no one but Llewyn seems to notice.

He turns to his friend, a bright-eyed, over-eager Justin Timberlake (you think I’m kidding; I’m not), whose eyes are glued to the stage, grinning and stupefied. “What do you think of this guy?” he asks.

“An incredible performer,” JT replies without hesitation.

“Is he?” Llewyn asks, incredulous, throwing a hard look at his friend as if to make sure they’re both seeing the same thing. “Does he... have higher functions?”

I knew then that I’d met my on-screen soul mate. Llewyn’s circumstances spiral from bad to ever-so-much-worse, and he yells a lot and throws a couple things and gets in a lot of trains and cars and more trains in search of someone who will GET it; who will hear him and realize there’s no honest song to sing besides these blues. He plays all the right songs to all the wrong people and is an absolute marketing - and otherwise - disaster. Nobody sees him; nobody listens; nobody gets it.

Inside Llewyn Davis may be set in the ’60s, but oh, how it still sings true. Too many of the songs about life and faith these days just try too hard to convince us that life is clean, that trust is easy, that happiness is the measure of our faith. It leaves no room for grieving; it leaves no room for pain. I want to hear a song where our pain still has meaning, where happy endings are not required.

A song that maybe we could all just marinate in with our pain for a bit until our thawed-out nerves begin to wake us up.

Truth is, once we let ourselves listen, everybody likes a sad song. We like them because we know they are true. We can swim around in them and we feel ourselves met; heard; understood. They put melody to our pain and lend a peaceful charm to our wounds. They turn abscesses into scars; they help us heal.

But we’ve forgotten how to grieve.

The other night, over late-night sausage and eggs in a Nashville diner, I sat down a friend of mine who’s devoted his life to the Gospel and the blues and asked him what the point of it all was.

"There’s no escapism in the blues,” he responded, after a moment of consideration. “Every song is a reminder that we are aliens. We are strangers...” 

He paused a moment, twirling his fork through a pile of omelet.

“... Don’t get too comfortable.”

We are tired of the platitudes presented as an opiate to soothe the masses, trying daily, hourly to convince us that all is as it should be. We are tired of the optimist telling us, that all will be well, if we can only have enough faith. We are tired of the pessimist, whose singular intelligence somehow always leads him to a hopelessness about our nows that extends to our tomorrows. They are all paths to despair, in their own way.

The prophet mourns over us before we even know how to put words or feet to our sorrow. She shakes our shoulders and begs us to see - really SEE - the dire straits we are in. The bluesman, too, chants our troubles over us, his melodies making them just palatable enough to sneak out of our subconscious and, suddenly, to the forefront of our hearts. Walter Brueggemann calls them ‘voices from elsewhere’ - breaking the silence of a settled order with life-giving dialogue. We cry out to a God who hears and we ask, not that He would rid us of our pain, but that He would be ever present with us in its midst.

Let the heaviness sink in a moment, friends. It’s ok to rest in it a bit. Because before we can re-learn how to hope, we must first re-learn how to grieve;

Before we can sing, “Victory, sweet victory…”

first, my friend...

we’ve gotta learn to sing the blues. 
 
Say you wouldn’t know the blues if they slapped you in the face? (They very well might!) Say you want me to stop talking and listen in for yourself? Good! I like you. More people need to tell me to shut up. For such a sort as you I have prepared a Spotify playlist that just BEGINS to scratch the surface of good prophetic, grieving blues tunes. Search “Hannah Paasch” on Spotify and listen to my playlist, entitled “I Wish I Was in Heaven, Sittin’ Down”.

Hannah Paasch was raised on Jesus and adventure. She is a self-styled storyteller, aspiring songwriter, bridge-builder, and bridge-destroyer, as the situation at hand would dictate. You can follow her on Twitter @thesettingsun07 and read more of her writing at her blog.

You can follow On Pop Theology on Twitter @OnPopTheology or like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/OnPopTheology. If you'd like to support what we do, you can donate via the button on the right of the screen.

Image Credits:
Image #1 via ZaraWhoa
Image #2 via ArtCrusade
Image #3 via Number Six 
  
You might also like:  

• Looking for the Kingdom Coming Down: The Alternative Reality of the Poet-Prophet
• Bonfire of the Vagueries
• Prayers to a Dark God

Reflections on Ecclesiastes at a Gazillion Feet (Approx.)

by JaneAnn Kenney

Flying has always helped me put my life back into perspective, which might be why I waited until now, on a Southwest flight headed west, to begin writing again. I sit with strangers and sometimes I hope for an extrovert (not the magazine-wielding lass who showed up today). Why? Why do I want Tyler Durden’s single-serving friend? Because I long for a story; I want to hear a new story, to swap stories. 

I need to be reminded that I am not an automaton when I board a plane, even though my entire body is suspended in space, as human bodies were never meant to be. My concerns remain real and are, perhaps, even pressing, but while in flight there is nothing to be done about them; they must wait patiently.

Perspective: everyone on this airplane is the lead actor in the plot of their lives. All of those tiny houses below in West Tennessee hold lives and problems which seem highly important to those within, but affect me not at all, just as mine are of no concern to them. I feel like a vanilla person in flight; certainly I’ve got flaws, and gifts as well, but no one here knows them. They may suspect, based on my appearance or my brief interactions, but they cannot know. 

At times like this, the Teacher’s admonition to be neither too wise nor a fool comes to mind (Ecc. 7:16-17 for the curious). It seems that both wisdom and folly lead to death, so a mixture of the two must be the recipe for life. Or else, perhaps the recipe of life is to be fully human, embracing our fallenness, since we cannot escape it except in death. In this embrace, we begin to understand how far we are from being God.

It’s not just that we die alone and are forgotten; we also live so much alone. If Adam and Eve were created to be in relationship with one another and with God, then the fact of human isolation constitutes a major flaw in the world, and perhaps even the major flaw. Ecclesiastes speaks directly to my post-modern American soul. (I would say Christian, but the Teacher would appreciate that I can confess to frequently being more American than I am Christian.) We are so busy with our own lives that we forget God and we forget one another. 

This is not a purely American problem, of course, but I see the brokenness of the world most clearly in my own culture. And I see the Teacher as speaking this culture’s native tongue: he refuses to give a straight answer to anything, preferring the grey areas to which we have become so accustomed.

I find the Teacher’s words easier to consider as an American woman than as a Christian. I feel less guilty for hopelessness, for trudging through life without a clear aim, than if I am supposed to be praising Jesus on an infinite loop. Qohelet (Hebrew for “the Teacher”) addresses the issues that the church in the USA avoids, namely, if God is on my side, why do I feel so lethargic or bumbling or useless? If the Holy Spirit is within me, why do I still want what I should not have and reach for what I cannot receive? 

Perhaps the life of faith hasn’t changed so much in the last 2500 years; even “knowing God and keeping his commands” can leave us listless and frustrated, especially on those days we’ve done all we can and life continues just as senselessly as the day before. Our histories never leave us, and so sorrows abound from past experiences, sins, and injustices, returning to us in new and unexpected ways.

But we don’t like this story; we want life to make sense, to have meaning and a happy ending. So we tell ourselves different stories in an attempt to drown out the truth. Perhaps the best example is the romantic comedy, a stalwart barrier against Real Life. We all know the recipe for romantic comedies; we see the characters spinning ever closer to an appropriate, satisfying end. 

Imagine a director or writer straying from the tried-and-true script. See the male lead—say he’s a bike messenger—always dashing around on two wheels, rather oblivious to both interpersonal and vehicular signals. As he races to the bus stop to prevent his female counterpart from boarding and leaving him forever, to confess his true love (which we know she shares—see the tears in her eyes as she thinks, he’s not coming), as he speeds through an intersection, he is hit by a car because he wasn’t looking where he was pedaling, and now he lies dead in a pool of blood. This isn’t how the story was meant to go! the audience protests, and yet part of us knows that this unsatisfying end is truer to life than their kiss ever could have been.

His death is the natural consequence of a lifetime of haphazard actions. He died because he was never looking where he went, checking left and right and then left again. We dislike it, but we have to admit it made sense. And what of a teenager in a dark hoodie killed because a man felt threatened by his gait? What of a movie theater massacre or—God forbid!—a school shooting? Qohelet protests: These things are not in God’s script, were never in God’s script! 

Any appeal to creation is an appeal to the way the world was designed to work rather than how we see it working. We gnash our teeth over the ridiculous salaries paid to baseball players, yet we pay our $20 to go to the game and cheer for our team (and believe me, I am guilty of this). Qohelet’s appeal to creation is a plea for God to restore order so that old men are not forgotten by their children nor is a stillborn child better off than the man full of years. He yearns for the day when finding one good woman in a thousand would be senselessly easy: they are all quality, and so are the men.

Perspective: I could die today in this airplane, whether because of an electrical malfunction or a terrorist act or my very body fatally betraying me. It is unlikely that I will die today, simply because I will only die the one time, and that time is already a very small percentage of my life.

Yet in this plane I face mortality and think: This is a bad time to go. Is the timing ever right, or is there no such thing? It can only be one or the other, really. In any case, there are loose ends in Oklahoma that I’m hoping to mend (not tear apart). My parents are still alive. I’ve never been married or (more importantly) raised a child. My degree isn’t finished, my brother can’t pay rent on his own, I am good at my job… the Teacher might even agree with me that, if I died today, it would be astoundingly senseless, and yet he would not be surprised.

It may be appropriate how self-centered I’ve been in considering the implications of Ecclesiastes in life today, and I know it’s appropriate that I’ve offered no real answers. The Teacher’s search, while on behalf of the community, was a path he walked alone. There was no Watson to his Sherlock, no Robin to his Batman, no Stewart to his Colbert (or should this last be reversed?). When I look at my life, I too see the dreariness, the endless wandering, the cycles of cycles and photocopies of days on end. And yet, 

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge & shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs --
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast & with ah! bright wings.

-G. Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur”

You can ask JaneAnn about: Nashville, theology, cats. Baseball. Glacial rivers. Her stance on the color purple, and then again the existence of the word "purple." General frivolity and terrible music (for the DANCING!!). Old Stephen King novels, time zones, and toll roads in Oklahoma. She will not, however, answer any questions about that thing living in her fridge. You can follow her on Twitter @JAKof3Ts.

You can follow On Pop Theology on Twitter @OnPopTheology or like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/OnPopTheology.

You might also like:  

• Laments for Lent
• A Place in Sedona
• Mothers, Don't Let Your Sons Grow Up To Be In Tarantino Movies

When Winter Comes

by Jacob Campbell

I love Game of Thrones - the show, not the books, and yes, I know this makes me some sort of Westerosian heretic. I am presently on my third attempt to tackle the books, so please, a little grace. But the show...holy cow, it is good. I love Ned Stark, the ostensible hero of the first season. He is noble, just, and loves his family, but what makes him so interesting is that those are the very things that trap him as well. His virtue keeps him caged, in a world where everyone else acts in complete freedom, regardless of law or tradition. And I also love the ancient motto of his house, a reminder to prepare for hard times are ahead: “Winter is coming...”. 

The show teaches me, again and again, that notions of good and evil really are limited, that they break down in a complex world. It teaches that winter really is coming. Winter itself is neither good nor evil, it’s merely the reality of naturally complex world and a perfect metaphor for the struggles of life. And, it also proves to me that I probably shouldn’t watch a show with this much sex.  

But yeah, in Game of Thrones, there really aren’t many truly good guys or, for that matter, truly bad guys. Life is more complex than that. A character may commit a petty atrocity in one scene and in another, we see him acting nobly and heroically. And what’s more, both seem entirely consistent with his nature. Like King David, who a professor of mine refers to as a petty tyrant, some characters do cruel things and yet remain the shows ‘good guys’.  

Consider Tyrion Lannister: he’s a scheming, whoring, drunken, acerbic dwarf who, at the same time, is brilliant, nurturing, and even shows himself to be the hero on more than a few occasions. Can he be categorized as simply good or simply bad?

And here is the one I’ve been wrestling with: can God? 

The events two months ago in Boston left many shaken. And while the national attention was focused on the bombings and ensuing manhunt, other more personal tragedies unfolded in my life. A member of my church was broken as his wife left him, and took their children with her. A friend’s twins, born prematurely, were unable to survive; they died in the NICU. With the world so often in turmoil, so viciously dishing out pain and horror, it always seems like winter. 

And inevitably the “why, God?” questions emerge. They don’t just emerge; they pile up. How could a God who is good continue to allow such pain at every turn? How could he not stop it?  But I’m not convinced anymore of the premise of behind such questions. I don’t think it’s a simple world we live in; it’s far more complex. As Game of Thrones shows us, in a complex world, our simplistic notions of good and bad no longer work.  

We cannot confine God to our categories, even the ones we name “good” and “bad”. It’s easy to think of God as good in the long, green summer; it’s easy to call God good as long as nothing too terrible happens. But when winter comes, it’s much harder to grapple with a good God. The lines start to blur. 

This isn't just a philosophical exercise for me; there have been far too many winters in my life already. My father was an alcoholic. He abused my brother and mother both physically and verbally. That same brother was later killed in a gas station robbery, leaving my father deeply depressed. That began a long slow decline of more alcoholism and eventually, death by cancer. My wife and I have struggled with joblessness and financial difficulties. Sometimes it feels as if God has turned against me. 

Now, I don’t mean to claim I have the hedge on suffering, but I can truly say I have experienced my fair share. And what I have discovered is that chasing the “If God is good...” rabbit into a bottomless hole accomplishes nothing.      

There is a great line in the movie God on Trial, which has Jewish prisoners in Auschwitz prosecute God for allowing the Holocaust, where one of the rabbis gives an impassioned speech that includes the line, “God is not good; he was never good. He was simply on our side.” 

What do we do with God when it seems like he’s turned on us? Is this not the cry of Job, “Yet God has found fault with me, he considers me his enemy.”  What do we make of God when it seems like winter has come, and that winter never ends?

We need to understand that God is above what we understand as good or bad. How does a good God let bad things happen? Because he is God. He is neither good nor bad. Sure, Scripture proclaims God as good in places. And certainly, the goodness of God was manifested in Jesus. 

But something as wild and uncontainable as God cannot be serviced by simplistic terms like ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Heck, ‘magnificent’ and ‘malevolent’ don’t do him justice. When winter comes, it’s all our finite brains can do to attempt to understand God in the present by trying to frame him in good or bad terms. 

Job pleaded to know the mind of God and was answered with more mystery. In the presence of God, Job was humbled as a mere human. And in the end, that is all we are. As we wrestle with an infinite reality, we need to remember how finite we actually are.    

It can be difficult to see God in the hard times. But hard times always come, and when they do, we must let go of our limited categories, give up confining God to the boxes of ‘good’ and ‘bad’. God transcends such things. We don’t need hollow phrases like, “It’s just his will,” or “God has a plan”. Sometimes it is best, even in the midst of a winter of suffering, to just be still, and know that God is God.

Jacob Campbell is a husband, father and teacher living in Chattanooga, Tennessee. According to Facebook he's a fan of the movie Road Warrior. Do with that information what you will. You can follow him on Twitter @Jake43083.

You can follow On Pop Theology on Twitter @OnPopTheology or like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/OnPopTheology.

You might also like:  

• On Pop Theology Podcast: Episode 20 - Sex, Violence and the Gods of Westeros
• Game of Thrones
• God Is...

Batman Should Have Died

by Ben Howard

Batman should have died.

I'm not kidding and I don't particularly care if I'm spoiling the ending. Batman should have died at the end of The Dark Knight Rises. It was the only appropriate way for the trilogy to end. Batman sacrificing himself and passing on his legacy to another. 

But of course that's not the way the movie ends. No, instead Batman finds the time in his busy schedule to do a thing to some stuff and dramatically fake his own death. 

Sentiment makes for lazy plot mechanics.

This has become a regular part of all superhero movies. In order to emotionally hook the audience there need to be real stakes, the audience has to believe that the hero is actually in danger. Of course, everyone intellectually knows that you can't kill the hero, so you endanger those close to him. It's why Uncle Ben has to die in Spiderman, why Batman's girlfriend has to die in the Dark Knight, or why Tony Stark's cave friend has to die in Iron Man.

But how much emotional capital does an audience really have invested in a character they've only known for half a movie? Not enough. So you have to kill off the star. You have to make it really hurt. You have to make it real.

So you kill Batman, or Sherlock Holmes, or Doctor Who. And then you figure out a way to bring them back to life.

It's a good story, but it's also cheating because real life doesn't come with a writer's room.


My favorite stories are the ones that end in pain, that embrace it, not because it's beautiful, but because it's real. Friday Night Lights is my favorite sports movie almost entirely because at the end of the movie, they lose. You build up so much emotion waiting for the climactic moment, the redemptive moment and then...you fall just short.

Any Game of Thrones fan can speak to author George R.R. Martin's almost maniacal obsession with killing beloved characters. He's even gone so far as to say that the end of the story will be bittersweet.

It's not that I don't believe in happy endings, it's that I don't believe in endings at all. Real life does not fade to black after the ending, it does not have a lovely epilogue where Harry Potter takes his kids to school, nor does it pan back from a funeral to find the supposedly deceased watching from off in the distance. It just keeps going.

We are tempted to deal with pain indirectly or tangentially, pulling back on the throttle before we get too deep. We're tempted to tell only stories that have endings, and since we can't embrace a sad ending, we get stories that end happily ever after.

That's one of the reasons I'm so drawn to the liturgical traditions of Christianity. The story is one that continually repeats. It goes through the tense darkness of Advent to the pinnacle of Christmas, it descends into the painful remembrance of mortality on Ash Wednesday, the ache of Good Friday and Holy Saturday and the exuberant joy of Easter. 

Yet, there are also plains between these peaks and valleys. Life is not an infinite binary of pleasure and pain. There is also the aptly-named Ordinary Time where things are, well, ordinary.

And this happens over and over and over again. There is no end, no beginning, just a continual roll of ups and downs, valleys and peaks and long ordinary plains.

Endings are overrated, but Batman still should have died.

Peace,
Ben

Ben Howard is an accidental iconoclast and generally curious individual living in Nashville, Tennessee. He is also the editor-in-chief of On Pop Theology and an avid fan of waving at strangers for no reason. You can follow him on Twitter @BenHoward87. 

 

You can follow On Pop Theology on Twitter @OnPopTheology or like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/OnPopTheology.

You might also like:  

• The Meaning of the End
• What Nolan's Batman Movies and Jesus Have Taught Me About How to Respond to the Shooting in Aurora
• Jay Bakker Knows Why We Need Batman

When It Is Still Not Yet

“But you O LORD, reign forever;
                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.” – Lamentations 5:19-22

by Ben Howard

Kyrie Eleison, Christe Eleison

More than likely in the next few days, we will have names and suspects. We will have arrests and we will have someone to blame. We will call them evil and they will be our new demons. They will serve as the face of menace and destruction and death.

We will hate them.

They will be the new James Holmes. The new Adam Lanza. The new terrorists.

And then we will fight. We will argue about mental illness or terrorism or who should have known what and when they should have known it. There will be hearings and there will be reports and there will be overpaid men in ties yelling at each other on cable news and using words like “obviously” to preface statements that are far from obvious.

Someone on Facebook will blame Obama. Someone else will blame God.

It is all so tragic, so horrible, yet so familiar, so normal.

Yesterday, after checking around to make sure that my friends were all okay, I thought to myself, “Only 3 died? That’s not bad.” Only?!? Really? That’s what crossed my mind? What kind of monster hears about the death of 3 innocent people, the pain and suffering of hundreds, and the emotional tragedy of thousands and says, “That’s not so bad”?

I am numb. The violence, the tragedies, the death, the brokenness and the desperation of the world just keeps coming. One after another. And they are so loud. They are so ever-present and unwieldy and unmanageable that I can barely do more than let them wash over me in a cacophony of tears and pain and blood.

And I am left cold, and I am ashamed that I do not feel more, that I do not hurt and ache along with those who hurt and ache. I am ashamed that my day was quite pleasant and relatively normal.

Since I am a Christian blogger and I have Christian blogger friends, I will read a bunch of articles about God today. They will talk about lament, and where God is in the tragedies, and how God is working with us to heal this broken world. They will talk about the heroes and the acts of love and truth and justice that happened in the wake of the explosions. They will talk about the Kingdom of God that is coming, the Kingdom that is already here.

And I will remember, bitterly, coldly, painfully, that though it is already, it is still not yet.

"In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express." - Romans 8:26

Peace,

Ben

Ben Howard is an accidental iconoclast and generally curious individual living in Nashville, Tennessee. He is also the editor-in-chief of On Pop Theology and an avid fan of waving at strangers for no reason. You can follow him on Twitter @BenHoward87.

You can follow On Pop Theology on Twitter @OnPopTheology or like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/OnPopTheology.

You might also like:

• A Prayer for Good Friday
• Laments for Lent
• Prayers to a Dark God

Laments for Lent

#228 by David Sweeney

by JaneAnn Kenney

“…it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.” –Lamentations 3:26

I grew up in churches that had little use for the Christian calendar. My understanding of Lent has been largely trial-and-error, without the guidance of church practice. For years, I would give something up from Ash Wednesday to Easter (pizza, alcohol, certain dorky computer games…), and I felt the pain of an extended fast. This year, however, I’ve added a discipline to my life rather than taking away a luxury, and I’m finding the experience profoundly enlightening.

My fascination with Lamentations began long ago, as a sophomore in college, writing for my Old Testament class. Jeremiah’s brief hope in chapter three shone like a beacon across the dark sea of my life, caught at age 19 in the despair of the stark reality of mortality and how easily life is taken away, how quickly those who survive are forever changed, so deeply as to be unrecognizable even to themselves.

Jeremiah’s despair in the other four chapters mirrored my own despondency, giving words to the abandonment I felt deep within my soul. I wish I had understood then that the despair which returned to him after his moment of hope would come to me as well. I wish I’d known that the brevity of that hopeful interlude didn’t mean I was broken or faithless, as though it should have lasted forever, but rather that I was granted a respite in order to gain strength for what was to come.

Enough abstractions! You deserve some concrete insight. Three days before leaving my brand new house in Kentucky for my brand new college in Texas, I saw a man die in my front yard—unnatural causes. It’s far too much for a blog post, all of my feelings and the repercussions, but the feeling that engulfed me as I came to know he was really and truly dead in front of me… it was like an eclipse that goes on too long, leaving the world cold, even in the sunshine of a mid-afternoon in August. Chaos swirled around me as though displaced by demons’ feet.

I didn’t shake that feeling before my freshman orientation, or even during my (seemingly) endless freshman year. I felt alone among my peers; who could understand how the death of a stranger had destroyed the world as I knew it and, therefore, myself as I knew me? Sophomore year was that shaft of sunlight, when I thought I was good, when I felt hopeful and like myself again, and then. Well, and then life went on, and despair returned, and I could no longer say that Pete’s death was the sole cause of my darkness.

With these things in mind, I decided to focus on Lamentations for my Lenten observance. What can I learn on the other side of that pain? Leading up to Good Friday, can I learn to wait quietly?

#33 by David Sweeney

And so, I am reading one chapter of Lamentations a day, Monday through Friday. By the time Lent is over, I will have read the book through about six times. Each week, I read a new translation which allows both for new insights and dwelling on persistent themes which recur, without respect to translation. So far, I’ve covered the NIV, NRSV, ESV, and part of the Message.

What I’ve seen:

“Her uncleanness was in her skirts; she took no thought of her future; therefore her fall is terrible; she has no comforter. ‘O Lord, behold my affliction, for the enemy has triumphed!’” (1:9, ESV)

I know you didn’t sign up for my biography, so I’m not going to give you any more now. Suffice to say, if this verse resonates with you, it sure as hell resonates with me. I took no thought of my future, the fall was terrible, and I’ve been years learning to stand again. I just pray to God I’ve learned as much as I think I have from that second darkness.

(and I thought, is any suffering like my suffering?)

“And you passersby, look at me! Have you ever seen anything like this? Ever seen pain like my pain, seen what he did to me, what God did to me in his rage?” (1:12, the Message)

She sounds angry—“Can you believe this was God?” How often do I sound like this—can you believe what God is doing to me now? It’s dangerous without a prophet around to assign cause and effect to our suffering or to anyone else’s, so don’t hear me saying that the bad that happens to me or anyone else is punishment. Maybe it is, maybe it ain’t. The real question is, am I comfortable being angry at God? Does he deserve it? Surely I’m not alone in saying, “Well, maybe…”  And not being alone is enough.

(my people have become heartless)

 “See, O Lord, how distressed I am; my stomach churns, my heart is wrung within me, because I have been very rebellious” (1:20, NRSV)

“My stomach drops and my guts churn.” You know that song? I resisted writing what came to mind when I read this verse, but Amy Winehouse and lament go well in a sentence together, I think. What wasted talent, what a hard life, and how quickly ended. Next time you read Lamentations, picture Amy as the woman Jerusalem, crying out to God, stunningly ignorant about why she suffers. Both deserve our tears.

#454 by David Sweeney

(she weeps bitterly in the night)

 “Look at us, God. Think it over. Have you ever treated anyone like this?” (2:20, the Message)

In context, this isn’t terribly hopeful. Being out of context doesn’t help either, really—“You don’t even treat our enemies so badly!” And yet, perhaps the woman, Jerusalem (Amy), finds solace in a community of suffering. This is no longer her battle alone. She will not be exiled alone. And what of us? Are we in exile? How would we know if we’re in exile? Shall we assume we’re in exile until we hear otherwise, being aliens in the land?

(He will regard them no more)

 “For the Lord will not cast off forever, but, though he cause grief, he will have compassion according to the abundance of his steadfast love; for he does not afflict from his heart or grieve the children of men” (3:31-33, ESV)

His heart’s not in it. Against this angry God we think we learned from the Old Testament, against a God defined by vengeance, I love to see his heart’s not in it.

(there may yet be hope)

“Those who once feasted on delicacies perish in the streets; those who were brought up in purple embrace ash heaps; [people like me who were well-educated found it meant nothing]” (4:5, ESV)

Sometimes when reading the laments, parallels to today present themselves. I’ve seen more of them the longer I’ve been reading these words, over and over. It seems an appropriate, middle-class American emendation to the text.

(there may yet be hope)

Redactions for today (from lament 5, NRSV):

With a yoke on our necks we work long hours;

                we are so tired, but there’s no time to rest.

Our forebears sinned; they are no more,

                but we continue in their sins, learning nothing.

The joy of our hearts has ceased;

                our dancing has been turned to mourning.

Are we now in exile and forgotten

                in a land deceptively accepting of you?

Will you not restore us after so long?

                Please do.

- Lamentations 3:29

JaneAnn tries to rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn, and her favorite people are those who try to do the same. Follow her on Twitter @JAKof3Ts.

Special thanks to David Sweeney for putting his work online so I could happen upon it at the right time. Check out his stuff at http://www.davidsweeneyart.com/works/b/david-sweeney. 

You can also follow On Pop Theology on Twitter @OnPopTheology or like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/OnPopTheology.