An Eicha for Now
The great city has become like a widow with so many tears on the lashes, on the cheeks, on the nose, and no one willing to wipe them away. The widow sobs, the city lets out a sigh, seeing erstwhile friends become foes in reaction to transgressions perceived in high places. The city is now hated, seen as embodiment of sin, mocked by those who once reveled in its beauty. Its residents cannot be consoled; having set aside the future for the purported sake of its very same future, it suffers misery, embarrassment, fear, even invasion. Its citizens feel bitterness, loneliness, utter hunger. Its leaders are brought low. The palaces that stood for humility, spiritual power, sanctity, caring leadership, celebration, security, growth, love, satiety, good fortune, wisdom, measured pride, peace, kindness, friendship, joy, memory, anticipation, freedom, comfort have been ground into the earth.
Was Eicha written for its moment? For our moment? For all eternity? Who is the city? Where are its inhabitants? What is the sin? Are we to use the lament as a mirror? As a bright light to illuminate those all too human beings on the opposite side of a seemingly uncloseable chasm? Or maybe as a commentary on the chasm itself. With its dusty yet accessible pathways, it’s hardly as untraversable today as it appeared millennia ago, before hope rather than the certainty of experience became the theme of our song.
The questions begin. Then, having started as a trickle from the blood-soaked ground, they pick up the pace and surge around us. Why did this happen? I would like to know. How can it be stopped? What mechanisms can we imagine that might push the overwhelming tide back to its boundaries so that evil stays in its lane, while invigorating calm overflows its banks? Where do we now find the strength to undo any handshake that was undertaken just to end all handshakes?
In one of his books, Jeremiah has all the answers. In his other, he barely has the emotional bandwidth to ask any but the most rhetorical question. As for us, whether we fail to recognize that none of us has the full story or we feel entirely at sea as to the facts, we would all like to shriek, to call, to whisper as a way to quiet an ocean of fear, of longing, of brokenness, but we feel challenged in gathering the breath to do just that.
The facts. The plans. The conviction that I know better than anyone else (and each of us is the I, so certain that we individually always know better) how to bring the end that must be reached for it all to end well. All of that can be addressed in another place at another time. Here and now, let’s wallow in a soup of ache and pain and even nostalgia that allows us to move away from only pointing a finger, from only knowing that I am right and knowing that only I am right. A soup more appetizing than what filled the empty bowls that clattered about on the floors of Jerusalem during the Babylonian terror, and the later Roman siege, wreaked on the people of the city. A soup more satisfying than what was available to Jerusalemites under the austerity imposed in and around 1948. A soup perhaps more morally compelling than the thin gruel (at best) seen by many to be inflicted on the victims of Israel’s enemies by those governing from Jerusalem today.
But after a good long soak, let’s recognize that maybe someone will be there to lift us out of the stew and we might be there for them. May we return, be returned to, meet halfway. May we appreciate the sunrise as we remember the brilliant sunset and move into the creative brightness of high noon.
