This Holy Week, there is a phrase which has been turning and turning in my head: sorrow and love flow mingled down.
It’s from the powerful hymn by Isaac Watts – When I survey the wondrous cross.
See from His head, His hands, His feet,
Sorrow and love flow mingled down!
Did e’er such love and sorrow meet,
Or thorns compose so rich a crown?
Sorrow. I have such a strong sense of sorrow at the moment. The images of war which fill our screens bring me down and make it hard to locate hope. This Holy Week feels darker than any before.
But we have heard it before. The readings set for Morning Prayer this week, from the Book of Lamentations could have been written yesterday, in Mariopol.
And yet there they are in the scriptures: this is the Word of the Lord. As Rowan Williams writes, in the Reflections on Daily Prayer:
We hear the anguished crying of those who are betrayed and believe they are forgotten, unseen and unheard. Their cry becomes God’s call to us – so that the terrible betrayal and abuse of human beings is not God’s betrayal of us but ours of God. Refusing to ‘look and see’, to acknowledge the pain of those doubly betrayed by being hurt and being silenced, is turning from God. Hard as it is, looking honestly at this is a turning to him; a conversion.
Lament – acknowledging sorrow – is something which, perhaps, we as Anglicans aren’t very good at. I know that I tend to take a relentlessly optimistic approach, looking on the bright side and denying the reality of pain which surrounds us. And, even during Holy Week, with Easter approaching, it feels hard to plunge into the darkness.
But there is good authority for lament – not only from the Book of Lamentation but also from the Old Testament prophets – from Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Malachi and so many others. Jeremiah, especially. Jeremiah, who lived in a time of exile and of great grief, when Israel had been conquered and taken captive. According to the great theologian Walter Bruegemann,
Jeremiah lived in a time of turmoil. He believed it was a time of dying. He envisioned the death of a culture, a society, a tradition. What pained him even more was the failure of his contemporaries to notice, to care, to acknowledge or to admit… Jeremiah’s testimony is a tale of grief. The book of Jeremiah is a meditation on grief and on great loss.
We don’t often read Jeremiah, and when we do, my heart tends to sink. He’s so depressing.
But my heart is being forced open, at the moment, by the importance of acknowledging openly and clearly the pain, loss, destruction and hardships which surround us.
We have a choice. We can live in denial – and much of the time we do. We can anaesthetise ourselves with shopping or alcohol or other displacement activities. Denial is an option: but the acknowledgement of pain is important, and real.
I am taking a course on spiritual direction – Encounter, through the London Centre for Spirituality. During a session on the work of Bruegemann and the prophets. Julie Dunstan, the course leader, said:
Against denial, the prophets, and especially Jeremiah, dared to express honestly the depth of sadness, rage, anger and loss in conversation with God and to the people; to complain, to say how overwhelming was the loss, how great the anxiety, how deep the fear.
There is so much to lament, at the moment. On a local level, the debasing of politics and the seemingly endless disruption of our lives due to COVID. The losses and sicknesses we are all experiencing. The cruelty of the society we live in – homelessness, violence, hunger.
On a global level – war in Ukraine and in so many other places. Global injustice – the exploitation of people in the Global South by us as rich nations, still pillaging and stealing through extraction and the financial system. And the heartbreaking stories of climate change, each more urgent than the last.
There is a growing movement calling for climate lament, which until now I have tended to shy away from: but I am beginning to realise how important it is.
To lament is an expression of love. It is to turn towards the people who are suffering: to be in solidarity alongside them, as Rowan Williams magnificently explained in a lecture he gave a few weeks ago.
Genuinely to lament is to be part of the web of pain and exploitation and destruction which surrounds us. It is to open our hands to the truth of pain, and to allow us to hear the cry of the poor, the cry of exiles and migrants.
By the rivers of Babylon , there we wept, when we remembered Zion. How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?
But, thankfully, it doesn’t stop there. As Julie goes on to say:
To know ourselves in a culture that in so many ways contradicts God’s ways, and to allow ourselves to feel about this, in prayer and in the company of others, instead of being in denial, enables us perhaps to turn our pain into faith and our despair into new hope for God’s saving grace.
To grieve is to allow our hearts to be broken and to return to our true identity in God. In this way our hearts will open more truly to the people in our world who experience geographical exile, dispossession and powerlessness. It puts us in communion with all those who suffer.
Three young Russians have recently been on trial. They are editors of the student news site DOXA, and they published a video about protests against the rule of Putin. For that they were under house arrest for a year, and have now been sentenced. Their speeches before sentencing are quite extraordinary and deeply moving. They should be read in full. Here are some extracts:
Armen Aramyan
Solidarity is the only thing with which society can oppose this fear. This is a mysterious, irrational feeling that, in fact, we are not alone. Even when we act separately, behind us there are thousands like ourselves, who feel that this is a common cause. They want to come help you, even if they are expelled, even if they are crushed, if they are kidnapped and tortured by the police.
Volodya Metelkin
The main question for our generation is not just one of how we can remain decent people under fascism, how to do the right thing and not do the wrong thing. The question is how we can build solidarity and unite in a society that has been mercilessly destroyed for several decades. “We are the youth, and we will definitely win,” are the words that can be heard at the end of our video.
And, indeed, who if not us?
Natasha Tyshkevich
It’s interesting, this work with time — I already feel like a veteran of this time-war; I reach out to myself from the future to pull myself by the hair out of the Moscow swamp of the 2020s. The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed and manifests itself through anomalies and miracles. From the future, we can look back and deconstruct the past narrative, knowing that the future was already glimmering through the cracks.
I am put in mind of Psalm 13
It is not that God has set out to inflict pain; but in a world where pain happens, he is never pushed out or immobilised.
To come anywhere near grasping this, we have to let go of any confidence that we can make satisfying sense of things by our own effort and ingenuity.
We must share the loss and disorientation of the most vulnerable – the cities under siege, the soldiers under fire. Silence; but a knowledge – in the silence – of something not defeated.
Sorrow and love flow mingled down.
Is this not another way of describing solidarity? As Rowan Williams says in his lecture;
The story of Holy Week is a story of solidarity: of the solidarity of Jesus, with the world God loves. As we read in the letter to the Philippians:
The challenge for us, is how we can stand in solidarity with Jesus, and in solidarity with those around the world who have such urgent and devastating sorrow?
To understand solidarity in terms of shared interest, mutuality, and common risk is to understand the need in all of us for all of us.
Solidarity creates an imagined community and makes it real.
During this Holy Week we are making an imagined community real.
But are we truly living in solidarity with the sorrow and pain of the suffering people of the world?
Are we hearing their cries, and are we responding with our own?
