Advent 4: December 20: Lamentations and Prayers for the "Impossible"

Lamentations 1: 1-5
Jeremiah 32: 23-27

This posting summarizes both the teaching series and the Advent quiet hour reflections on lamentations and on praying amidst chaos and destruction. We began by reading the first five verses of Lamentations, which begins:

How lonely sits the city that once was full of people! How like a widow she has become, she that was great among the nations! She that was a princess among the provinces has become a vassal. 2She weeps bitterly in the night, with tears on her cheeks; among all her lovers she has no one to comfort her;

We discussed the context of both the Lamentations and of the passage from Jeremiah: the utter destruction of Jerusalem, the Diaspora, the ruined and burnt-out lands, the utter despair.  God's order to Jeremiah, to purchase the deed to the land of his ancestors, leads the prophet to question God about why he would purchase such worthless real estate.  God responds that with God, all things are possible.
We discussed the nature of the public lament using these questions:
1. What good does it do, do you think, to lament?
2. Why or how is it that lamentations—or public expressions of grief—seem foreign to our culture.
3. If we were to bring the book of Lamentations into our own time period, what would our focus be? What would we lament?
4. Use this silence for lamentations. If you wish to write a lamentation for our time, please do. You may or may not wish to share it.
5. Using Jeremiah, how might we move from lamentation to hope?

Our answers were various in both sessions, but we agreed that public lament is an important part of acknowledging the grief we hold for ourselves and for our communities. Our discomfort with public lamentation stems from the cultural codes of behavior that Westerners are bridled with: restraint, a distaste for demonstrating public grief, our intellectual, cerebral approach to grieving. For our own time period, we would publicly lament the homeless, the lack of access to health care, the large number of incarcerated persons in this country. We remembered our public lamentations over Columbine and September 11. One person had been that very day to a memorial in Central Park for the homeless persons who had died this past year.
During our quiet hour, some of us wrote lamentations that we hope to share on this blog. We ended with the words from Jeremiah, spoken by God:

The word of the Lord came to Jeremiah: 27See, I am the Lord, the God of all flesh; is anything too hard for me?