Howl! Howl! Howl!

When was the last time you had a good cathartic lament?

A lament like King Lear’s in Act 5, Scene iii when he finds his daughter Cordelia hanged:

Howl, howl, howl! No, no, no life left? Why should a dog or horse or rat have life, but not you? You’ll never come to me again, never, never, never, never, never.—Please help me undo this button. Thank you, sir. Do you see that? Look at her. Look, her lips. Look there, look there. Oh, oh, oh, oh.

Or the lengthy lament of Allen Ginsberg, appropriately called, “Howl”:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the … streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz …

Or the silent howl of Michael Corleone in Godfather III as Michael holds his dead daughter on the steps of an opera house and cannot summon his voice to scream his lament to heaven.

There are some things so awful, so unjust, that the only fitting response is a loud lament. But how many of us are able to set ourselves free to do it?

In 1967, when as an Air Force chaplain’s assistant I was assigned to organize bus trips from Woodbridge, England, to Earl’s Court in London, where Billy Graham was hosting a month-long crusade. On most of those trips, by accident or on purpose, I sat next to a beautiful and somewhat flirtatious young woman named Patty. She was 30 and married to a major so she was utterly unattainable to a 21-year-old airman, which probably made me feel safe around her. Even so, I had a major crush on her.

A few weeks after the bus trips were over the chaplain called me into his office. “It’s so sad,” he said. “Patty died. Her husband was cleaning his revolver and it discharged. A terrible accident.”

I sat in stunned silence, my eyes brimming with tears.

Accident? For the life of me, I couldn’t see how one could open the cylinder of a pistol to clean it and fire the gun at the same time.

I also knew there was no chance at all the Air Force would question it. If the major said it was an accident, it was an accident.

And it would be pointless for me to howl my lament, no matter how much outrage I felt. I retreated from the chaplain’s office and sat at my desk in silence.

 No doubt most of us have had moments of rage that we suppressed because laments has been conditioned out of us. It’s impolite. It frightens people. It makes us look unbalanced.

But Jesus’ lament to the city of Jerusalem reminds us that there are times when raising our voices in anger, dismay, and protest may be the righteous thing to do.

Rev. Dr. Mitzi J. Smith, the J. Davison Philips Professor of New Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Ga., writes,

“Collective lament is an appropriate and necessary response of a people or nation burdened with a history of social injustice, poverty, oppression, murder, and the privileging of lies over truth that bleed into its present.”

In his lament over Jerusalem, Jesus tells the truth about Jerusalem’s history of killing prophets and stoning God’s messengers (19:34), as well as the violence Pilate committed against them (13:1). Jesus laments on his journey toward Jerusalem (9:51). Once in Jerusalem, chief priests and other Jewish leaders accuse Jesus before Pilate of sedition against the emperor and the Jewish people; he is a Galilean trouble-maker who claims to be “king of the Jews,” they say (23:1-6). 

Jesus knew none of this should be endured in polite silence.

It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to identify outrages and injustices in our society that we shouldn’t be silent about, either.

Yet we remain silent in the face of ignorance that breeds the poisons of our time, including homophobia, islamophobia, antisemitism, racism, 

We remain silent while observing discrimination against women in wages, employment opportunities, and decision making power.

We remain silent in the face of lies, violence, and threats of violence by right-wing politicians and white supremacist cultists seeking to overturn democracy.

We remain silent in the face of the oppression of the poor by keeping minimum wages down and forcing millions to hold two jobs to make ends meet.

We remain silent while ignorant racists who believe the lie that COVID-19 was a Chinese plot attack Asians and Asian Americans on our street,.

We remain silent amid a system of economic favoritism that protects the very rich, many of whom pay no taxes at all on multi-million dollar corporate bonuses.

There is so much to lament about.

Dr. Mitzi Smith writes, “Violence inflicted on a collective or nation from external forces usually provokes lament.” 

“Yet when the violence is inflicted by internal forces and authorities, lament is slow to come,” she laments, “especially when masses of people have been convinced that the violence is necessary or when the perpetrators are convinced that they are doing God’s will and acting in the best interest of the nation. 

“Those in power benefit from the internal violence against the marginalized and poor, so drown out the cries of the oppressed with lies that promote fear of change and equality. The consciousness of the nation must be awakened.”

“Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem,” Jesus laments.

And we dare not read his impassioned words in silence.

It’s time for the most passive of us to fix our national gaze on what some politicians have called our “shining city on a hill” and cry out,

“Oh, America, America.”

For there is so much to lament.