Feast of Saint Clare

A happy camper at
the MSF 2009 picnic

Pass through the city, through Jerusalem,
and mark a “Thau” on the foreheads of those who moan and groan
over all the abominations that are practiced within it.

The thau that marks those who weep over Jerusalem is the same cross we place on our foreheads on Ash Wednesday. It is a sign of repentance, a free confession of our sinfulness and unworthiness to be called God’s people.

This passage from Ezekiel reminds us of the blessedness of grief. Americans have been learning this virtue. When President Kennedy was shot on November 22, 1963 the nation grieved but life went on. He died on a Thursday and the National Football League kept their schedule of games the following Sunday.

Thirty-eight years later, when the nation was attacked on September 11, 2001, all sporting events were cancelled for the next ten days. We are learning that a “great nation” can grieve without loss of dignity.

If the wicked grieve at all, it is only momentarily. My mother remarked once that a certain relative grieved deeply when a Wild Turkey distillery in Bardstown Kentucky burned to the ground, but she soon found Southern Comfort. (Thank God, she is sober today.)

Grief is a natural and beautiful part of our life. It honors the pleasure and joy we have known. Without it life would be gray indeed, a long series of uneventful, emotionless days of toil.

Psychological therapy is often an experience of grief. In conversation the patient allows hard and bitter disappointments to finally catch up with him. He may grieve over the loving parent he never had, the dog who died, the friend he lost, the opportunity missed. In a society that is so often in a hurry to get somewhere else and do something else, that thinks joy is the only acceptable feeling, that can anticipate a Super Bowl with fanatical expectancy, and forget the loss by Monday, we have to take lessons in grief.

Fortunately, life is full of disappointments. We can experience a degree of sadness nearly every day, whether it be the disappointment of an insult or the death of a spouse. We can sit with the sadness a while, pondering the cycle we’ve been through from expectation to satisfaction to disappointment and sadness. We can relive the sudden shift from a perfectly normal day to the stunned realization that everything has changed. We can consider the options of anger and resentment as they inevitably arise, and decide if these are appropriate.

In today’s first reading, God commands that those inhabitants who do not grieve over the destruction of Jerusalem be punished. Evidently they have found opportunity amid the grief, ways to profit from the general destruction. They are looting the pockets of the dead and pilfering the ruins of their homes; they cannot be bothered with sadness. Many have turned their religious devotion to other gods, the deities who seem to have driven the Lord from his temple. They do not remember to whom the city belongs. But God is grieving the catastrophe that has fallen upon his holy city. He will not abide those who capitalize on his loss.

Perhaps, as Christians, it’s time we pondered and grieved the death of Jerusalem. It is the “crucifixion” of the Old Testament, a disaster still evident in the Diaspora of Jews, matched only by the Holocaust. If we cannot often join with our Jewish neighbors in their ceremonies; nor they, in our rites, we can honor the Holy City that was destroyed in 586 BCE. 


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