PART 2 of 2

You have to develop your imagination to the point that permits sympathy to happen. You have to be able to imagine lives that are not yours or the lives of your loved ones or the lives of your neighbors. You have to have at least enough imagination to understand that if you want the benefits of compassion, you must be compassionate. If you want forgiveness, you must be forgiving. It’s a difficult business, being human.
~ Wendell Berry

And I used to think March Madness was a Basketball Tournament. ~ Moi

The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means
being able to say, What are you going through? ~ Simone Weil

I cry in the cocoon
for the wings of tomorrow
the future is a tortured today
that doesn’t yet have wings.

~ Matilda Elena Lopez
Salvadoran poet of resistance

I want to suggest one other response that is accessible to each and all of us in regards to the madness and bloodshed happening in Ukraine. One that I believe is especially appropriate for those of us who are physically and geographically so far away from the epicenter of the recent human-generated terror and trauma taking place there. It is a capacity humans are born with, though often misunderstood and therefore, at times, frightening. It is first an involuntary, deeply human reaction to an event or experience that breaks us open and causes us inner pain. It is piggy-backed by a second response that is necessary to ensure the original reaction to the event is not turned inward toward ourselves in a harmful, debilitating way.

The first, involuntary reaction I am talking about is grief. Grief is the psychological, emotional, and physical response to loss. The second, piggy-backed response is less to the precipitating experience than to the experience of grief itself. This response is called grieving or mourning. Grieving and mourning are synonyms and they come into play ideally and therapeutically as what we do with our original emotional reaction of grief.

In American culture today, when more and more people are no longer involved in a religious tradition where for thousands of years grief was ritualized, expressed, and shared amongst a close-knit community, it has often become a very private, closeted affair. Using the Hebrew prophets as our guides, especially as interpreted by the renowned Hebrew scripture scholar Walter Brueggemann, I want to present grieving as a public response to the trauma, tragedy, and loss occurring in Ukraine that—while being deeply personal—is communal, national, and global. At one and the same time, ancient and ever new, at its core mourning is an imaginative, fiercely sympathetic, and prophetic response that not only has subversive potential but also transformative and healing power.

When grounded in the Hebrew scriptures, especially as expressed in the blistering words and embodied actions of the prophets whose bold, public criticism comes out so forcefully it takes great effort to miss, it is accentuated like the words in a college textbook highlighted in bright yellow or florescent orange or lime green lines. Although hard to miss, the Hebrew prophet’s example and counsel toward grief and grieving tends to be hard for most people to express, especially publicly where, in circumstances comparable to the March Madness unconscionably unleashed by Vladimir Putin, it is both most appropriate and most capable of functioning as an act of protest able to bring about constructive change and necessary healing.

The Hebrew prophets are often presented as caricatures—the disheveled, hot-blooded, irrepressibly bitching-and-moaning irascible crank, who apparently gets out of the wrong side of the bed (every day) and claims to be God’s messenger but who despite other respectable grades, gets low marks each grading period for Deportment. As a result, we often tend to think the theme song of prophets like Jeremiah is one of anger—something like Bruce Cockburn’s “If I Had a Rocket launcher.” In his incisive book The Prophetic Imagination, Brueggemann counters this assumption by asserting that the proper idiom for the prophet is not anger but the language of grief. The prophetic ministry is centered in the articulation of grief and mourning.

Brueggemann explicates the imaginative and prophetic power of grief and grieving to transform the present in unexpected and hopeful ways. Brueggemann argues that in situations of oppression and exploitation and their subsequent agony generated and maintained by the powers and principalities of the dominant culture, public expressions of personal and collective grief is a prophetic act of protest and criticism that exposes those in power as the perpetrators of corruption, vicious violation, heinous crimes against humanity, and the massive suffering of the innocent.

Focusing on the times of the Hebrew prophets, Brueggemann exegetes the universal and timeless strategy of tyrannical rulers to normalize oppression, exploitation, and injustice until they are taken for granted, seen as just the way things are, not so much accepted by those most adversely affected but passively acquiesced to as the modus operandi of the dominant culture. Controlling the narrative, disempowering and terrorizing the people they lord over, their aim is to create a collective numbness, paralyzing fright, and even self-defeating blindness and denial of the situation among the masses.

Over time, numbness becomes the response that is no response. When communal grief in response to widespread affliction caused by cruel leaders and their maintenance of systemic injustice is kept atomized by persons isolating from others in their great suffering rather than shared, its power to expose evil, criticize its orchestrators, empower its victims, and transform, heal, and offer hope to the afflicted is greatly diminished. We witness this fright, denial, acquiescence, and justified numbness on the nightly news when American reporters interview Russian citizens on the streets who presently refuse to question Putin, a one-news-service country, but are adamantly willing to question and deny different versions of events from family members and friends living in and outside of Russia.

In his searing autobiographical book Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl, the famous Austrian psychiatrist, and holocaust survivor offered what was to be his most poignant insight and revelation while he was in the death camp: the Nazis can take everything from me, literally take away each and every human act of freedom EXCEPT my power to choose how I will respond.

When personal grief is consciously brought into the communal circle of woe, and when through the strength of one another grief is addressed in the deliberate work and healing power of mourning, then the agony and anguish pulled from within by mourning as if by a poultice can be channeled into a collective voice of public lamentation. The freedom and power to choose the movement from grief to mourning to pubic lamentation as prophetic protest has the intention and capacity to cut through the numbness and denial groomed into a dominant consciousness. By visibly and audibly calling into question the way things are, we signal a possibility of an alternative consciousness that energizes people and gives them hope.

In the context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with its manipulated and false justification for doing so, and the grand scale of the ensuing physical destruction, human carnage, displacement, present-day agony, and their long-term effects on millions of people’s lives, grief and mourning and lamentation say loud and clear Things are not as they should be.

And here’s where we, who feel so removed from this horror, come in. It is the rest of the world’s responsibility—yours and mine—as Wendell Berry asserts, to develop our imaginations “to the point that permits sympathy to happen.” We have to be able to imagine the lives of the Ukrainian people as if they were our lives, as if the home they had to flee from or that was eviscerated by a bomb was our home, as if their parents, brothers, sisters, and neighbors are our mother and father, brother and sister, and neighbor. Through an imaginative act, we activate feelings of solidarity, deep sympathy, and compassion. I invite you to do this—whether into a  pillow or in the privacy of your home or a church or a public square with others or in the woods—by agonizing with the people of Ukraine (and Russia), by feeling their grief as your own, by mourning and lamenting with them, by giving voice and movement to the weeping and wailing that are commensurate with their grief and suffering in a cry heard around the world as a mixture of righteous anger, prophetic protest, and a merciful reaching out that says “I am/we are with you.”

I ask you who like me claim to be walking the Christ-path, and you who walk other spiritual paths, have our ways become so prettified, so tame, so self-protective lest we expose ourselves to a wee bit of embarrassment, judgment, o danger, so buttoned-down, so devoid of any real risk or personal cost, so lacking in its desire to cultivate fools for Christ—which means fools on behalf of justice, peace, and the common good of other humans and other-than-human life forms of the earth who are our siblings—so somnolent as to even notice and care about the pain and suffering of others beyond our own small enclosed circle of family and friends, that we are afraid to weep and wail and gnash our teeth like Rachel weeping for her children who even today are our children? There is nothing quaint or comfortable or proper about lamentation.

In the past, there have been organized worldwide “moments of silence.” These devoted periods of silence range from ten seconds to an hour. In Israel, moments of silence are held in memory of the victims of the Holocaust on YomHaShoah. In Japan, a minute of silence is observed (and televised nationally) at ceremonies every August in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki cities at the same time as the atomic bombings. In the United States, a moment of silence is observed nationwide that correspond to the moments the terrorist attacks struck the north and then the south tower of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and Pennsylvania, as well as the moment when both Twin Towers fell on September 11, 2001. Organizations devoted to the making and keeping of peace have organized quiet, synchronized sits around the world. Some coordinate periods of chanting, believing the collective vibrations of the primal sound—which in many languages is a name for the Divine—can move the world toward peace.

Imagine if, in an act of solidarity with our brothers and sisters in Ukraine and Russia, we organized and synchronized a worldwide minute, not for commemorative silence, but for a lamentation in which we consciously and prayerfully re-member ourselves to suffering people by giving voice to an extended raw, vociferous, unapologetically inelegant, snot-nosed, psalmic, messy, loud, primal scream as a global cry heard round the world of collective grief, mourning, protest, and prophetic criticism saying Things are not as they should be and signaling by our human and holy howl and our tear smeared faces a collective yearning for an alternative and peaceful way of being and living on this planet. 

The riddle and insight of biblical faith is the awareness that only anguish leads to life, only grieving leads to joy, and only embraced endings permit new beginnings. ~ Walter Brueggemann~

⊕ We have many upcoming dates when such a collective cry could be offered: April 1, April Fool’s Day; April 3, First Day of Ramadan; April 10, Palm or Passion Sunday; April 15, Good Friday; April 16, First Day of Passover.

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4 Ways to help Ukraine (that you may not have heard about) CLICK HERE.

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