The main commentary I've chosen to help me study Lamentations is "Lamentations & the Tears of the World," by Kathleen O'Connor. O'Connor on God's silence in this unique book of the Bible:
"God's speechlessness in Lamentations must be a calculated choice, a conscious theological decision...No matter what God said, Lamentations would come to premature resolution, and the book's capacity to house sorrow would dissipate. Any words from God would endanger human voices. They would undercut anger and despair, foreshorten protest, and give the audience only a passing glimpse of the real terror of their condition. Divine speaking would trump all speech."
"The missing voice of God leaves suffering exposed. In the language of poet Nelly Sachs, it creates an opening between "the rocks of yesterday and tommorrow, held apart like the rims of a wound" (Sachs 220-221). God's silence in Lamentations leaves wounds festering, open to the air and possibly to healing. The benefit of exposed wounds is that they become visible and unavoidable. Left exposed, they require us to see, acknowledge, and attend to them, and then perhaps there can be energy to attend to the wounds of the world.
God's frightening silence...makes of the poetry a haven for voices of pain. It prevents us from sliding prematurely over suffering toward happy endings. It gives the book daring power because it honors human speech. (O'Connor 85-86)."
How true that when we are walking through those dark nights of the soul that God seems especially quiet and distant - and yet that is most likely when he is actually most attuned to our pain.
The silence forces us to go deeper to really excise the surrounding tissue of our wounds, increasing the margins so the infection can be completely removed. Healing then can occur from the "inside out"
Similar to the lesson from Job's friends, we as humans need to be able to accept the uncomfortableness of silence as a healing virtue rather than feel the need to cover the pain of others by filling the void with words.
Posted by: Jaye | October 16, 2009 at 04:20 PM