My wife and I have now had the chance to attend a couple of performances by the excellent Atlanta Symphony Orchestra where we listened to the rarely performed Symphony No. 5 by British composer, Ralph Vaughan Williams. I have always enjoyed his music, but about halfway through each performance, I found myself wondering why I find it so gripping, soothing, and even a tad, well, unsettling. Throughout his music, there is a sense of unease with flashes of calm or peace or whatever you want to call it breaking through.

Vaughan Williams wrote with a sense of the ominous on the horizon. As a medic during the First World War, looking across the shredded French landscape, he surely considered that something so big was happening as to change the world forever. He struggled to reconcile something so heartbreaking with what was once pristine. This violent transition signaled the sad reality of loss.

These thoughts fueled his Symphony No. 3 also known as the Pastoral Symphony, which he completed after the war. Beset by trench warfare, Vaughan Williams produced one of the most memorable pieces of 20th century music: at turns slow and somber, haunting and full of melancholy, and yet containing moments of hope and even triumphalism. The piece aurally paints a picture of beauty slipping away never to be recovered. In so much of his music, one finds a sense of sadness. But even more than this is the constant feeling of universal longing. Longing for a place we once had or shared. Longing for a time unmarred by panic, whether made by humanity or nature. Longing toward restoration and wholeness.

One of the Bible’s most gripping descriptions of longing comes from Deuteronomy 28:32. With dramatic examples, Moses describes life as it might look apart from God, broken and marred. “Your sons and your daughters shall be given to another people, while your eyes look on and fail with longing for them all the day.” Here the Hebrew term translates “longing” (kaleh) to “failing with desire.”

What a vision for us today. We see a way of life we have enjoyed for a century, and we feel it slipping out of our hands. Falling stocks, a frozen housing market, retirement plans jettisoned, weddings and funerals conducted with no one in attendance. Not the life we were brought up to expect or for which most of us saved and looked toward. We long for what we thought was promised us. But right now, we look upon all of this with failing eyes.

The last weeks have been surreal. Videos of over-capacity emergency rooms. Government officials coming to grasp how to navigate an unseen enemy. Social distancing. “Stay-in-place” orders. Businesses closing. Death unfolding in real time. To be sure, we are not embroiled in a global military conflict. But we have lost our sense of normalcy, and we are grasping with how to cope with it.

The notion that we would long for something necessarily implies that we are not satisfied. C.S. Lewis is well-known for suggesting that our longings indicate that we are made for another place and time.(1) It is a natural state for our souls to long for something, and our earthly desires serve to alert us to a real, if eventual, fulfillment of what truly satisfies.

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“Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, your king is coming to you; righteous and having salvation is he, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”

These old words sprung to life when an awkward request from the Rabbi had to be carried out by a nervous disciple. Jesus, their teacher, asked them to go asking for a donkey, so he could ride into Jerusalem. I wonder if some knew that he was walking into a trap, or perhaps it would be a trap from which he would emerge and pull off that one hattrick that would prove him to be their radical warrior king. Is this where he would shame the empire and show its finite capability in quenching the coming kingdom? Jerusalem, a congested city of many reveries and divided allegiance, was alive with festivities. It was the Passover and its lamb was watching from a distance. He watched the city as though watching his path towards a lover for whom he would give everything to love, yet knowing that the ultimate act of his love would be unrequited. The elite of the city undermined him, with their eyes and scaling hands they had already weighed him.

But there was a place where this Savior was visible. Just like his entry into the world, he was shown to be of the highest order of royalty to the lowliest in society: the shepherds, the peasants Mary and Joseph, prophet Simeon and prophetess Anna. Throughout his life, these margin bodies, the adulteresses, tax payers, and outcasts, they saw God with them, talking to them, eating with them, putting their lives together. And there, at the edge of the city, they saw him. And so they did what the common people did in that culture when a king would grace their streets. They placed palms on the floor to let him triumphally parade himself among them.

In this hour of global crisis, this part of our Lenten journey finds us forced to pause with pain as we reflect again on this Holy Week entry into the city of Jerusalem. Covid-19 has dealt a global blow to us that has us feeling exceptionally out of control. Whether we have our social immersion at the margins of the city, where life is hard and poverty and lack of access makes room for more destruction, or in the heights of the affluence of the city, where consumption disguises itself as the acquisition of meaning, where anxiety and emptiness cause havoc, in this moment we have a common vantage point. We see that the flesh alone has no capacity to shield itself from forces bigger than itself. Our finiteness is on full display.

All of us would not be lost for words to describe our disorientation in this period. The haunting realization that there is no certainty around our approach and longing for a future after this virus calls us to find a more tangible and concrete point of reference for time and its motion towards purpose. It is this kind of Lenten season that invites us to re-enter into the story of Holy Week with a more humble posture. We all stand at the threshold of the city with him, hoping that somewhere in the distance, our warrior king could flip the script on us and give us a reprieve from this global nightmare.

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A Lenten Lament

Suffering blurs the vision. Through the fog of confusion or the veil of tears, afflictions obscure our lens of life. They tend to displace our emotions and reconstitute our rationale. Normality is often abruptly upended. Suffering becomes what feels like an inescapable labyrinth of lament.

This emotional entanglement is explored throughout various books of the Bible, but it is particularly palpable in the Old Testament. The Psalms, for example, express various authors’ raw feelings, and the unhinging nature of suffering is on full display:

“My soul pants for you, O God… My tears have been my food day and night… how I used to go with the multitude.”(1)

In our distressful moments, we long for this language of lament. We long for approval to voice our sorrows, an invitation to lament both individually and corporately. This invitation is found in the Christian religious tradition called Lent. This 40-day period is a time of spiritual and emotional preparation leading to the events of Holy Week and the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. It is a time where all who lament can feel encouraged to do so. It is also a time where the suffering of Christ reorients our focus. We are not alone.

Jeremiah was arguably the biblical figure most known for his intimate relationship with sorrow. He was burdened with the unenviable task of prophesizing God’s justice and ultimate judgement against his fellow Israelites, who, despite warnings, were engaging in unjust practices and behaviors. Their disobedient hearts resulted in exile and the destruction of their beloved city. Throughout his lengthy book, Jeremiah endures rejection, suffers loneliness, languishes in isolation, and sustains beatings. Anguish is ever-present. “My grief is beyond healing; my heart is broken… I hurt with the hurt of my people. I mourn and am overcome with grief.”(2)

In the midst of our current global crisis, we feel besieged by the presence of suffering, too. Like Jeremiah, our eyes may feel like fountains of tears. Perhaps it is the persistent prick of seclusion. In this time of social distancing, isolation can be even more discomforting. Perhaps the anguish of anxiety looms in a ubiquitous manner. Uncertainty and the unease that accompanies it have ironically become synonymous with regularity. Perhaps the loss of a loved one has soaked our joy in sadness. Hope can feel as fleeting and remote as the mandated lack of human embrace.

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