Grief
Grief is love that has lost its object and refuses to stop being love. The body keeps a place set; the throat catches on the wrong name; whole rooms reorganize themselves around an absence. Vela treats grief as a primary emotion — not a stage to move through, not a problem to resolve — and reads it through the writers who have stayed long enough with it to know its weather.
Working definition · The weight of absence; love continuing without its object or without resolution.
5254 passages · 6 Vela essays · in 1 cluster
Vela’s read on this emotion
Grief is one of the emotions Vela reads most patiently, because the writers who have stayed long enough with it are the ones worth following.
The reading is primarily through memoir. Joan Didion's *The Year of Magical Thinking*, written after the sudden death of her husband, is the modern reference for grief inside the marriage. Helen Macdonald's *H Is for Hawk* reads grief for a father through a year of training a goshawk. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writes about her father's death in *Notes on Grief*. Anne Carson's *Nox* — a memorial for her brother — is grief built as an accordion-folded book of fragments, photographs, and a translation of Catullus 101. Alongside the memoir, the fiction that holds an absence at its center — Marilynne Robinson's *Gilead*, Toni Morrison's *Beloved* — names the same weight in a different form.
Grief also runs through the contemplative inheritance. The Psalms keep an unembarrassed register of lament. The elegiac tradition — from Greek elegy through Milton's *Lycidas* through W. S. Merwin — gives grief a verse form. The Japanese practice of *kintsugi*, repairing broken pottery with gold so the breakage shows, names a posture toward repair that doesn't pretend the break didn't happen.
Grief is not the same as sadness, and it is not the same as yearning. Sadness can arrive without a specific absent object; grief has one. Yearning faces forward, toward what might still arrive; grief faces backward, toward what won't return. The work of grief is reorganization around the absence, not movement past it.
What is intentionally light here is the stage-model literature. *On Grief* — the slower companion essay in the magazine — is a reading, not a model: how the word lives in language, in the passages Vela returns to, and in the pairings between passage and figurative image.
Study and magazine
Long-form guide in the magazine
*On Grief* — the slower companion essay. How the word lives in language, in the testimony Vela reads, and in the pairings between passage and figurative image. Not a stage model; a reading.
Read the guidePassages
Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.
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5254 tagged passages
From Healing Our Broken Humanity: Practices for Revitalizing the Church and Renewing the World (2018)
The authors say, “Scripture teaches us that we can’t move toward hope, peace, transformation, and reconciliation without going through sorrow, mourning, regret, and lament.” Why do we need to lament before we can experience healing, peace, hope, and so on? 2 . Does your church practice lament? Does your culture? 3 . Why is lament a foreign idea to so many of us who live in Western cultures? How can we recover lament in our gathered worship and private lives? 4 . What kinds of things do your church and culture need to lament? 5 . Look at the nine elements of lament. Would you modify this list in some way? What would you add or change? 6 . What needs to change for you and your church to renew your practice of lamenting together? 7 . What steps will you take to apply this practice fully and in the long term? Think about how you can apply this practice in your life, family, small group, church, and neighborhood. Chapter 3: Repent Together1 . Why is repentance important? 2 . Look at the four stages of repentance. Would you modify this list in some way? What would you add or change? 3 . What does your church and culture need to repent of? 4 . The authors say that we need to ask ourselves, “How have my attitudes and practices disadvantaged the elderly, Muslims, people of color, indigenous peoples, undocumented migrants or refugees, women, the poor, those with disabilities, or other groups? How have my choices and preferences and attitudes silenced and marginalized these groups? How do my political decisions compound the problem?” Discuss these questions in your group. What do you need to repent of, and how will you embrace the mind of Christ? 5 . Repentance helps us welcome, embrace, and listen to those marginalized by society. Do you agree? Why or why not? 6 . What needs to change for you and your church to repent of white (or other) cultural captivity, of racial and gender injustice, and of your complicity? 7 . What steps will you take to apply this practice fully and in the long term? Think about how you can apply this practice in your life, family, small group, church, and neighborhood. Chapter 4: Relinquish Power1 . Does your culture encourage you to acquire, consume, and accumulate things instead of giving up things? What does that say about the values and priorities of your culture? 2 . What do we learn about relinquishment from the way Jesus and Paul gave up power? 3 . Who do you know that models this well (someone you know personally, or maybe someone you’ve heard or read about)? 4 . What kinds of power do you and the people in your church need to give up? 5 . What does it mean in practice to embrace the power of the cross and the resurrection? How do we live that out in our daily lives? 6 .
From From Judgment to Hope: A Study on the Prophets (2019)
In the wake of the destruction, the leading residents of Jerusalem were deported to Babylon where they sang the Songs of Zion in a strange land (Ps. 137:4). Many more residents of Jerusalem remained behind in the shambles of the city. Both populations, deported and remaining, were left bereft of historical possibility or theological assurance. The period of Babylonian occupation and deportation produced quite remarkable prophetic poems of hope, among them Isaiah 40–55, which anticipated the overthrow of Babylon and the return home for those deported from Jerusalem (587–540 BCE). Isaiah identified Cyrus, the Persian ruler, as God’s messiah who would permit a return home (Isa. 44:28; 45:1). And in 537 BCE, just fifty years after the destruction of the city, Persia did defeat Babylon and Cyrus allowed the return of the Jews to Jerusalem (see 2 Chr. 36:22–23). The government of Persia, perhaps a bit less brutal than Babylon in its policies, not only permitted the return but also invested in the restoration of the political economy of Jerusalem. For all of that, however, the territory around Jerusalem became a Persian colony presided over by a Persian-appointed governor who supervised the taxation of the colony on behalf of the empire. During that extended period from 537 BCE (and the decree of Cyrus) to 444 BCE (Ezra and Nehemiah), three prophets appeared—Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi—who would become part of the “Twelve Minor Prophets” we conventionally group together in Scripture. The first two, Haggai and Zechariah, are contemporaries, while Malachi is judged to have prophesied a generation or so later. Still, all three are preoccupied with the slow, hard work of restoration and rehabilitation. While there are no easy parallels to our own time, one could suggest that Western society is now also engaged in the slow, hard work of restoration and rehabilitation after a long spasm of excessive, unsustainable wealth, power, and preeminence. Then, as today, the embrace of “small things” after such a season of largeness is not easy (see Zech. 4:10); nor is it obvious how to proceed. It is no wonder, now as then, that the slow, hard work evokes great and vigorous contestation among us, just as it did in that ancient time. HAGGAI
From From Judgment to Hope: A Study on the Prophets (2019)
The city is under threat because of its refusal to practice the elemental requirements of YHWH: justice and righteousness. When the covenant with YHWH is violated long enough, eventually the old covenant curses are enacted by YHWH. Thus the prophetic tradition voices a meta-history, which means the visible realities of history are an arena in which the purposes of God are enacted. In prophetic imagination the city had been assigned the task of justice and righteousness. In its arrogance, however, it embraced an economic system of exploitation, and it engaged, at the initiative of its kings, in a venturesome foreign policy that was seen by the prophet as defiance against YHWH. The defining importance of this failure is simply put in the wordplay of 5:7: He expected justice [mishpat], but saw bloodshed [mispah]; righteousness [tsedeqah], but heard a cry [tse’aqah]! The outcome of such failure is that everything will be lost. God will take away all that is valued: For now, the Sovereign, the LORD of hosts, is taking away from Jerusalem and from Judah support and staff— all support of bread, and all support of water— warrior and soldier, judge and prophet, diviner and elder, captain of fifty and dignitary, counselor and skillful magician and expert enchanter. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . In that day the LORD will take away the finery of the anklets, the headbands, and the crescents; the pendants, the bracelets, and the scarfs; the headdresses, the armlets, the sashes, the perfume boxes, and the amulets; the signet rings and nose rings; the festal robes, the mantles, the cloaks, and the handbags; the garments of gauze, the linen garments, the turbans, and the veil. 3:1–3, 18–23 The reason for the loss is the maltreatment of the poor, who are the special object of divine concern: It is you who have devoured the vineyard; the spoil of the poor is in your houses. What do you mean by crushing my people, by grinding the face of the poor? says the Lord GOD of hosts. 3:14–15 There is no doubt that Israel, as presented by the prophet, is in big trouble. This is evident in the cluster of oracles in chapters 28–31, each of which begins with “woe,” variously translated as ah, ha, oh, alas (28:1; 29:15; 30:1; 31:1). This repeated accent means big trouble is coming. Big trouble is coming on Jerusalem because Jerusalem must finally answer for its refusal to acknowledge, in policy and in practice, the inescapable rule of God, who demands justice and righteousness in society. Thus the book of Isaiah, in its early chapters, is an anticipatory cry of loss and grief for the trouble that is sure to come. GOD SAVES SOUTHERN JUDAH, . . . FOR NOW
So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.” … (2) But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” (3) When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away , tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher). Jesus said to her, “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.”’ Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord” and she told them that he had said these things to her. Mary gets to give the wrong interpretation of the empty tomb three times: to the disciples, to the angels, and finally to Jesus himself. She does not even recognize Jesus when he appears to her, at least until he addresses her. She is told to announce not the resurrection but the ascension. And if you object that at least she gets to see Jesus, read on to see what John 20 has to say about seeing the risen Jesus rather than, like the Beloved Disciple, believing after seeing only an empty tomb and empty grave cloths. The final exaltation of the Beloved Disciple is over Thomas. Recall that Simon was nicknamed Rocky or “the Rock”—Petros in Greek and Cephas in Aramaic. Another follower of Jesus called Jude or Judas (not Iscariot, of course) also had a bilingual nickname, “the Twin”—Didymos in Greek and Thomas in Aramaic or Syriac. This is the figure here immortalized as Doubting Thomas.
When, however, would-be orifices start to appear where no orifices are meant to be, then, unable to tell orifice from surface, or with all boundaries rendered porous, the entire system breaks down. That is why biblical leprosy applies not only to skin , as in Leviticus 13:1–45 and 14:1–32, but to clothes , as in 13:46–59, and to house walls , as in 14:33–53, and it renders each surface ritually unclean—that is, socially inappropriate. The leprous person is not a social threat because of medical contagion, threatening infection, or epidemic, as we might imagine, but because of symbolic contamination, threatening in microcosm the very identity, integrity, and security of society at large. And so, in Leviticus 13:45–46: The person who has the leprous disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his head be disheveled; and he shall cover his upper lip and cry out, “Unclean, unclean.” He shall remain unclean as long as he has the disease; he is unclean. He shall live alone; his dwelling shall be outside the camp. Those sufferers are in mourning for their lost lives, because in an honor-and-shame society, where, as we have seen earlier, one’s existence is in the eyes of others, they are now quite dead. In such societies, with strict distinctions of clean and unclean—not, of course, as clinical or medical but as social or symbolic categories—the heartbreak of psoriasis was not funny. It was tragic. If, by the way, such practices strike you as archaic and pathetic, you might ask yourself whether you or your group has ever been militarily defeated, socially marginalized, or culturally absorbed. Probably for better, our social boundaries are very open, and so, possibly for worse, are our bodily boundaries. Illness and Disease What would we have seen, then, if we had been there when the leper was healed? What exactly happened, granted all that body-society interaction just explained? Once again, a swift detour into cross-cultural anthropology prevents us from projecting some current American presuppositions back into the ancient Mediterranean world. Medical anthropology or comparative ethnomedicine has proposed a basic distinction between curing a disease and healing an illness . Here are two basic formulations of that difference. The first is from Leon Eisenberg. Patients suffer “illnesses” physicians diagnose and treat “diseases.”…Illnesses are experiences of disvalued changes in states of being and in social function; diseases, in the scientific paradigm of modern medicine, are abnormalities in the structure and function of body organs and systems…. The very limitations of their technology kept indigenous healers more responsive to the extra-biological aspects of illness, for it was chiefly those aspects they could manipulate. Our success in dealing with certain disease problems breeds then ideological error that a technical fix is the potential solution to all. It would be absurd to suggest that we should forego the power of Western medicine in deference to shamanism. It is essential to enquire how we can expand our horizons to incorporate an understanding of illness as a psychological event.
From Healing Our Broken Humanity: Practices for Revitalizing the Church and Renewing the World (2018)
Reconciliation is only possible after lamenting the past, repenting of our complicity, seeking forgiveness, relinquishing power, restoring justice, relishing diversity, and reinforcing agency. In Roadmap to Reconciliation Brenda Salter McNeil defines reconciliation in a helpful way. Her definition talks about the biblical and theological foundations of reconciliation, the various aspects of reconciliation, the process of reconciliation, the systemic nature of reconciliation, and the final goal of reconciliation. McNeil says, “Reconciliation is an ongoing spiritual process involving forgiveness, repentance and justice that restores broken relationships and systems to reflect God’s original intention for all creation to flourish.”4 Reconciliation includes renewing authentic partnerships and seeking reconciled relationships . True reconciliation needs biblical and theological foundations. It also need to pay attention to the things McNeil mentions: fostering ongoing spiritual processes, addressing systemic injustices, restoring broken relationships and systems, and seeking God’s original intention and final goal for all creation. In The Christian Imagination Willie James Jennings tells a story from his childhood about white Christians who were oblivious to the faith, dreams, and needs of African Americans on their very street and in their neighborhood.5 Reconciled partnerships are about genuinely seeing and hearing and engaging with the other. Such partnerships require us to work through power dynamics so that these become equal, mutual, and reciprocal partnerships. Marginalized people mustn’t be recipients. They must be partners. Reconciliation means we must cultivate lament, repentance, forgiveness, justice, partnership, dignity, and equality. We must foster identification with others and determination to change. We need to take active steps toward community building. We should pursue conflict resolution, intercultural communication, and problem solving. We must relinquish destructive power dynamics. James H. Cone says, as we mentioned earlier, “For white people to speak of reconciliation at the very moment that they are subduing every expression of black self-determination is the height of racist arrogance.”6 As Cone says, it is racist, disingenuous, and arrogant for those of us with cultural, racial, or gender-based power to speak of reconciliation without first addressing our complicity in the personal, systemic, and structural forces that subdue and oppress the self- expression, dignity, and freedom of marginalized people. This includes, for example, the disadvantage experienced by women and people of color due to the pervasiveness of white male power and privilege. Emmanuel Katongole and Chris Rice talk about the various visions of reconciliation. Some see reconciliation as mostly being about individual salvation and the reconciliation between God and humanity. Others see reconciliation as an effort to recognize and celebrate diversity and inclusion. Others paint a picture of reconciliation that focuses on addressing injustice in its many forms. Others treat reconciliation as a process of firefighting : overcoming urgent and immediate expressions of conflict, brokenness, and division. These are all aspects of reconciliation. True reconciliation draws all these ideas together around the reconciling nature, story, and mission of God.
But those twin garments, one filthy and one clean, worked much better as a prophetic type (the technical term for such a model) of Jesus, first dishonored at the cross, and then triumphant at his second coming. And, as long as you were in Zechariah, and thinking along those lines, it was easy enough to go from 3:3–5 on to 12:10: And I will pour out a spirit of compassion and supplication on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, so that, when they look on the one whom they have pierced, they shall mourn for him, as one mourns for an only child, and weep bitterly over him, as one weeps over a firstborn. You have now arched beautifully and completely from past to future, from passion to parousia, from Jesus crucified to Jesus triumphant, from the day of piercing to the day, at the end of the world, when those who pierced Jesus would mourn both for him and for what they had done. I now give you a Christian document that shows the entire exegetical procedure. It combines all four strata: the two goats of Leviticus 16 from the Bible and Mishnah (which I indicate with underlined type); the crowning and robing of Zechariah 3 (in boldface type); the seeing and piercing of Zechariah 12 (in boldface italic type); and the spitting of Isaiah 50 (in ordinary italic type). These stata are all laminated into one demonstration that Jesus’ past crucifixion pointed inevitably toward his future victory. The text is to be found in the Epistle of Barnabas , a book written toward the end of the first century C.E . but showing no knowledge of the New Testament gospels. The section at 7:6–12 is developed through four questions based on the actual ritual of the Day of Atonement: Note what was commanded: “Take two goats, goodly and alike, and offer them, and let the priest take the one as a burnt offering for sins.” (1) But what are they to do with the other? “The other,” he says, “is accursed.” Notice how the type of Jesus is manifested: “And do ye all spit on it, and goad [pierce] it , and bind the scarlet wool about its head, and so let it be cast into the desert.” And when it is so done, he who takes the goat into the wilderness drives it forth, and takes away the wool, and puts it upon a shrub [instead of the rock]…. (2) What does this mean? Listen: “The first goat is for the altar, but the other is accursed,” and note that the one that is accursed is crowned because then “they will see him on that day” with the long scarlet robe “down to the feet” on his body , and they will say, “Is not this he whom we once crucified and rejected and pierced and spat upon?
John’s vision of awaiting the apocalyptic God, the Coming One, as a repentant sinner, which Jesus had originally accepted and even defended in the crisis of John’s death, was no longer deemed adequate. It is not enough to await a future kingdom; one must enter a present one here and now. By the time Jesus emerged from John’s shadow with his own vision and his own program, they were quite different from John’s, but it may well have been John’s own execution that led Jesus to understand a God who did not and would not operate through imminent apocalyptic restoration. The third and final set is composed of sayings by friends or enemies contrasting John and Jesus, and these indicate a recognition that the two individuals were somehow very different from one another. Notice, for example, how John as fasting and Jesus as feasting are contrasted in the following two units, the former from Mark 2:18–20 and the latter from the Q Gospel in Matthew 11:18–19 or Luke 7:33–34: (1) Now John’s disciples and the Pharisees were fasting; and people came and said to him, “Why do John’s disciples and the disciples of the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?” Jesus said to them, “The wedding guests cannot fast while the bridegroom is with them, can they? As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast. The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast on that day.” (2) John did not come eating and drinking, and they are saying, “He is demon possessed.” The son of man [that is, Jesus] has come eating and drinking, and they say, “Look at him, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.” Behind the positive metaphors of that former unit and the negative ones of that latter there is present a similar contrast between a fasting John and a feasting Jesus . John, in other words, lived in apocalyptic asceticism, and Jesus did the opposite. But, of course, to say that Jesus was not an apocalyptic ascetic does not at all tell us what he was. All that has been established so far is what John was, where Jesus began, and how eventually, in his own words and in the eyes of others, Jesus became something very different—indeed, almost the exact opposite of the Baptist. One Like a Son of Man There is, it would seem, an immediate and crippling objection to those preceding conclusions. Did not Jesus repeatedly foretell the coming of the Son of Man, a figure clearly apocalyptic? Was not Jesus, in other words, just as apocalyptic as John the Baptist? The question thus presses: Did Jesus speak of himself or any other protagonist as the coming Son of Man?
He combines Irini with Maria, whose thirty-year-old son Kostas was killed in a construction-site accident and buried in the grave next to Eleni. As those two mothers share grief and counterpoint lament, there is no hint that a daughter’s loss is less than a son’s, that identities derived from men and lost with their deaths are what fuel female mourning. Caraveli is surely right to deny Loring’s interpretation: “In the villages where I did my fieldwork,” she says, “narratives about female ‘heroes’ (worthy mothers or wives, skilled midwives or healers, talented singers, story-tellers, or craftswomen) constituted a female history of the village, a body of women’s expressive gestures, and a female line of transmission” (1986:170). What is at stake in female lament is an alternative mode of power that protests the general injustice of death over life but also the particular injustice of men over women. That theme appears again and again in the studies cited above, from Alexiou in the 1970s to Caraveli(-Chaves) in the 1980s and Seremetakis in the 1990s. Female lament poetry is not just a case of females temporarily out of male control or temporarily controlling public ritual and performance. Female lament poetry is a direct social protest against oppressive male institutions, whether political and economic or religious and theological. I noted above how female laments totally ignore and bypass institutional religion. The antiphonal collectivity of lament performance is, as Seremetakis puts it, “a political strategy that organizes the relations of women to male-dominated institutions.” It is “in critical relation to the male-dominated social order. The deployment of pain to detach the self and body from residual social contexts is but a prelude to the staging of women’s reentry (as individuals and as a collectivity) into the social order on their own terms” (1990:482, 508–509). When Andromache laments for Hector at the end of Homer’s Iliad , she does not say a word about his past fame as a Trojan warrior or his future fame as a fallen hero. She speaks about herself; she protests against him; she laments as a widow with a father-orphaned son, as one bereft of male protection in a male-dominated world. She weeps not for him but for herself and for her child. HISTORY The Judeo-Roman history of crucifixion can be summarized over four stages. The first stage is biblical crucifixion—the traditional Jewish method, which is quite different from the later Roman system. Jewish crucifixion was dead crucifixion. An executed and already-dead criminal was hung upon a cross. Crucifying after death was the public warning in the Jewish tradition. That style of crucifixion is mentioned in the laws of Deuteronomy and the conquest stories in Joshua. As we saw in the previous chapter, the law of Deuteronomy 21:22–23 commands that, when anyone “is convicted of a crime punishable by death and is executed, and you hang him on a tree,” the corpse must be removed by sunset. Notice the sequence: executed and hung.
Anna Caraveli-Chaves studied the “distinct thematic units … conventional to lament poetry in particular” and identified five that appear and reappear throughout a composition (135–136). They are intention, praise/invocation, history of the deceased, mourner’s plight, and invitation to share mourning. It is especially with that third of the “building blocks with which the singer will develop her song”—with the “history of the deceased”—that I am primarily interested in what follows. Here is one example of such a lament, given to underline that specific aspect but also to note some others every bit as important. HISTORY OF THE DECEASED On October 25, 1984, Peter Levi read Eilís Dillon’s translation of The Lament for Arthur O’Leary in his inaugural lecture as the University of Oxford’s Professor of Poetry. “It was composed in Irish at the end of the eighteenth century, and recovered in several different versions from illiterate or scarcely literate countrymen and fishermen in the south of Ireland in the 1890s and later…. I think it is the greatest poem written in these islands in the whole eighteenth century…. With this poem a world ended: we had not known that it had lived so long” (18–19). It was composed by Eibhlín Dhubh Ní Chonaill, widow of the murdered man. She was “born around 1743, her mother was a poet and her family had been patrons of traditional, wandering Irish poets” (19). The lament’s background is the anti-Catholic laws that Eileen’s younger kinsman Daniel O’Connell would eventually destroy—though far too late to save Arthur O’Leary from them. The latter was a captain in the Austrian army, but wearing a sword was illegal for a Catholic in Ireland. He won a horserace against Abraham Morris, high sheriff of Cork, and then refused to sell him the winning horse when asked; that refusal was likewise illegal for a Catholic in Ireland. On the run as an outlaw for these two crimes, O’Connell was betrayed by John Cooney and shot by one of Morris’s soldiers. Then a man named Baldwin, married to Eileen’s twin sister, Maíre, gave O’Leary’s horse to Morris. All of those characters are named in Eileen’s lament. Morris is wished “bad luck and misfortune.” Cooney of the “black heart” is “a píddling lout.” Maíre O’Connell gets “no bad wish,” but “I have no love for her.” Baldwin is “the ugly wretch with spindle shanks.” Eileen O’Connell married Arthur O’Leary in 1767, and he was killed in 1773. By that time they had two children, Conor and Farr, and a third “still within me / And not likely I’ll bear it.” All of those biographical details are mentioned in the lament, as are pertinent geographical locations connected to them: Killnamartyr, Cork, Toames, Macroom, Inchigeela, Carriganima, Geeragh, Caolchnoc, Ballingeary, Grenagh, Derrynane, Capling, and “all Munster.” It is lyric poetry edging toward epic in this lament of friend, lover, wife, and mother for friend, lover, husband, and father. These are stanzas VII and VIII (25): My friend you were forever!
As Tsiaras photographed Matinio, she addressed him directly: ‘We’ll all look like this in the end. Some day you’ll see the remains of your mother and father exhumed this way. Some day you’ll get exhumed, then you’ll look like this too.’” Who controls that photograph? Women lament. “What is common to laments for the dead in most ‘traditional’ cultures is that they are part of more elaborate rituals for the dead, and that they are usually performed by women,” as Holst-Warhaft writes. “Men and women may both weep for the dead, but it is women who tend to weep longer, louder, and it is they who are thought to communicate directly with the dead through their wailing songs…. [W]hile in early literate texts such as the Bible and the Homeric poems it was proper for men to weep and be wept over, it later became unacceptable…. Such a dialogue with the dead places a certain power in the hands of women” (1–2, 3). Any attempt to separate the genders—women in private home and men in public square—breaks down rather totally when it comes to funeral and grave, lament and mourning. It is not the noise of wailing but the power of lamenting that creates tension at this point between women and men. Men complain. Fermor speaks of male reaction to female lament primarily in terms of mild unease. “The men of the family often appear uncomfortable while all this goes on; changing feet, turning their caps nervously round and round in their fingers, keeping their eyes glued to the ground with all the symptoms of male embarrassment at a purely feminine occasion” (57). Caraveli-Chaves uses stronger language, speaking of “men’s ambivalent attitude towards women’s lamentation ranging from outright hostility to uneasy mocking of the tradition and, in some cases, to thinly disguised admiration” (130). What exactly is at stake in that male reaction? This is Danforth’s explanation: “Because a woman’s identity depends greatly on her relationship to a man, the death of this man deprives her of the crucial component of her identity…. It is for this reason that women participate so much more fully than men in the performance of death rituals. They must do so in order to continue to be who they were prior to the deaths of the men who gave their lives definition and meaning” (138). But, if that were true, one would surely expect female laments to emphasize much more the death of fathers, husbands, and sons over that of mothers, sisters, and daughters. That is negated not only by the examples I cited in the previous section but by Danforth’s own case studies from a Thessalian village in north-central Greece. He begins his book with Irini’s lament for her twenty-year-old daughter Eleni, who was killed in a hit-and-run accident in Thessaloniki a month before she was to begin her career as a teacher.
Such laments contain the details of the story of the death of the deceased…. The Passion narrative itself could have its roots in the formal context of repeated, sung storytelling, which could have preserved basic details of the tale of Jesus’ death…. I am suggesting that the Passion narrative had its origins in a grass-roots liturgical context dominated by women and ordinary people” (chapter 7, from ms. of forthcoming book). In what follows I am deeply indebted to both those scholars. I am completely persuaded that there is some very basic connection between female lament tradition and the development of the passion-resurrection story. I have cited those summaries, however, because I differ with them on how narrativelament tradition and passion-resurrection story interact with one another. The challenge, in any case, is how best to imagine that interaction. It must pay equal attention to anthropological expectations and to transmissional analyses of the gospel texts and sources. THE MOTHER AS MARTYR I talked in Chapter 16 about the martyrdom of the mother and her seven sons in 2 Maccabees . That story, from the persecution of the Greco-Syrian monarch Antiochus IV Epiphanes in 167 B.C.E. , is also told in 4 Maccabees , a text dated to between 19 and 54 C.E. (OTP 2.534). George Nickelsburg is even more precise on that date: “Fourth Maccabees may well have been written around the year 40 in response to Caligula’s attempt to have his statue erected in the Jerusalem Temple” (1981:226). It argues that full observance of the Jewish Law is true wisdom and proves the superiority of religious reason over human emotion. It is in this context that it repeats and develops the story of mother and sons from 2 Maccabees 7 into 4 Maccabees 8–18. But there is one very special development pointed out by Nickelsburg. “The mother of the seven brothers, whose speeches are integrated into the narrative of 2 Maccabees 7 , is here treated in a separate section (14:11–17:6). She is the ultimate example of the author’s thesis” (1981:225). Religious reason conquers even maternal emotion! In her 1994 doctoral dissertation Barbara Butler Miller analyzed very closely the male viewpoint of those stories. That viewpoint begins in 2 Maccabees 7: “In most of the references to the young men, they are called ‘brothers.’ In only two references does the narrator refer to them as her sons (2 Maccabees 7:20 , 41). In one of her speeches, the mother uses ‘my son’ and ‘my child’ (2 Maccabees 7:27). The sons never speak to their mother despite her intimate speeches to them. When the young men speak of each other, they always use the filial term ‘brother.’ The dominant use of the ‘brother’ terminology by the narrator stresses male/male bonding, rather than the mother/son relationship” (147–148). And the male viewpoint continues rather dramatically into 4 Maccabees .
The author cites a lament the mother did not make in 16:6–11 and he frames it fore and aft with that negation in 16:5, 12: Consider this also: If this woman, though a mother, had been fainthearted, she would have mourned over them and perhaps spoken as follows: O how wretched am I and many times unhappy! After bearing seven children, I am now the mother of none! O seven childbirths all in vain, seven profitless pregnancies, fruitless nurturings and wretched nursings! In vain, my sons, I endured many birth-pangs for you, and the more grievous anxieties of your upbringing. Alas for my children, some unmarried, others married and without offspring. I shall not see your children or have the happiness of being called grandmother. Alas, I who had so many and beautiful children am a widow and alone, with many sorrows. And when I die, I shall have none of my sons to bury me. Yet that holy and God-fearing mother did not wail with such a lament for any of them, nor did she dissuade any of them from dying, nor did she grieve as they were dying. That is a rather fascinating text. It is a man describing what he thinks women normally do and applauding the mother for not doing it. And it presumes that lament and grief are somehow antithetical to courage and martyrdom. But Miller’s comment is very perceptive: “Since the lament is treated with disdain by the writer, there seems some possibility that it might have been composed by women, or at least, echo the laments of real women of the eastern Mediterranean area. Second, the literary and sociological analyses of Greek laments carried out by M. Alexiou and A. Caraveli-Chaves, among others, offer parallels between this lament and other modern laments from the eastern Mediterranean area” (288). Here are examples of such parallels from those two authors. Margaret Alexiou, in her classical study of the Greek ritual lament across three thousand years from antiquity to modernity, highlights the contrast convention: “In the ancient lament, the commonest formula for this convention was to contrast one clause, introduced by before or then , with a second clause, introduced by now ” (166). She exemplifies from the Testament of Job , a text dated to either the last century B.C.E. or the first century C.E. (OTP 1.850). There is a series of six contrasts in Testament of Job 25:1–8 between the rich past life of Sitis, wife of Job, and her present desperate situation. Each past/present contrast ends with the same refrain: “Now she sells her hair for bread.” There is a similar contrast convention in 4 Maccabees 16:6–11: “After bearing seven children, I am now the mother of none,” or, “Alas, I who had so many and beautiful children am a widow and alone, with many sorrows.” Such stylized conventions indicate that laments are formal, ritual, and traditional poetry.
This final section goes in the opposite direction, not from the Cross Gospel to the Ascents of James , but from the Cross Gospel backward into the Jerusalem community of the 30s. It focuses especially on gender roles within that community, on the interaction of exegesis and lament, and on the relationship between named females and named males in those earliest days after the execution of Jesus. Biography in Lament I follow women’s cultural response to historical fragmentation as they weave together diverse social practices: dreaming, lament improvisation, care and tending of olive trees, burying and unburying the dead, and the historical inscription of emotions and senses on a landscape of persons, things, and places. These practices compose the empowering poetics of the periphery…. For the poetics of the periphery is always concerned with the imaginary dimension of material worlds, of things and persons made and unmade…. The poetics of the cultural periphery is the poetics of the fragment. One thing must be made clear about the fragment. It may be marginal, but it is not necessarily dependent, for it is capable of denying recognition to any center. I am concerned with the global vision that emerges from the particular. To stand in the margin is to look through it at other margins and at the so-called center itself. Constantina-Nadia Seremetakis, The Last Word , p. 1 First, did the female companions of Jesus lament his death and mourn his execution? Second, did such activities influence the communal tradition? Those are obvious questions. But they were obvious to me only after scholars such as Marianne Sawicki and Kathleen Corley had raised them persuasively and powerfully in their own writings. Sawicki raised them in terms of burial, tomb, and apparition within the gospel texts. “Calvary had been a quarry in antiquity, and after executions the police dumped the bodies into any convenient hole together with some lime to cut the stench. But possibly the Sanhedrin took custody of Jesus’ corpse according to the procedure recalled in Mishnah Sanhedrin 6:5 [that is, burial in a common criminal tomb], since the sentence of the court was not considered satisfied until the body decomposed [one year later]…. In either case—limed pit or confiscation—the interruption of the dying process causes grief…. I suggest that such grief over loss of the body was the starting point of the reflection that culminates in a ‘finding’ of the empty tomb and a ‘seeing’ of Jesus as already risen from the dead” (1994a:257). Corley raised them against a wider background in the cross-cultural anthropology of female lament tradition. “In many parts of the world, such as Greece, Ireland, Central America, Finland, China, the Middle East, Africa, New Guinea, and Spain, women have in past and present times habitually keened and mourned the dead. Many of these lament traditions in fact sustain a poetic genre that goes back in some cases hundreds, or in the case of rural Greece, thousands of years….
From Lit: A Memoir (2009)
(Years later, we’ll accept each other’s longhand apologies for the whole debacle and resume the correspondence that held the better angels of our natures.) Disaster, my teacher Bob explained to me once, can translate as something wrong with the stars. Our stars—David’s and mine—badly misalign, yet we can’t escape each other’s orbits. He climbs on my balcony and bangs on the bedroom window. I slip heartfelt notes under his windshield wiper. Coming across each other at a meeting, we wind up making out in the parking lot. By Thanksgiving, we’ve both changed our phone numbers to escape each other’s stalkeresque calls, and we’re burnt out enough to let go, though we’ll reconnect for a few sloppy goodbyes before he moves away that spring. By December when telephone poles sparkle with red lights and green bells, I’m sunk in the grief for my marriage that I’d been running from all along. This time I vow to embrace my loneliness till some spiritual presence takes up residence in my rib cage. But I face the holiday like my own private gallows. Dev and I shape clay elf ornaments to bake in the oven, but at night, while I’m grading papers, they take on a ghoulish, leering quality I didn’t figure on. Walking to school under the gray sky, I envision my solo Christmas hunched over a hot plate boiling packaged noodles. (Forget that I don’t own a hot plate.) Patti invites me over on Christmas Day, contingent on my volunteering at the local soup kitchen—a duty I resent like hell. She says, Whatever you want emotionally, you have to start giving away. Want to find company? Open up to other people. That’s how I land behind the steam table of a homeless shelter on Christmas, hair wadded into a black net. One hand wields a long-handled spoon, the other an ice cream scoop for potatoes. Patti predicted I’d bond cheerily with my fellow volunteers. But to me, they’re that most grisly of Christmas specters: a happy family. Uniformed in matching Buffalo Bills football jerseys, they nonstop grin like beauty contestants who’ve vaselined their teeth. The
From Healing Our Broken Humanity: Practices for Revitalizing the Church and Renewing the World (2018)
We must follow the way of a God who will not release us either to our demons or to our despair.6 We lament corruption among politicians, police forces, and bankers; military interventions and the militarization of society and police forces; uncaring government agencies and big business; and urban poverty and homelessness. We lament the enslavement, rape, exploitation, and oppression of people of color and their communities; systems of slavery and institutionalized racism; the proliferation of guns in society, and the idolatry and death associated with gun cultures; the violation and oppression of women (and especially black women); and the way people and people groups have been imprisoned instead of rehabilitated. We lament rampant Islamophobia, reinforced by Donald Trump’s announcement of a ban of people from seven Muslim-dominated countries from entering the United States. We lament the nature, extent, and effects of white privilege, nationalism, xenophobia, and racism; the unwelcome shown to refugees and asylum seekers; and the fear, anxiety, and suffering experienced by undocumented migrants. We lament the treatment of women in society and church. Too often women suffer multiple oppressions. We lament gender inequalities, the discrimination and harassment women suffer, the sexualization of women and girls, and the domestic violence many women suffer daily. We lament the sex trafficking of poor young Asian girls whose bodies are sold for sex, domination, and exploitation. We lament the theological and religious constructs that seek to make women subordinate, submissive, and silent. We lament the colonization, devastation, and assimilation of First Nations and indigenous peoples, and the role Christianity has played in this. We lament colonialism, paternalism, expansionism, and the oppressive dimensions of Christendom. We lament the United States’ segregated churches and neighborhoods, its near-genocide of Native American peoples, and its enslavement of one another. We lament the United States’ original sins: racism, sexism, and addiction to power.7 We lament American exceptionalism and all its effects, predatory lenders and real estate speculators, and the colonization and devastation of Native American and indigenous and aboriginal cultures. We lament America’s treatment of Latinx immigrants and the pain and trauma caused to those who are undocumented. While Christian faith is vibrant among Latinx immigrants, many feel unwelcome, marginalized, and discriminated against. We lament the treatment of Asian immigrants who worked as indentured workers and who died building the railroad. Those who survived never made enough money to go back home. In Australia we lament our treatment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, the high level of violence against women, the spread of Islamophobia, and our treatment of asylum seekers on the high seas and in offshore detention centers. We lament when my Muslim friend is called racial slurs and when my Asian American friend is told to “go back to China.” We lament when my Asian American dad is called “chink” and “worthless Chinaman” because racism exists and is breeding hate. We lament the silence of the people of God about many of these things.
[T]he final, essential moment, and the climax of this vast transformation of values, of the whole Iliad , is the lamentation of the dead Hektor. However Homer may have cooled down the ritual laments of women, which appear in a wilder form a little earlier in the conclusion, it remains true that it was by adapting women’s poetry at the climax, and by accepting women’s views, that he gave the Iliad its extraordinary power. The lamentation of Hektor is not a stray incident, nor a merely formal closure” (13). Female lament questions the morality of male heroism and of many other male characteristics and institutions as well. At the moment I look at lament in preparation for some very specific questions. They are the questions to be seen later in Helmut Koester’s claim that “the different versions of the passion narrative in the gospel literature” derive from “the oral performances of the story in the ritual celebrations, ever enriched by new references to the scriptures of Israel” (1995:18). They were seen already in the quotations from Marianne Sawicki and Kathleen Corley. These, then, are the questions: Are the different versions of the passion-resurrection in our gospels but the written accounts of oral multiforms? Are they inscribed from divergent traditions of female lament, especially from the narrative or biographical content of such mourning rituals? How, in other words, do female lament and the passion-resurrection tradition relate to one another? In preparation for answering those questions in the next and final sections, I look here at actual oral multiforms of female laments. It is impossible to prove or disprove claims of oral traditions that are completely lost. But if one has some written records of a tradition, there may be sufficient evidence to prove oral multiforms at base. That was seen for the oral and epic poetry of male performances at the start of this book. It can now be seen for the oral and lyric poetry of female laments in what follows. When we read such poetry today in books , we recognize another world staring us in the face from behind the written page. This is what oral multiforms look like. THE LAMENT OF CHRYSA KALLIAKATI FOR HER MOTHER Anna Caraveli-Chaves studied female lament poetry in “Dzermiathes … a large village, situated on the Lassithi plateau of the island of Crete, and the capital of the Lassithi province” where “moirologia (laments)—like other forms of ritual poetry—are rapidly becoming extinct. The present generation of lament poets is almost certainly the last.” Against them stand male attitudes, “the underlying fear of laments as magic songs, songs which open up perilous channels of communication between the living and the dead,” and modern standards and values. Her work is superbly evocative of the social context of those laments for “the women of the ‘patriarchal’ Greek village society … as strategies of survival” (1980:130, 131). In what follows I focus for my own present purpose on one somewhat minor aspect of her study.
The lament was antiphonally performed between Kalliopi and Poulos’s mother at the graveside. Later Kalliopi married another man, whom she also outlived. The first two versions of the antiphonal lament are recorded from female relatives of her late husband; the third is from Kalliopi herself, “an elderly widow now, who has been living in Athens (earlier in Piraeus) for decades” (130–137): From a First Relative From a Second Relative From Kalliopi herself Poulos’s mother speaks: Poulos’s mother speaks: Poulos’s mother speaks: Ah, my sweet, golden crown, didn’t I come up to Dri on Easter Day with the big bread rolls and the red eggs, with a silk dress and the fat goat? How can I part from you icon of Christ? Ah, icon of Christ, how am I to separate from you? To lose bride and groom and all the in-laws? Wasn’t I coming Easter and Easter day to bring the fat lamb? Ah, icon of Christ, how am I to separate myself from you? I was proud of you, to come to my household as a bride gave me great honor. Kalliopi responds: Kalliopi responds: Kalliopi responds: Listen, my sweet mother, don’t cry for your sweet, little crown cry for the professor for you have no other child. For I will get married, another professor I will find. For I, on my part, have no need of anything, my father is a teacher, my brother is a doctor, I am educated myself. I, on my part, don’t mourn him as my husband nor as my fiancé, I only mourn him as a brother for we studied together over there in Areopoli. Stop, my sweet mother, you melt my heart. Me, what kind of good do I bring you that you are warmly receiving me? Such good [let it go] to the sea and to the deepest waters. I, on my part, have no need of anything, for I am well in my household, the household of my father, for my father is a teacher, my brother is a doctor, a teacher I am myself. I beg your pardon, please, I am not mourning a fiancé, but a neighbor and covillager, an only child. I will mourn him today, your only cherished son, I am not mourning a fiancé, for I hardly came to know him one month only. He passed from Dri as if an itinerant. Generous Poulo_____, my poor one, won’t you change your mind, and not for my sake, I am well in my household, queen I am and kira in the king’s palaces, my father is a teacher, my brother is a doctor, I am educated myself. Seremetakis comments that “the women of her present affinal clan, in recounting the 1932 event, play down the high status of the dead fiancé’s clan and the depth of Kalliopi’s mourning” (1991:144).
beloved spinner of the yarn and twister of the cloth. Ah mother, keeper of the home, mother, weaver and spinner Eh mother, keeper of the home and mistress of embroidery even the night sky itself was woven in your loom. you knew how to embroider the sky with in all its stars. I hope it is not disrespectful to admit that I prefer CK’s terminal location but AP’s doubled rendition of those passionately accurate lines. A final instance shows the “mourner’s plight” motif. This gets only lines 13–14 in AP but lines 27–34 in CK. The difference, however, is far greater than two against eight lines. There are no parallels to any of lines 27–40 from CK in the AP version. It is a long and stern reproach to the Holy Trinity, all the saints, and the miraculous Virgin Mary of Tinos Island. She vowed offerings; they did nothing. CK will go to church next Sunday (but only?) to remember her mother bringing her to communion long ago—that is, only “to see my mother.” Those lines make up one-third of the CK version. Does AP omit them because she is less religious or more religious than her mother? Less religious and therefore uninterested in them? More religious and therefore embarrassed by them? The omission, in any case, is hardly a vagary of memory. It is part of the standard censorship of oral repetition. THE LAMENT OF KALLIOPI FOR POULOS This second example comes from the other aside of the Cretan Sea, where three fingers point southward from the Greek Peloponnese into the Mediterranean. The middle finger is spined by the Taygetos Mountains and flanked by the Ionian Sea’s Messenian Gulf to the west and the Aegean Sea’s Laconian Gulf to the east. The southernmost part, past Outer Mani and Lower Mani, is Inner Mani. At its tip is Cape Tenaron, traditional entranceway into Hades. The female dirges of the Inner Mani are, in Fermor’s words, “entire poems, long funeral hymns with a strict discipline of metre. Stranger still, the metre exists nowhere else in Greece, The universal fifteen-syllable line of all popular Greek poetry is replaced here by a line of sixteen syllables” (57–58). Constantina-Nadia Seremetakis is interested in “the particular optic of Inner Mani” against the background of “recent anthropological literature that pluralizes the concept and tangible presence of power by identifying strategies of resistance that emerge and subsist in the margins” (1991:12). I have, as in the previous case, a far more limited focus at the moment. It is in oral multiforms, in the three different versions she gives of the lament for “the premature death, in 1932, of a young man [Poulos] who was engaged to be married to Kalliopi, a woman from a high-status clan. The deceased man was a schoolteacher, as was his fiancée. Both had studied in urban centers, and he died of an urban disease, tuberculosis, before the marriage could occur” (130).
I knew nothing of your murder Till your horse came to the stable With the reins beneath her trailing, And your heart’s blood on her shoulders Staining the tooled saddle Where you used to sit and stand. My first leap reached the threshold, My second reached the gateway, My third leap reached the saddle. I struck my hands together And I made the bay horse gallop As fast as I was able, Till I found you dead before me Beside a little furze-bush. Without Pope or bishop, Without priest or cleric To read the death-psalms for you, But a spent old woman only Who spread her cloak to shroud you— Your heart’s blood was still flowing; I did not stay to wipe it But filled my hands and drank it. I am primarily interested here in narrative detail and biographical content in traditional lament poetry, and their relationship to the passion-resurrection tradition. But those stanzas draw attention to another and even more widespread aspect of female ritual mourning. There in stanza VIII and again later in stanza XXVII Eileen laments that Arthur had no official religious ministers to attend his death. But that is all there is to it. Nothing else in the poem speaks of Roman Catholicism or even general Christianity. There is nothing about the resurrection of the dead or about reunion in heaven. Here, in fact, is how the poem ends in stanza XXXVI (35): All you women out there weeping, Wait a little longer; We’ll drink to Art son of Connor And the souls of all the dead, Before he enters the school— Not learning wisdom or music But weighed down by earth and stones. That is absolutely characteristic of ritual lament from female poets. It is not that they resist or oppose official, male religion. That would be to give that alternative too much attention or relevance. They ignore it; they bypass it; they operate on a level far more physical and primitive and profound. I have noticed that again and again in reading those traditional lament poems, though I have never heard a living lament, even in Ireland. But those who have heard them—in Greece, for example, as bodies were being exhumed from grave to charnel house—often interpret them quite differently. Patrick Leigh Fermor takes that dialectic of female lament and male religion as a simple syncretism: “There is, in practice, little belief in a conventional after-life and the rewards and sanctions of Christian dogma. In spite of the orthodox formulae of the priest at the graveside it is not for a Christian eternity, for a paradise above the sky, that the dead are setting out, but the Underworld, the shadowy house of Hades and the dread regions of Charon; and Charon has been promoted from the rank of ferryman of the dead to that of Death himself, a dire equestrian sword-wielder…. There is no clash in the Greek mind between these two allegiances, but a harmonious unchallenged syncretism” (54).