Reality, Grief, Hope by Walter Brueggemann

Author:Walter Brueggemann [Brueggemann, Walter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
Published: 2014-02-20T23:00:00+00:00

Anyone who has long benefitted from these old arrangements (including this writer) has much reason for sadness!

But set this down: sadness over loss that is unvoiced, unembraced, and unacknowledged a) turns to violence and b) precludes movement toward new possibility. Sadness unvoiced leads to violence, whether expressed in racial bigotry, hostility toward outsiders, readiness for attack on enemies, or self-hatred. Sadness unvoiced leads to a backward wish for recovery; as a result no energy is left for the pursuit or practice of new social possibility that lies beyond our old comfort zones. Thus our public discourse is largely cast as a yearning for the way it used to be, with old-time privilege and old-time religion cast in comfortable country music that requires nothing.

Given that state of legitimate sadness that is kept numb and unvoiced, the prophetic task, I propose, is to encourage, permit, and engage the practice of public grief over a world that is gone. This is, I have shown, what the prophets did as they anticipated the coming destruction. This is what they did as they cast YHWH as the chief mourner (keener) over Jerusalem that was taken from them via the God-presided vagaries of history. And that is surely what is being done in these negating communal songs of grief that boldly contradict the “Songs of Zion” (Psalms 74, 79, 137) that ponder the demise of city, king, and temple. That practice, moreover, came to fullest expression in the book of Lamentations. These poems of grief that stopped well short of restoration were on the lips of those “left behind” in Jerusalem, so that they had every day to see the ruined walls and to smell the smoldering, still smoking residue of the city in shambles.

Such voiced grief — in anticipation, on the lips of YHWH, and in the wake of loss — enacted the painful process of relinquishment. The task in death is to let go of what is finished, dead, and failed. The ideology of exceptionalism, with its favorite modifier “forever,” insisted that such an ending could not come. For that reason, every sign of such an ending must be denied. But the assurance of “forever” and the required denial do not and cannot cancel the facts on the ground or dispose of the sense of free fall that persists in spite of willed denial.

The alternative toward health and new life is the shared, out loud, honest work of grief. Such voiced grief is an alternative to violence. Such grief, moreover, turns loss to energy for newness. Thus it is, I propose, the very voicing of loss that permitted displaced and dislocated Jews to do the work of articulating covenantal faith in quite different and venturesome categories after the loss of Jerusalem.

Thus I propose that the prophetic community, right in the middle of a culture of denial, is a proper venue for grief work. Such a meeting will not, at the outset, be “the happiest place in town.” It will only be the most honest place in town, where honesty is not an extreme concern in a culture of denial.

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