Genesis 15:1–12, 17–18; Psalm 27; Philippians 3:17– 4:1; Luke 13:31–35

“Cé hé an fear breá sin                                 

Ar Chrann na Páise?                                       

Óchón agus óchón-ó!    

An é n-aithníonn tú do Mhac,

A Mháthrín?

Óchón agus óchón-ó!”

This is a piece of my ethnic heritage – and John’s ethnic heritage – that I share with you. It’s called “keening,” and it was a widespread practice in Ireland and Scotland for generations.

The piece from which I just sang is called the Caoineadh na dTri Mhuire, and is a composition which puts a keening song into the mouth of the Virgin Mary at the foot of the cross. Keening is a form of lament, and it was most commonly practiced at funerals by women.

These women were not usually members of the family of the deceased, but professionals who could be hired for their services. In Celtic folklore, it was believed that the banshee – or “woman of the sidhe,” the Celtic underworld – was a conduit for the soul to depart into the next life. By taking on this role, a flesh and blood woman could not only aid the soul in its journey, but also provide a source of catharsis to the whole community.

I love the idea of hiring someone to give voice to the sound inside a grieving heart. I’m also so moved that this was exclusively women’s work. In fact, tradition often places the keening woman in the wild wastes, walking on the margins, showing solidarity with the dead by disheveled hair and torn clothes. She was the one who gave voice to all of the thoughts of grief that many of us would never share with anyone else. She would impress upon fellow mourners that bizarre sense of unreality following a death by describing the mundane details of life, and following it with what one scholar called “a brutally realistic description of the weight of the cold earth of the grave.” One of the truly beautiful things she did was to express anger at the deceased for dying, asking them who would plow their fields and raise their children, which gave other mourners safe space to air their own anger. She was like a Holy Fool…or a prophet.

The passage from Luke we read has the heading, “the lament over Jerusalem.” This heading (which is not in the original text) was the first thing that reminded me of this ancient practice of my ancestors. The fact that we are in Lent, and like a keening woman our Church provides us with a prescribed space of time in which to air our griefs so that we may neither bypass them nor be trapped within them, also made me reflect on lament. We lament our sins and our mortality on Ash Wednesday, and we lament the terrible cruelty we humans can inflict on one another, and the pain that was visited on our Beloved, on Good Friday.

It’s so important to take this time, as dreary as it may seem at first, to lament. I think lament has become incredibly counter-cultural in our time period today.

It may not look like that at first. Every day we get up and see news stories on TV about how horrendous the world has become. We may mourn “the good old days,” or feel powerless to halt the perceived tidal wave of human misery. People write articles and scream at their TVs and say, “I’m not angry, just disappointed.”

But I don’t think that is true lament. Lament is productive. Lament gives us a chance to bring things into the light and thereby disinfect them. Ever notice how, in the Bible, people gained power over demons by naming them? And God changed people’s names – Abram became Abraham, Sarai became Sarah – but refused to be named: “Tell them I AM has sent you.” I think it’s same principle here. Naming our feelings gives us power over them, and maybe by enfleshing with words what is incorporeal, like grief, we can subject it too to the slow erosion of mortality. We can’t remove its teeth, but in time they may grow dull.

Jesus lived a life that would have been somewhat familiar to a keening woman. He kept to the margins and expressed truths in a blunt and provocative manner that felt liberating to some and terribly uncomfortable to others. He made himself safe space for others.

Unfortunately, his life was similar to a keening woman in another way: after countless women passed down this oral tradition to the next generations, the practice is now almost extinct in Ireland save for a few holdouts on the incredibly remote Blasket Islands. The suppression of this tradition was led primarily by the Roman Catholic Church – it was seen as heathenish because of its lack of reference to the afterlife, and, in the 1800s, superstitious and embarrassing. One scholar I read believed that priests felt it inappropriate for women to act as conduits between life and death. Some priests even publically whipped women who tried to keen the dead up until the early twentieth century. The Marian lament that I sang earlier was part of a new art form created by women who, deprived of their ritual, took back the tradition in a way they thought would escape censure, by ascribing it and a host of traditional keening imagery, to the Mother of God.

Jesus, who clearly was doing something right in the eyes of these Pharisees, is warned to make himself scarce before Herod finds him. Jesus’ retort and message for ‘that fox’ (a title which in its context was more like ‘that skunk’) makes it clear that he is willing to brave whips and worse for the right to cast out demons and lament for Jerusalem, the blessed and holy city of God that stones prophets and murders messengers. We also have that exquisite line where Jesus longs to be as a mother hen gathering her brood under her wings.

Jesus, the prophet in between Pharisee and pauper, the stranger between master and mother. Jesus, lover of the lost and seducer of the civilized.

During the season of Lent, we shrug off our cloaks of pretense, and remind ourselves that the span of our days is like that of the flower of the field. We put our...secret “A” words in boxes and we stifle many of our songs. The closer we get to Easter, the more we strip away, until Good Friday comes and there is nothing left.

We lament.

We cry, “Kyrie eleison,” and “We are dust and to dust we shall return.” We say these things because it is so easy to forget, especially in this part of the world, that mortality and frailty are a natural part of every human life. It is so easy to forget that in so much of the world death and pain are not sanitized the way they can be here. Lent makes space for us to say, “Not only are death and pain real…our God lived them, and by doing so gave us life.”

We lament.

I think this is an incredibly prophetic opportunity. Every Lent, we the Church are offered the opportunity to keen on behalf of the world. Distance, oppression, and fear have been a padlock on so much grief. Let’s open it and expose that grief to air. Let us, during this season, walk on the margins. Let us show solidarity with the sad by making ourselves poor in spirit and righteously angry that the world is not always as it should be, and we will never be fully untangled until Christ returns to us. Let us provide the entire world with a safe space for grief, in the knowledge that making space for the awkward emotions also makes space for the joyous ones.

Let us cry out, “Óchón agus óchón-ó!” – “Alas, and alas” – knowing that after “Alas” comes another ‘A’ word...one we don’t say at this time, but it’s only a few syllables off, and just as raw, just as beautiful.

Alas, and so may it be.

Ministries
Worship Services