Homily for Tuesday, 31 July 2018– Memorial of St. Ignatius of Loyola

Tuesday of the 17th Week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Jeremiah 14:17-22; Psalm 79:8, 9, 11, 13; Matthew 13:38-43

Have any of us ever read and prayed over a passage of Scripture like today’s reading from Jeremiah or our Psalm and thought about how dour it is? “All the prophet or the psalmist do is complain bitterly,” we might say. Or have readings like these ever resonated with our own experience or that of any of our loved ones?

An article that has greatly influenced my reflection on these questions is Walter Brueggemann’s The Costly Loss of Lament, which I first read when I was taking a course on the Psalms in seminary. Brueggemann says, and I agree, that our society and culture today tend to shun lament and people who lament. And yet, Brueggemann says, the Psalms especially, and also the prophets and other Old Testament writings, show us not only that the occasional good lament can be effective, but that lamenting properly is an essential part of religious faith. To lose the ability or reflex of lamentation, of godly complaining, cripples religious faith itself.

And so how do we lament properly? What are the key features of a good lament, and how do we distinguish proper lamentation from useless complaining? I think Jeremiah and the Psalms can help us to answer these questions.

Today, we hear Jeremiah pleading bitterly with God. Judah, the southern part of the Holy Land, is being laid waste by the more powerful kingdoms that surround it: Assyria and then Babylon. Jeremiah wonders on his people’s behalf whether the invasions, destruction, deportations, drought, and famine will end anytime soon. And our Psalm takes up the lament motif similar to that of Jeremiah: “How long, O Lord? Will you be angry forever”?

Both Jeremiah and the Psalmist connect the national disaster of Judah of their time with the sins of the people; there is a penitential aspect to their lament. But, more importantly, both Jeremiah’s and the Psalmist’s laments end on a note of hope and a promise to praise God should God relieve them of the suffering they are lamenting. The most genuine praise always stems from the most honest lament, particularly in the Old Testament prophetic writings and Psalms.

I invite us, then, to ask ourselves this question: If and when we have complained, would we have complained if we had not had any hope that whatever we were complaining about would be resolved? I imagine most or all of us would answer “no” to this question; we would not complain without at least some hope of rectification of the lamentable situation.

The same is true of Jeremiah, of the Psalmist, and of St. Ignatius of Loyola, whose feast we celebrate today. In his Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius contrasts consolation, when all seems right in our lives, with desolation, when God seems absent, prayer is dry, and we want to lament. St. Ignatius, in short, invites us to lament freely when we feel the need. God is as present in desolation as in consolation. Desolation may take up most of a person’s lifetime, as it did for the likes of St. Teresa of Kolkata (famously in our time) and St. Ignatius himself. Keep praying and, above all, be honest, especially in prayer. Desolation will end in consolation; just as genuine lament is based on hope and ends in the most genuine praise. In this, we have the example of St. Ignatius; of Jeremiah; of the Psalms.