I Mourn, and Horror Has Seized Me

My joy is gone; grief is upon me;
    my heart is sick. 

Listen! The cry of the daughter of my people
    from far and wide in the land:
“Is the Lord not in Zion?
    Is her King not in her?”
(“Why have they provoked me to anger with their images,
    with their foreign idols?”)
“The harvest is past, the summer is ended,
    and we are not saved.”

For the brokenness of the daughter of my people I am broken,
    I mourn, and horror has seized me.
Is there no balm in Gilead?
    Is there no physician there?
Why then has the health of the daughter of my people
    not been restored?
O that my head were a spring of water
    and my eyes a fountain of tears,
so that I might weep day and night
    for the slain of the daughter of my people!
(Jeremiah 8:18-9:1, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)

“My joy is gone; grief is upon me; my heart is sick.”

I don’t think it would surprise any Friend to hear someone say they feel that way, certainly not after the week we’ve just had. The United States bore witness to a brazen act of political violence on a college campus in Utah—some people bearing that witness more directly than others, as social media platforms practically force-fed video of the fatal shooting to their users, in many cases without warning. Reckless speculation about the killer’s motives flourished, fueled by a news media eager to stoke never-ending social conflict with one hand and condemn it with the other. On one side of the political spectrum, they began issuing calls for retaliatory purges; on the other, they shook their heads ruefully and hurriedly agreed that “violence has no place in America.”

As we learned more about the man eventually charged in the killing, however, the tenor of the public conversation shifted briefly toward the theme of a classic headline from the satirical newspaper The Onion: “‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.” Who can understand why men steeped in a gun-fetishizing environment of toxic masculinity and emotional alienation lash out against their communities so violently? Authorities and commentators alike throw up their hands in willful confusion and continue searching for an easy scapegoat.

(Meanwhile, the ruling powers couldn’t even wait for an official announcement of the victim’s death before they began fast-tracking him for martyrdom. The president ordered flags to be flown at half-mast for several days, with promises of a posthumous Medal of Freedom. In Congress, they spoke not just of a funereal ceremony in the Capitol but a permanent statue honoring his memory. And the furies come down from all corners upon anyone with a critical word for the deceased.)

“Why have they provoked me to anger?” the Lord asks Jeremiah rhetorically.

I like the spin the King James translators put on the end of 8:19; instead of complaining about “foreign idols,” God criticizes the “strange vanities” of an unfaithful Zion. The earliest Quakers might have seen that rendition, but they often turned to the even earlier Geneva Bible, which speaks of “the vanities of a strange god.” And so, as you read first-generation Friends like George Fox or James Nayler, you’ll often see references to “the god of this world,” who we should resist with everything we’ve got (and every bit of grace God gives us).

When we encounter an ideology that regards empathy as a “made-up… term” that “does a lot of damage,” Friends can and should reject this negation of the Beloved Community to which Spirit invites us all. All the more so when that ideology promotes a hierarchical vision of power that regards women as subordinate to men, people of color as inferior to “Whites,” and executing queer people as an example of “God’s perfect law.”

Quakers don’t need to pretend that “practicing politics the right way” includes propagating such views, and we don’t need to canonize a man who built his political career on doing so. We can feel empathy for that man, who didn’t deserve to die like that. We can also feel empathy for the Minnesota state legislator and her husband murdered for their political affiliation three months ago. For the police officer killed in the line of duty during an assault on the Center for Disease Control offices in Atlanta last month. For the two students wounded in a Colorado high school shooting within an hour or two of the murder that has seized everyone’s attention.

“I mourn, and horror has seized me.”

Or, as Robert Alter vividly translates the same verse, “I plunge in doom, desolation has gripped me.” Jeremiah’s story doesn’t end there, though—and neither should ours. In their own troubled time, Fox and Nayler and their peers felt much as Jeremiah felt. “The devil hath made the world like a wilderness,” Fox wrote in his Journal, “and there are so many ways in it that [people] do not know which way to come out of it.” But the Quakers came to realize that God was still rooting for them, and could “be a teacher unto thee at all times.” They had merely to embrace the opportunity.

As our hearts ache within us (to once more borrow Alter’s phrasing) over current events, we too have an opportunity to “feel the grace and truth in thy heart, that is come by Jesus Christ, that will teach thee how to live, and what to deny.” If you can’t connect with the “Jesus Christ” part, just focus on the “grace and truth” to start. Either way, by acknowledging our horror, and confronting its causes, we can begin to make our way toward a better world, where the balm we seek awaits.