The death-dealing imperial machine of ancient Rome killed Jesus. The same machine is killing planet Earth, though that machine now appears under different names: global capitalism; single-use plastic; neo-liberal nationalism; the tyranny of convenience among the well-intentioned.
There is much to grieve in a world of violence and destruction, but such a world calls also for lament. As Walter Brueggemann so frequently reminds us, lamentation is not just sadness; to lament is to insist on transformation, to resist any notion that the world cannot change. Lament can create communities of transformation, bonding us together, by God’s grace, in shared efforts to dismantle the imperial dynamics of domination and death.
We humans, I’m increasingly convinced, are not alone in our grief, nor in our lamentations. Other animals, other creatures of the same God (to borrow Andrew Linzey’s felicitous phrase), mourn the loss of habitats, the spoiling of ecosystems, the runaway disaster of fossil fuels and oceans brimming with plastics. I have more recently become persuaded that all these other animals not only mourn but also engage in something like lament, perhaps even with something like hope. Or as the poet Sylvia Sands supposes, the mourning generates a new kind of song for a different kind of dawn.
On this Good Friday, let us grieve; let us also lament, which is the only way I can see to make this particular Friday “good.” Other animals can help us in this, as Sylvia Sands so poignantly suggests…
Song of the Bird
He loved us,
birds of the air.
Listen to his stories
of ravens and eagles –
and even sparrows:
two sold for a farthing,
and not one falls to the ground
without the Father knowing.
Here I am,
perched on his cross
eyeing those thorns
burrowing blackly and blindly
burrowing secretly, searingly
into his brow.
Tell me,
where is that damned dreamy
dove of peace now?
His beak is longer and stronger than mine.
Look, I’ve tried
I’ve flown into,
under his sweat-soaked,
blood-drenched,
once beautiful hair.
I’ve tried to wrench out
one, just one, of those thorns.
I’ve beaten – nearly broken – my wings
against his face;
and all I’ve done is
to draw more blood.
Fierce are those thorns
force-driven into his head.
With what strength I have left
I am flying,
flying away from my failure,
flying away lest I forget
the music trapped in my breast
for sunset and dawn:
flight and music –
his gifts.
As I fly
a hoard of young sparrows
come twittering and taunting,
laughing and crying after me:
Red breast! Red breast!
Who ever saw a red breast before?
I glance down as I fly
and see my breast flame crimson
against the gathering dusk.
The fellowship of his sufferings:
in my heart, as if to break it
creep sunset and dawnbreak,
and in my soul a new song is born
with which to greet them.
