O vos omnes qui transitis per viam, attendite et videte: Si est dolor similis sicut dolor meus.
The text comes from the Vulgate translation of Lamentations 1:12, a
current translation reads
Come, all who pass by the way,
pay attention and see:
Is there any pain like my pain...
It's a common refrain on Holy Week, for Good Friday in particular. So why is it showing up in my mental sound track this week, between Ascension (Thursday in my diocese) and Pentecost?
I took the photo at the left from the train just outside Union Station in Washington DC yesterday morning. I wanted to capture the sign on the building,
Mathematica, as it is coincidently the name of a software package I use with my students to do technical computing. I grabbed the photos as the train rumbled past, stuffed my phone back in my bag and continued on my way.
When I got home yesterday afternoon, I pulled down the photos from the weekend and flipped through them. It wasn't the building that caught my eye this time, but the homeless encampment in the foreground.
O vos omnes I chanted under my breath.
I had spoken at Daylesford Abbey on Sunday about science and faith, about the ways in which a serene and tender attentiveness to the world — something scientists can perhaps model for those of faith — ought to move us toward what Pope Francis referred to in Laudato sí as a painful awareness.We should dare, the suggests, to dare to turn what is happening in the world into our own pain, then use that pain to help us decide how we can and must respond.
I told the story at the Daylesford talk of the
two men and the bagel, and noted every time I went past that intersection outside Union Station in DC, I thought about that encounter. And how each time I regret my lack of a response in the moment. It made me painfully aware, to say the least, of both the problem of hunger and poverty and of my own lumbering response to it. Someone commented in the question period that perhaps God's desired response is that I continue to tell the story. True, perhaps, but I don't think God is letting me off the hook quite so easily. Do I really think that Paul wrote letters about the Christian life, but didn't live it and live it immoderately? I can't imagine that Matthew's account of Jesus life was drawn not just out of Mark and the Q source, but out of his own response to Christ's call to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and welcome the stranger.
Nor do I think that whatever response I've made or will make— the giving of alms or working in a shelter or food bank — is sufficient either. Perhaps this is just another way to frame the kenosis, the emptying, we are called to. That whatever we do, we are always emptying ourselves out for the Gospel. Come, all who pass by, pay attention and see, for
All her people groan,
searching for bread;
They give their precious things for food,
to retain the breath of life. — Lamentations 1:11a