Sorrow Like My Sorrow
This week I have been listening1 to a musical arrangement of Lamentations 1:122 called O Vos Omnes:
Latin
O vos ómnes qui transítis per víam, atténdite et vidéte: Si est dólor símilis sícut dólor méus. Atténdite, univérsi pópuli, et vidéte dolórem méum. Si est dólor símilis sícut dólor méus.
English
O all you who walk by on the road, pay attention and see: if there be any sorrow like my sorrow. Pay attention, all people, and look at my sorrow: if there be any sorrow like my sorrow.
Lamentations to Christian Lent
O Vos Omnes was often set, especially in the sixteenth century, as part of the Tenebrae Responsories for Holy Saturday. I find the application of this passage from Lamentations to the events of Holy Week to be powerful.
The song had its purpose once as a lamentation for the destruction of Jerusalem, again as a help for faithful Israelites in later generations going through sorrows, and ultimately as a song for the Church to sing to the Bridegroom, with tears of love for His Passion. We hear Jeremiah’s words repeated, not wailing for the temporal city and Solomon’s temple but for much greater sorrow. The temple’s destruction brought much wailing, but something greater than the temple is here.
The haunting and slow melody invites us to hear the words of lament on the lips of Mary, the Godbearer3: standing at the foot of our Lord’s cross while crowds mock Him. Jeremiah's rhetorical invitation to “pay attention and see” becomes an invitation to join the Blessed Mother and the Beloved Disciple in looking upon the most terrible and most wonderful thing in the world: Jesus Christ on the Cross of our redemption.
Pay attention, all people, and look at my sorrow: if there be any sorrow like my sorrow.
Artistic Sense of Sacred Scripture
The literal sense of the Scripture is binding, factual, and divinely inspired. But there is also a spiritual sense that crowns the text with a supernatural dignity. It is possible to fall into a sort of biblicism that actually approaches a denial of the divine authorship of the Scriptures. This is something that I think bible-belt Christianity has sometimes fallen into, and is something that I wrote about in Be Thyself our Break of Day.
The singing of a scriptural text often opens it to richer and deeper interpretation. It places it in a context that is both immediate and transcendent. The listener is invited to imagine himself in the person of the cantor and to enter more fully into the Word of our God.
When, in historic liturgies, Holy, Holy, Holy from Isaiah 6 is sung in connection with the Eucharist, that passage from Isaiah finds a place of honor, and we are invited to see it more deeply. It is ‘out of context’ in one sense, yes— but in another sense, Isaiah’s words have found their true and ultimate context. When the words of the centurion are made the prayer of every Christian, Lord I am not worthy… we are recognizing that Sacred Scripture is more than a normal historical account (although, it certainly is a historical account). Those centurion’s words, which our Lord commended, become for us a spiritual treasure: mystical, heavenly, and supernatural.
Stabat Mater
When the sorrows of Jeremiah over Jerusalem are made the sorrows of Mary over her Divine Son, those sorrows are brought closer to us. Those sorrows become our own, that "we might share His sufferings...4", and that we might "be wretched, and mourn, and weep5" those healthful tears that poured from the face of the most favored Mary, the beloved John, and the penitent Peter.
A single tear shed at the remembrance of the Passion of Jesus is worth more than a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, or a year of fasting on bread and water. —attrib. St. Augustine6
Let us place ourselves into those moments in the coming months. Let us hear ourselves in St. Thomas’ distressed words in the upper room, “Lord, we do not know where you are going! How can we know the way?7” Let us at least follow the soldiers at a distance that have taken Christ away. Let us hear the rooster crowing. Let us place ourselves at the most terrible and awesome place of all:
At the Cross her station keeping, Stood the mournful Mother weeping, Close to Jesus to the last.
Let us hear this dirge, this lament, lifted from the pangs of the heart of the God-bearer, inviting all to look on the Suffering Servant, the Way, the Truth, and the Life, the King of the Jews, rejected and crucified by His own people.
Listen to the lamentation to contemplate His sorrows. To be scandalized. To stumble over this stumbling block. To be confounded. To experience this sign of contradiction. To marvel. To lose sleep. To be restless, until we find rest in Him. To be brought low. To lose and gain everything for the sake of the Crucified One.
We lament for Zion, for the dwelling place of our God, for she has experienced untold suffering. A sword has pierced her heart also. But joy comes for her in the morning.
Rejoice, O daughter of Zion. Laetare, alleluia; Quia quem meruisti portare, alleluia…
If you enjoyed this post, check out these where we follow more old covenenat themes into the New Song of Christ’s kingdom:
This version from Clamavi De Profundis, and this from The Cambridge Singers.
“Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow which was brought upon me which the Lord inflicted on the day of his fierce anger.” Lamentation 1:12
For another meditation on the typology here, see Handmaiden, Headcrusher.
Philippians 3:10-12
James 4:9
I have not been able to find the source for this in St. Augustine.
John 14:5. See my post You Know the Way.
A rich and deeply thoughtful essay. To think long and drink deep at the ever spring of God’s Word, to let our spirits rise in holy wonder for we are overcome with his mercies.