March 31/Wednesday of Holy Week
Insult has broken my heart, and I am weak, I looked for sympathy, but there was none; for consolers, not one could I find.
I will praise the name of God in song, and I will glorify him with thanksgiving. ~ Ps 69.21, 31
It is the rare person who will not have succumbed to “COVID despair” at some point in the past year. We have endured a long, enforced loneliness; at times it has been a struggle to hold on to hope as we have been isolated from family members, from colleagues, from the gym attendants and waiters and grocery cashiers whose names we might not have known but who were part of our daily rounds. Even the less isolated have experienced the bleak moment, the occasional dark day. Such despair is not limited, of course, to our current circumstances; it is endemic to mortal life. The nineteenth-century British Jesuit and poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, gave voice to such human grief and anguish in his “terrible sonnets,” which probe the depths of his desolation over God’s absence. He cries into the void, “No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,/ More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring./ Comforter, where, where is your comforting?” Like his Victorian counterpart, our psalmist experiences the pain of isolation and heartbreak, and in his cry, he, too, seeks divine help in salving that pain. Hopkins finds no ostensible comfort within the meters of his sonnet, but the psalmist, by surrendering his pangs and forepangs to the wide and merciful embrace of God, finds himself lifted to a place of trusting confidence from which he can praise the Lord. In the very act of lamentation, of naming our despair, we often find comfort. As we, too, bemoan our pitiable plight to our Lord, we sense that he is with us, comforting us, even at our darkest moments.
Compassionate God, Assuage my grief, ease my pain, and comfort me in my times of sadness. Amen.
For today’s readings, click here: https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/033121.cfm
To hear The Sixteen sing Palestrina’s “Improperium expectavit cor meum” (My heart expected reproach and misery), click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiEA8lCfM34
