The God of the Signs - The Sign of Lament
[Editor's note: This is part of a series by Corban Klug, author of A Light in the Darkness. This series will be published in its entirety here at Every Square Inch.]
How the Voice of Creation Teaches the Heart to Believe
The seventh sign of cosmic wisdom evident in the Book of Creation (and the mournful counterpart to the Signs of Beauty and Love) is the Sign of Lament. Where Love is the universal patron of meaning and essential human satisfaction, Lament stalks the graveyard of Love’s shattered hopes and collects the tear-stained fragments of Beauty’s torn garments. The eternally tragic face of Lament may be observed in the weeping of a mother holding the lifeless body of her stillborn infant. Its elegy is sung by the family sifting through the rubble of a home devastated by wildfire or ripped apart by cyclonic winds. The tortured countenance of Lament transfixes us in the televised wailing of a crowd surveying the blood-splattered carnage of school-bound children dismembered by a bus bomb. Lament is that convulsive verbal flooding that occurs when the dark river of sorrow overflows its private banks and finds ready publicity in piercing and terrible sound. No matter the language a man speaks, the groans that, by some mysterious emotive volcanism, emanate from his broken heart when he gazes for the first time into the sightless eyes of his dead wife require no translation; all persons, irrespective of race, creed, age and education, understand with pristine clarity the absolute propriety of his sorrow.
Such is, in fact, the first lesson taught by the Sign of Lament—that grief, and its compatriot, anger, are entirely proper responses to the desecration of Beauty and Love by the jaws of violence and chance. With surgical precision, Lament opens the wound of the world to the bone, exposing as a sham the glib pretense and pseudo-optimistic dissimulation that man fabricates to hide the cancer at the heart of his fallen experience. Where society flees the scene of torment like rats from water, Lament embraces the unquestionable righteousness of pain in the face of grievous and inexplicable wrong. Lament screams over a pool of innocent blood that not only are the hands of man stained by wickedness but, more, that the very ground beneath his feet is cursed by some primordial imperfection. Lament weeps over the ravaging of life and zealously proclaims that all is not as it should be; that time was not intended to mark the process of decay and dying; that ocean breezes and waves upon the sea were not meant to ravage coastal villages by hurricane and tsunami; that man was not intended to victimize his fellow man, abuse his women or torment his children. Lament teaches the heart lanced by sorrow the indelible lesson that sorrow is eminently justified. Indeed, the instruction of Lament is so visible in the face of Creation that even Nature itself is observed to “groan” in the wake of disturbances in original harmony. How else but in the language of pain can one describe the tortured sound of cracking tree limbs in the vicious winds of a tornado? How else can one understand the scurrying fright of animals prior to a severe thunderstorm or the stark and utter desolation of once fertile fields scarred by blight or drought? What Paul wrote in the eighth chapter of Romans the Sign of Lament confirms, namely that “the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.”
Yet, too, the Sign of Lament knows a less abrasive presence. Like a gentle salve, Lament teaches the broken heart a way to survive its own pain. In compelling man to deride the senseless chaos and driving him to his knees, Lament forces the heart into a catharsis of grief by which it may honor all it has lost yet acquire fresh purpose for a continued existence. Thus, more than embodying that unique paroxysm of pain evoked by the sudden appearance of natural and human evil, Lament marks out the wilderness path by which the heart beset by tragedy may rise again from the ashes to hope anew in the sweet mercies of Beauty and Love. In purveying such hope, moreover, the Sign of Lament not only reinforces the absolute dignity of living but also adumbrates the prospect of ultimate divine restoration. For if a human being is scandalized by the interloping reign of disorder and madness, would not also the One by whose creative Genius the cosmos was beneficently designed lament the disarray of depravity into which the world has fallen and wish to apply, in redemptive fashion, that same Genius to emancipate Creation from its slavery to strife? Such is a postulate even more pressing than the proverbial grief-stricken question “Why?” For liberation, not mere explanation, is the answer the wounded heart truly seeks.
Of course, in similar fashion to the reckoning foreshadowed by the Sign of Conscience, the Sign of Lament does not logically require the divine gift of cosmic redemption. Nevertheless, the Sign of Lament does stir the soul of man to yearn for final deliverance from the malignant reign of melancholy, the omnipresent perils of disaster, and humankind’s longstanding addictions to callousness, injustice and perversion. As it turns out, however, the Book of Creation does not leave such yearning without a reasonable ground for expectation. For, where, beneath the illumination of the first seven Signs, the idea of restoration is merely aspirational, its practical promise is revealed by the Light of the eighth and last Sign, the Sign of the Heavens.
Next time: The Sign of the Heavens
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