Hebrew Bible and Christian Scriptures

I had just come back from the gym and was getting a little breakfast when the first airplane crashed into the towers on September 11, 2001. The metaphor that grabs me most about that day is fire; imagine the temperature that it took to melt the infrastructure of those buildings. I vividly remember thinking to myself “how does one forgive a person for committing such a heinous and hateful act.
I taught courses at the Institute for Black Catholic Studies hosted by Xavier University in New Orleans for several years. On the one hand I listened intently as various news agencies described the event around hurricane Katrina. On the other hand, I tried to distance myself lest I be overcome with grief. Like many post-moderns in this “global village” the access to news in this “flat world” means one must carefully negotiate between empathy and distance. The hurricane brought the flood. Like the biblical account of the flood there were winners and losers. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson blame the hurricane on the New Orleans lifestyle. They relented when mainstream America mouth agape and stunned by the callous use of biblical historiography retaliated with denunciations. The reaction to Katrina and the subsequent aid dramatized issues of race and class in ways that many Americans found quite disturbing.
This week the earthquake in Haiti once again reminds us of natural disasters and human frailty and courage.
The fire and the flood, the human caused trauma and the natural disaster shape the lives of women and men living in North America but does that change biblical studies? Kathleen M. O’Connor (Lamentations & the Tears of the World) and Tod Linafelt (Surviving Lamentations: Catastrophe, Lament, and Protest in the Afterlife of a Biblical Book) have done this for the book of Lamentations. I wonder what other books in the area of biblical studies examine hermeneutics after these sorts of disasters.

So often, it is difficult for our post-modern culture to grasp some of the feelings that are conveyed within the poetry of the Old Testament, especially the laments found in the book of Lamentations.  But, how easily we forget… Here are a few (very few) of the reasons that we should be able to better connect with the author of Lamentations: *  We have faced loss as a nation, as well as individuals. *  While we are not proud of all of our decisions, we have seen the ripple effects of child labor as well as enslavement. *  We can vividly remember the feelings we have had upon seeing our nation attacked.

Therefore, it should not be that difficult for us to put ourselves in the place of those who were exiled.  Their city and the Temple were destroyed.  No doubt, they lost people they deeply cared about while they were also attempting to process the reality of their world being literally turned upside down.

Perhaps it is because we live in such a fast-paced world, or perhaps it is because we are so self-centered.  Or, perhaps it is for an entirely different reason.  Yet, we cannot deny the fact that as a nation we move-on rather quickly and then we are shocked to realize how little time has passed between our present and past traumatic events.  One day, it can seem as if there is nothing familiar left in our lives… then suddenly, we find the gaps  have been filled and we can’t imagine life any other way.

Sometimes, I wonder if we will need “to find a souvenir, just to prove the world was here”. (quote from 99 Red Balloons)

99 Red Balloons song & lyrics (as played by Goldfinger): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ko8SDv0CsiM