The City Sat Solitary

“How lonely sits the city that was full of people! How like a widow has she become, she who was great among the nations!”

— Lamentations 1:1

In the early hours of Saturday, February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched nearly two thousand strikes against the Islamic Republic of Iran. By dawn, the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was dead. By nightfall, the death toll had begun to climb — a number that would eventually exceed twelve hundred Iranian lives within days, including, most hauntingly, one hundred and sixty-five schoolgirls and their teachers in the city of Minab, killed by a strike on their elementary school.

An eight-minute video was released. The word used was ‘obliterate.’ The word used was ‘terror.’ The word used, in a White House statement, was ‘unrelenting force.’ There was no word for the girls.

When confronted with what seems to be a profoundly horrific potential future, I felt compelled to revisit the Book of Lamentations. I have also been rereading a sermon I once gave on the Beatitude “Blessed are those who mourn” — a guest sermon in the summer of 2020, and returned to as an essay in 2023 after a shooter walked into a mall near my home in Texas and opened fire. I did not expect these texts to speak to each other so directly. I was wrong.

Lamentations was written in the wake of the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BC — the burning of the Temple, the forced exile of the people, the end of everything that had seemed permanent and divinely guaranteed. It is five poems of grief, and four of them are written as acrostic poems in the original Hebrew, each verse beginning with a successive letter of the alphabet. Scholars have suggested that the form itself is theological: grief must be expressed from aleph to tav, A to Z, completely and honestly, before anything like healing can begin. There can be no shortcut through mourning.

We have not yet begun to mourn.

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I. The Kings Who Could Not Believe

“The kings of the earth did not believe, nor any of the inhabitants of the world, that foe or enemy could enter the gates of Jerusalem.”

— Lamentations 4:12

Jerusalem was God’s city. The Temple was the dwelling place of the Most High. It was, in the theology of the time, simply inconceivable that it could be breached, burned, and humiliated. The belief in Jerusalem’s inviolability was not merely political or military — it was metaphysical. And it was wrong.

America has carried a similar conviction into the world. We have named it exceptionalism. We have built aircraft carriers named after our presidents and military budgets larger than the next ten nations combined, and we have told ourselves and the world that our power is not merely dominant but righteous — that history has chosen us, that we are, in some essential way, immune to the consequences that lesser civilizations have always borne.

Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann has written at length about what he calls the “royal consciousness” — the ideology of empire that insulates power from critique and anesthetizes the moral imagination. The royal consciousness cannot engage with suffering because to do so would be to admit vulnerability. It reaches instead for the language of strength, of resolve, of victory. It mistakes motion for direction and force for wisdom.

We have been living inside the royal consciousness for a very long time. From the invasion of Iraq in 2003, built on fabricated intelligence and a catastrophically misguided theory of democratic transformation, to the twenty-year war in Afghanistan that ended in a helicopter departure from a rooftop — to Libya, to Syria, to the drone campaigns that have killed civilians across a dozen countries with little legal authorization and even less accountability — the arc of American foreign policy in the Middle East has been a story of hubris meeting consequence, over and over, without the institutional capacity to learn.

Now we have struck Iran. We have assassinated a head of state. We have killed schoolgirls. And the White House has described it as unrelenting force.

The kings of the earth could not believe. Neither, apparently, can we.

II. Your Prophets Have Seen For You False Visions

“Your prophets have seen for you false and deceptive visions; they have not exposed your iniquity to restore your fortunes, but have seen for you oracles that are false and misleading.”

— Lamentations 2:14

The poet of Lamentations is not only angry at Babylon. He is angry at the prophets — the religious and political leaders of Jerusalem who told the people what they wanted to hear. They prophesied peace when there was no peace. They assured the city of its security when the walls were already crumbling. They offered oracles calibrated not to truth but to comfort, not to wisdom but to power.

This verse arrests me because it is not describing a fringe phenomenon. It is describing the mainstream. The false prophets were not obscure cranks. They were the credentialed voices, the respected figures, the ones who ate at the king’s table.

Who are their American counterparts? They are the bipartisan foreign policy establishment — the think tanks and the television experts and the congressional committee chairs — who have for twenty-five years provided intellectual scaffolding for the idea that military force is a credible instrument of political transformation in the Middle East. They assured us that the Iraq War would be a quick operation, that the “mission accomplished” banner was real, that Afghanistan could be nation-built, that regime change in Libya would produce stability, that arming various factions in Syria was a coherent strategy.

Not all of them were dishonest. Some believed what they said. But the Book of Lamentations does not require conscious malice to identify a false prophet. It requires only this: that the prophet failed to expose the iniquity, failed to call the people back from the path that led to destruction. The test of a true prophet, in the Hebrew tradition, is not eloquence or credentials. It is whether the word they speak leads the community toward truth or away from it.

By that measure, there have been very few true prophets in the American foreign policy conversation in the twenty-first century. There have been dissenting voices — some of them quite prescient — but they have been treated with the contempt that powerful institutions reserve for those who challenge their narratives. We did not want the oracle of truth. We wanted the oracle that confirmed our own power.

Lamentations tells us how that story ends.

III. Should Women Eat the Fruit of Their Womb?

“My eyes are spent with weeping; my stomach churns; my bile is poured out to the ground because of the destruction of the daughter of my people, because infants and babies faint in the streets of the city… Look, O LORD, and see! With whom have you dealt thus? Should women eat the fruit of their womb, the children of their tender care?”

— Lamentations 2:11, 2:20

One of the most striking features of the Book of Lamentations — and one of the most overlooked by those who approach it purely as a theological document — is its insistence on naming the specific suffering of children. The poet does not allow the catastrophe to remain abstract. He does not speak only of the fall of the city in geopolitical terms. He speaks of infants fainting in the streets. He drags the eye, mercilessly, toward the children.

I cannot write past the schoolgirls of Minab.

On the day of the strikes, in the city of Minab in southeastern Iran, a strike hit an elementary school. One hundred and sixty-five children and their teachers were killed. An Al Jazeera investigation found evidence suggesting the targeting may have been deliberate, though the United States and Israel denied involvement. Whether it was deliberate or a catastrophic error, the children are equally dead. Their names are not in the White House statement. Their faces are not on the cable news chyrons in America. They are the infants fainting in the streets of the city — present in the ancient poem, largely absent from our modern reckoning.

The poet of Lamentations understood something that modern media and political systems are specifically designed to prevent us from understanding: that the moral weight of a war is not measured by the intentions of those who wage it, or the strategic objectives they pursue, or the geopolitical theory that justifies it. It is measured, in the end, by what happens to the children.

Look, O LORD, and see. The poet is not merely describing devastation. He is demanding that God look — that divine attention be directed at the unbearable specificity of human suffering. It is an act of moral witness. It is what we are called to do.

IV. You Have Wrapped Yourself in a Cloud

“Though I call and cry for help, he shuts out my prayer… You have wrapped yourself with a cloud so that no prayer can pass through.”

— Lamentations 3:8, 3:44

Here, at the center of the Book of Lamentations, we arrive at the spiritual crisis that lies beneath the political one. What does it mean to be a person of faith in an age when the machinery of war operates in the middle of the night, announced by an eight-minute video, without debate or declaration — and when the institutions we built to prevent exactly this kind of catastrophe seem inadequate to the scale of the moment?

Theologian Kathleen O’Connor, in her landmark study Lamentations and the Tears of the World, argues that this book models what she calls “trauma theology” — a way of holding faith that does not rush to resolution, does not offer cheap comfort, does not paper over the darkness with reassuring phrases. The poet of Lamentations does not pretend that God is clearly present and clearly good. He says, frankly, that God has wrapped Himself in a cloud. He says that the prayer does not pass through.

This is not atheism. It is something harder than atheism. It is faith that continues in the absence of felt divine presence — faith that insists on crying out even when there is no answer. It is the faith of the Psalms of lament, which the Church has sometimes tried to domesticate and which the Synagogue has preserved more honestly. Lamentations has its liturgical home in Judaism on Tisha B’Av, the day of mourning for the Temple’s destruction — a day that insists: the community gathers not to celebrate, not to receive comfort, but to mourn. Together. Completely. Without rushing to the exit.

For those of us watching this war unfold — watching the strikes and the retaliations and the dead children and the surging oil prices and the congressional debates about war powers that no one seemed to think were necessary before the bombs were dropped — there is something that feels very much like a cloud between our prayers and heaven. Why does this happen? Why are the institutions we built to prevent exactly this kind of war apparently unable to prevent it? Why do the voices of conscience seem so marginal against the machinery of force? Why does the suffering of Iranian civilians register so faintly in the conversation of the nation that caused it? Why is the suffering of Israeli, Iraqi, or Lebanese civilians so easily silenced or ignored in the mosaic of political power and desire for war?

Lamentations does not answer these questions. It insists on asking them. This, O’Connor suggests, is itself a theological act — a refusal to let the suffering of the world be normalized or explained away. In a culture that moves relentlessly toward the next news cycle, this refusal is almost countercultural. The poet of Lamentations does not move on. He stays.

V. The Steadfast Love — But Carefully

“The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.”

— Lamentations 3:22–23

This is the passage that has been set to music, quoted in sermons, printed on devotional objects. And it is genuinely in Lamentations — genuinely present, genuinely meant. But we must read it where it actually is, surrounded by what actually surrounds it.

It appears in the middle of chapter three, which opens with a cry of absolute desolation: “I am the man who has seen affliction under the rod of his wrath; he has driven and brought me into darkness without any light.” The passage of hope is flanked on both sides by grief. And the book itself does not end here. It continues through chapter five, which ends with an unanswered question.

The ember of hope is real. But it is an ember, not a sunrise. To read these verses as a simple declaration of triumphant faith is to wrench them from their context — to make Lamentations say something it deliberately does not say. This is, in fact, a form of the same false prophecy the book condemns: the oracle of comfort that protects us from the truth we need to hear.

What the passage offers, situated where it is, is not resolution. It is a possibility held with trembling hands — the barely-surviving conviction that the universe is not finally indifferent, that the arc of history is not nothing, held by someone who is simultaneously drowning in grief. That is a different thing from easy faith. It is a more honest, more costly, and ultimately more sustaining thing.

There is reason to hope. But the hope is not that we will be spared consequences. The hope is that honest reckoning, genuine lament, and the hard work of collective repentance can, over time, change the moral direction of a people. That has happened before in history. It could happen again. It has not happened yet. Will we see the ember catch flame in November when we go to the polls? Or, will our collective passivity allow it to be squelched before it can roar into a flame of renewal?

VI. Let Us Test and Examine Our Ways

“Let us test and examine our ways, and return to the LORD!”

— Lamentations 3:40

This is the only verse in Lamentations that issues a direct communal call to action. After the grief, after the rebuke of the false prophets, after the honest acknowledgment of divine silence, the poet issues a summons: examine your ways.

It is not a partisan call. Lamentations does not blame only the current king. It reckons with generations of accumulated failure — the prophets who came before, the alliances made with foreign powers, the inequities within the community that weakened it from the inside. “Our fathers sinned, and are no more; and we bear their iniquities,” the poet writes in chapter five. The inheritance is long. The accounting must be honest and broad.

The American reckoning that Lamentations calls us toward is not a simple partisan condemnation of this administration or that one. It is a deeper examination of a national foreign policy culture that has, for a quarter century, consistently chosen force over diplomacy, regime change over patient engagement, the short political cycle over the long moral horizon. It is an examination of a media and political culture that makes it easier to launch a war than to ask whether it is just. It is an examination of ourselves — of the ways we have accepted the normalization of violence at a distance, the abstraction of civilian casualties into “collateral damage,” the treatment of non-American lives as less legible, less grieva ble, less real than our own.

John Wesley, preaching on the Beatitude “Blessed are those who mourn,” taught that the call to mourning was above all a call to mourn our collective sin — because it is through that recognition that we know to take action in the new reality of our reckoning. Mourning, in Wesley’s reading, is not the end of the road. It is the moment at which the road opens up. We cannot repent of what we refuse to grieve. We cannot change what we are not willing to feel.

Congress debating a war powers resolution. This is something. But the examination Lamentations demands is not merely procedural. It is moral. It is spiritual. It is the kind of reckoning that a community undertakes not because it will immediately change the situation — the children in Minab are not coming back — but because it insists on being a community that knows the difference between right and wrong, and is willing to say so out loud, in the public square, regardless of political cost.

The prophets of ancient Israel did not speak because they expected to be heard. They spoke because silence was not permitted to them.

VII. Blessed Are Those Who Mourn

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”

— Matthew 5:4

The river that flows through the Book of Lamentations does not end in the Hebrew Bible. It runs forward through the centuries and emerges, startlingly, in the Sermon on the Mount.

When the Gospel of Matthew records Jesus opening his greatest sermon with nine makarisms — declarations about human flourishing1 — he is drawing from precisely the same well as the poet of Lamentations. The Greek word makarios in Matthew’s text translates the Hebrew ‘asre found in the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures. In the Old Testament wisdom literature, ‘asre appears forty-five times — always as a statement about what constitutes true flourishing within God’s covenant. In every case, the Septuagint renders it makarios. This is not a coincidence of translation. It is a thread of theological continuity running from the acrostic laments of ancient Jerusalem to the hillside in Galilee. Lamentations and the Sermon on the Mount are drinking from the same stream.

To understand “Blessed are those who mourn” as a simple comfort — God will console those who grieve — is to miss the force of what Jesus is saying. In the context of First Century Judea, where Roman imperial power controlled every aspect of daily life and the priestly classes enforced a rigid social hierarchy based on adherence to the Law, the Beatitudes were not platitudes. They were a counter-narrative. The meek shall inherit? Not in Rome’s accounting. The poor in spirit receive the kingdom? Not according to the Pharisees. The mourners are makarios? No empire has ever said that. The language Jesus uses is prophetic imagination at its most radical — a direct challenge to the royal consciousness that insulates power from the claims of suffering.

In this subversive key, the Beatitude speaks directly to our moment. When the machinery of American military power describes the killing of schoolgirls as “unrelenting force,” when the political class reaches reflexively for the language of strength and resolve, to choose mourning — to insist on naming the dead, on feeling the weight of what has been done — is itself a political act. It is the act that empires have always feared most. It is the act that breaks the royal consciousness open.

But there is something deeper here than political resistance. The concept of makarios — the true, full weight of what Jesus means by “blessed” — is not merely consolation. It is a statement about the conditions for human flourishing. Jesus is saying that the willingness to mourn — honestly, completely, at cost to yourself — is not a diminishment. It is the path toward the life you were made for. This is not the world’s account of what makes a person fortunate or powerful or secure. It is a counter-account, rooted in the ancient Hebrew wisdom tradition that Lamentations itself embodies.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing in The Cost of Discipleship under the long shadow of another empire he would ultimately give his life resisting, captured the full moral architecture of this mourning:

By ‘mourning’ Jesus, of course, means doing without what the world calls peace and prosperity: He means refusing to be in tune with the world or to accommodate itself to its standards. Such men mourn for the world, for its guilt, its fate and its fortune…. The disciple-community does not shake off sorrow as though it were no concern of its own, but willingly bears it. And in this way they show how close are the bonds which bind them to the rest of humanity.

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

Willingly bears it. This is not passive grief. This is an active, costly, chosen act of solidarity — with the schoolgirls of Minab, with the American service members who died in retaliatory strikes, with the Iranian families who fled their cities as ghost towns in the predawn hours of a war they did not ask for. To mourn them, to insist on mourning them, is to bear witness to their humanity in the face of every institutional force designed to abstract and minimize it.

Paul, writing to the Galatians, put it plainly: “Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.” The law of Christ, in this reading, is not a legal code. It is a practice of solidarity. It is the willingness to take on the weight of another’s suffering as your own. It is, in its deepest form, what Lamentations has been asking of us from the beginning.

The makarios insight — the deepest gift of this Beatitude — is that this mourning is not ultimately a path to defeat. It is the path to flourishing. Not the false flourishing of imperial triumph, not the brittle confidence of the royal consciousness, but the genuine human flourishing that comes from solidarity, from moral clarity, from the courage to name what is true even when it is unbearable. Lamentations asks the question. The Sermon on the Mount offers the demanding, costly, life-giving answer.

VIII. Why Do You Forget Us Forever?

“Why do you forget us forever, why do you forsake us for so many days? Restore us to yourself, O LORD, that we may be restored! Renew our days as of old — unless you have utterly rejected us, and you remain exceedingly angry with us.”

— Lamentations 5:20–22

The Book of Lamentations ends here. Not in triumph. Not in resolution. Not even in confident faith. It ends with a prayer that trails off into uncertainty — unless you have utterly rejected us. The possibility is left open. The answer is not given.

Scholars have puzzled over this ending for centuries. The rabbinical tradition developed a custom of repeating verse 21 — “Restore us to yourself, O LORD, that we may be restored!” — after verse 22, so that the liturgical reading would not close in despair. But the text itself does not offer that rescue. The ancient poet refused to falsify the ending. It closes in the dark, with the question still open, because that was the truth of the moment.

This is the most theologically honest ending in all of scripture. Because there is no guarantee. The arc of the moral universe does not automatically bend toward justice. It bends because people bend it — because communities refuse to accept catastrophe as the final word, because prophetic voices continue to cry out even when no one is listening, because the ember of conscience refuses to be completely extinguished.

We are watching a war unfold in real time. We are watching children die. We are watching a world order fracture. We are watching the institutions of democratic accountability struggle to keep pace with the machinery of unilateral force. And we are asking the oldest question human beings know how to ask: Why have you forsaken us?

Lamentations does not answer that question. But the Sermon on the Mount does — not with comfort, not with resolution, but with a call. Blessed are those who mourn. Not: blessed are those who will eventually stop mourning. Not: blessed are those who mourn but move on quickly. Blessed are those who mourn — who choose, in the face of empire’s preferred language of strength and victory, to insist on grief as a form of fidelity, as a form of resistance, as the first necessary act of any genuine moral renewal.

We must mourn before we can act. We must lament honestly before we can repent honestly. We must let the grief go from aleph to tav — the full alphabet of our sorrow — before we can begin to speak something new into the silence. This is not weakness. The ancient poet knew it. John Wesley knew it. Dietrich Bonhoeffer knew it, in a prison cell, with the full weight of history pressing down. And Jesus, standing in the same Hebrew wisdom tradition that gave us Lamentations, said it plainly at the beginning of his greatest sermon:

The mourners are the flourishing ones.

It has never sounded less like the world’s wisdom. It has rarely been more urgently true.

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The city sits solitary. The children are gone. The prayer has not yet passed through the cloud.

We are still in Lamentations.