Lamentations is traditionally ascribed to Jeremiah, written in the smoking aftermath of Jerusalem's fall in 586 BC. The temple is rubble. Children are dead in the streets. The covenant people have watched the unthinkable happen. Five acrostic poems sit in the wreckage and refuse to look away. And then, in the exact middle of the middle poem — the structural heart of the book — the poet says this. Not as a denial of the grief, but from underneath it. Lamentations is the only book in the canon where this sentence could carry its full weight.

From the writers we read together

Brennan Manning

Franciscan priest and writer (1934-2013), author of The Ragamuffin Gospel

Manning wrote out of his own ruins. He was an alcoholic priest who relapsed publicly, repeatedly, and never stopped insisting that the gospel was for the man he actually was on the worst morning of his life. His whole project was to take the word chesed and translate it into the language of someone who has just woken up ashamed. The mercies are new every morning, he kept saying, because every morning is a new morning when you need them.

Lamentations 3 sits exactly where Manning sat. The poet is not in a worship service; he is in a war zone he helped cause. And the line he reaches for is not I have turned things around but his mercies are new this morning. That is the only sentence available to a person who has spent the night being honest about himself. Manning's gift to the church was to remind us that this verse is not for spiritually tidy people. It is for the rest of us, which is all of us.