The Lamb's Lament
I shall say only that heaven must have led me here today to console me, if he who is unfortunate can attain consolation from seeing another even more so…
The Man Who Eats Grass: O how those sweet voices of those happy students crush my spirit! And only because they are so good and so gleeful as the plan their sunny days. Because they make me search my suffering past for some fruit, some lesson, some purpose as to why I could not, and can not, be like them. Why I had to live what I lived.
But each time I mine my life for something I’ve won that they lack, I come up empty. It seems all I’ve learned through torment, insanity, and cruel suffering, they’ve learned through calm grace, by singing teachers and vibrant activity, by riding on the backs of angels!
Why, God, do you make one happy and pious from birth, and throw another the other into terrible waves? To be beat around for decades, only to wash up on some empty island, so they can live in lonely strangeness? To be all alone with scraps of petty wisdom that all others know simply as common sense.
Woe is me! Woe are those who suffer for its own sake! Woe is Job and all his wormed skin and ruptured boils!
Will you say suffering purifies? Then is my soul so corrupt that I needed such cleansing?
What is the source of my trouble!? What is it that I fail to see? Am I really still so distorted by sin that I cannot be happy? Then tell me! Correct me! Where is your hand of judgement? Answer my questions and console me! Have you felt what I felt? Do you feel what I feel now?
O God, I’m sorry. I see now that my wretched soul longs only for the perfect sacrifice. Most innocent, least deserving, how did you suffer? They say you never once lost your beatitude, but surely it was not in bliss alone, for you cried out twice. What was happening in you then? I cannot comprehend it. Why, if your better reason staid steady and fixed in knowledge, did you cry? What happened, O God?
O, who am I to ask? Surely no one has suffered more than you. Even now I cannot deny it. And never will I have the strength to drink from your cup and to know for myself. Who am I to lament! In your suffering you saved us all. In your suffering you console me now. Then, let me gather my cross, and let my peace be the peace that I give to others.
They tell the story of a wise man who one day reached a point of such poverty and misery that his only nourishment came from eating the grasses he picked.
Can there be anyone else, he said to himself, poorer and sadder than I?
And when he turned his head he found the answer, for there was another wise man gathering up the blades that he’d discarded.
— Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Life’s a Dream (trans. Michael Kidd)