Bitter Lamentations                          Gorzkie Żale

Sundays of Lent at 9:30AM

The Church of St. Casimir, Buffalo, NY ─ Lent 2014

The sun, moon, and celestial lights, fade into shameful darkness. Mountain rocks crumble. Angels of heaven weep.  Our hearts are stirred with compassion, as all creation witnesses the execution of the Son of God.

These mystical sentiments surface in the stirring melodies and vivid poetry of the beloved Polish devotion or Lenten or Bitter Laments. The coldest and hardest heart cannot help but be moved from indifference or apathy, to deepest sorrow and love for God, and contrition for our sins.

About one-hundred years before America’s Revolutionary War and Poland’s disappearance from the map of Europe, these sung meditations were first sung in Warsaw’s Church of the Holy Cross, where the famed composer Frederick Chopin later served as organist and Blessed Mary Angela Truszkowska, foundress of the Felician Sisters prayed with her street kids. For centuries they have stood in testimony to a powerful intimacy with Jesus, the Suffering Servant Lord, characteristic of the Polish heritage and experience of faith.

During World War II, Nazi Germany unleashed a vicious campaign of unparalleled death on the citizens of Poland. Torture, death camps and shooting squads awaited Catholic Poles who defended their homes and land.  Hitler’s army systematically bombed and street-by-street dynamited government buildings, historic churches and parishes, national landmarks and monuments of Warsaw, Poland’s capital.   

After ninety percent of the beloved city was leveled, the famous Sursum Corda statue of Church of the Holy Cross lay amidst the rubble (see photo). One of the image’s arms still embraced the cross; the other hand rose above the destruction. Over century the statue stood on the steps of the church where the Lenten Lamentations were first sung. Now, more than ever, Jesus called from the street, through the country’s open wound: Lift up your hearts!

Not many devotions can so bond deep human trauma, loss, pain, and sadness with the bitter gall of Jesus’ passion and the compassion of his Sorrowful Mother. These melodies pray: Come, bitter sorrows, lamentations, wreathe my soul in contemplation…. One short step into Your Passion, cools my flames of desperation.

I welcome you, friends and members of The Church of St. Casimir, to embrace the bi-lingual translation of the song and lyrics of this thundering, universal lament for justice and personal healing. 

Hold these prayer-chants close to your own pain, disappointments, rifts, and misfortune. Apply your own wounds to the miraculous wounds, the curative lashes, the mocking execution and redemptive passion of Jesus.  He will stir your heart to true love of those in our families and neighborhood whose hope has been challenged.  At the same time tears of repentance can move us to confess our insensitivity, our harsh and ruthless judgments of each other.

These meditations can move us from complacency to recognize Jesus in the lonely, the homeless and homebound, the sick and all who hunger for love, joy and hope.  Having walked with him in the desert of forty days of Lenten Lament, united with Jesus, he continues to carry our pain. Therefore, we shall recognize him at the end of the road breaking bread at resurrection table of Emmaus.