Status Updates From A Liturgy of Grief: A Pasto...

For those who grieve, but not for the regular hearers, the old story is ever new, always filling their consciousness and needing to be told once more, as intensely as it was the first time. Patience is the prime virtue that empathy requires. -59

The first half of the poem [Lam. 1:1-6] will be increasingly marked by this spiritual agenda. Its purpose is to foster a spirit of repentance and confession among these prodigal sons and daughters left in the land. -38

This book of five poems, in the form of five chapters, certainly responds to its calamity in terms of tears, talk, and time. It responds to deep sorrow by bringing to the surface what lies buried far down, originally beyond tears and beyond words. -2