Every head is shaved and every beard cut off; every hand is slashed and every waist is covered with sackcloth. – Jeremiah 48:37

Today’s Scripture Reading (March 6, 2014): Jeremiah 48

In March 1861, Queen Victoria’s mother died. Even though the relationship between Victoria and her mother had been a rocky one, Victoria was deeply moved by the event. Victoria was at her mother’s bedside when her mother died, and her feeling of loss was only intensified when she went through her mother’s papers and discovered that her mother had loved her deeply. Victoria’s grief was so intense that she began to disengage from even her own duties. During the following months in 1861 it was her husband, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha that took over her duties, despite the fact that he was ill at the time with a chronic stomach illness. And then the unthinkable happened. At the beginning of December 1861, Prince Albert was diagnosed with typhoid fever. Prince Albert died on December 14, 1861.

And Victoria went into a permanent state of mourning. The queen wore black for the rest of her life. The color indicated the darkness that had invaded her soul. Victoria would reign for another 40 years, but during that time she would rarely appear in public. She almost never stepped foot in London. She shied away from all public appearances, to the point where her reputation and the public image of the Monarchy began to decline. Her advisors begged her to make public appearances, to remind the people that she was still the Queen over the United Kingdom, but she agreed to the appearances reluctantly. The defining feature of her life was no longer that she was the Queen of the United Kingdom and the Empress of India. Her life was now defined by her grief. And all of this earned Victoria the nickname of “The Widow of Windsor.”

Jeremiah speaks in this passage, not of humiliation as some might think, but rather of grief. In the pagan cultures that surrounded Israel, each one of these behaviors is associated with grief. In ancient times, in deep grief men would pluck out the hairs on their heads until they were literally bald, they would shave their beards which were considered the “glory of their faces.” They would cut themselves, especially their arms and hands either with their fingernails or with a knife in an attempt to relieve the pain of their souls. And they would cover themselves with sackcloth, a rough and uncomfortable fabric, indicating to the world that they were in mourning. All of this was an outside view of an inner pain. And all of this is Jeremiah’s message. Moab’s pain will not just be physical, it will be emotional – and it might be that the emotional is more debilitating than the physical.

Sometimes we seem to be tempted to downplay our emotional pain as if it was not real. But it is real – and it needs to be dealt with. The truth is that our emotional pain changes more than just the way we dress, it changes the way that we react to the world. Left unacknowledged, it can remove us from life – and stop us from making the difference in this world that we are intended to make. And that is simply too high a price to pay.       

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Jeremiah 49