Feast of St. Irenaeus

Today, the Catholic church celebrates the Feast of St. Irenaeus. He was a bishop of Lyon in the second century. St. Irenaeus lived in a period of relatively peaceful time between massive persecutions from the Roman Empire. Therefore, he was able to devote his time in refuting the heresy of the day: Gnosticism.
The reading today is chapter 2 of Lamentations which consists only of 5 poems. The first four poems are acrostic. That is they are made up of multiples of 22 verses, each beginning with the 22 Hebrew alphabets in sequence! Lamentations is one of the 5 Megillot, liturgical scrolls to be read in special days in Judaism. It is read for communal mourning. Nowadays when individualism is prevalent, it is not easy to appreciate the emotions of sufferings in a community. We can only experience such emotions in times of great disasters like the recent Sichuan earthquake. But even for us in Hong Kong, it is difficult to share the emotions unless we happen to be touring in Sichuan. We can only see them in TV footages.
Lamentations is not about natural disasters. Rather, it is about war atrocities. The Jews saw Yahweh turn against them and butcher them without mercy! Of course, they saw this as a punishment for their rebellion against Yahweh. Yet, when their very Saviour turned against them in blind rage, it was really too much to bear.
The Lord has destroyed without mercy all the habitations of Jacob;
in his wrath he has broken down the strongholds of the daughter of Judah;
he has brought down to the ground in dishonor the kingdom and its rulers (Lamentations 2:2).
In our time of economic prosperity, it is heart-renting to read of the plights of famine, of young children starving to death on the bosom of their mothers. In time of hardship, the poor and the weak, without any security cushion, are the first to bear the brunt, the hardest hit.
My eyes are spent with weeping; my soul is in tumult;
my heart is poured out in grief because of the destruction of the daughter of my people,
because infants and babes faint in the streets of the city
They cry to their mothers, "Where is bread and wine?"
as they faint like wounded men in the streets of the city,
as their life is poured out on their mothers' bosom. (Lamentations 2:11-12).

My Advocate, like a summer gnat, it is unconvincing for me to talk about the chill of winter. You are the Spirit of Love. Awake in us the awarenss that we are one with each other on this planet. Grant us empathy so that we may be able to share genuinely the sufferings of our neighbours. Extinguish the selfishness in our hearts so that we will be able to contribute generously to relieve the sufferings of our brothers. Amen.