Lamentations

The cross and the human condition.

The human condition at times requires weighing of alternatives tremendously at odds with each other. The intensity of the pain may be said to overflow and transform into a defensive intellectualisation after the initial denial.

The most famous of them is the one of Christ on the cross 'oh lord, oh lord why have you forsaken me'?

Beyond the theological explanations one can say even the most powerful, son of God himself had to endure the suffering and feel that things were beyond his capacity. Jesus took it upon himself to bear the cross and be crucified. Yet at the actual hour he out of that extreme sense of being abandoned cried thus.

"I have finished my race" so goes the prayers at the funeral and in the run up to death one has to encounter many such situations where doing one thing vs another is weighed heavily. Psychologists would call them approach- approach conflict where both the outcomes are desirable, apporach-avoidance conflict where the outcome has both good and bad consequences and avaoidance- avoidance conflict where two outcomes are both repulsive. These are however less philosophical than the true lamentations.

Hamlet's quintessential 'To be or not to be that is the question' is another one of those famous laments in history captured by Shakespeare in his play of the same name.

Arjuna faces an extreme confusion and moral dilemma about fighting his own cousins, Krishna explains to Arjuna his duties as a warrior and prince and elaborates on different philosophies, with examples and analogies.

In the bible there is a book of lamentations said to be about the fall of the city Jerusalem in which 'sharp pains of defeat had dulled into the chronic ache of captivity'.

Amidst such an individual crisis may sound less but nevertheless to the one who bears it is real and inevitable from which either one comes out or is forever doomed either way transformed. 'Oh God, Oh God why have you forsaken me' echoes in everyman's life borne in silence no one else interested and no place to run away to.....