Lament in a Time of Rage
Great is thy faithfulness, great is thy faithfulness.
Morning by morning, new mercies I see,
All that I needeth, thy hand has provideth,
Great is thy faithfulness,
Lord unto me.
There is power in the words of this hymn, yanked straight from the center of the book of Lamentations. How many times I have sung them and felt emotion well from within, as if I’ve tapped a spring of deeply buried twin grief and joy.
But there is an irony in this hymn, as well. These lyrics are indeed pulled from the book of the Hebrew Bible called Lamentations, in which an unknown poet grieves the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem. However, these words are the only words of hope in the entire book; five poems, 132 versus, and about 12 of them speak of steadfast faithfulness, hope, and the promise of justice. Yet, this is the one thing we in the evangelical culture remember from Lamentations, even in a world that continues to offer injustice, pain, and disappointment.
These versus of hope are vital. They characterize God’s justice as the beginning of hope; that promise can’t be overemphasized. But I wonder what we miss when we deny ourselves the freedom to grieve and keen? I wonder why we do this to ourselves?
I have come to believe that dwelling fully within our spiritual heritage in the practice lament could radically change the way we understand and interact with ourselves, our world, and our Creator.
Lament can be a release valve for rage. We are arguably living in a cultural moment, now in America of the 2010’s and 2020’s, mainly defined by our rage. We tend to frame things in terms of war; battles for hearts and minds, for the soul of America, weaponized words, culture wars, and, of course, political tribalism. Every one of us is enraged in some way. Every one of us feels wronged. I include myself in this headcount, of course. I believe in the righteousness of my own perspective-that is unlikely to change all that much. The question is not how do I take on another’s beliefs about the world, the question is how do I come to see the “other” as my beloved family? Our rage divides and blinds. It doesn’t allow full access to empathy, because in our rage we are nothing more than foot soldiers on the battlefield of power. This may be where those who consolidate power would like us to be (including “leaders” in our own evangelical culture), but this is not where justice lives.
We are given an alternative to this framing of the world, but it requires a radical honesty with ourselves about our own grief. It requires the vulnerability that is built in to the practice of lament. Rather than skip-hopping over the rest of the 120 versus of Lamentations to focus on the few at the heart that allow us a palliative moment, potent as they are, we can instead give name to our fears and grief and the powerlessness that goes with them. I would argue that in order to find the peace we seek to make, we must give name to that fear, grief, and powerlessness. Anger is a mask emotion, or so I’ve heard from those with mental health expertise. I wonder if the rage we feel is self-protective, giving us access to self-justification and a sense of control and power? Giving voice to grief, on the other hand, exposes our soft parts to the world. It is an act of vulnerability that requires true self-emptying. In practicing vulnerable lament, I have found that my rage begins to dissolve, exposed as the self-protective mask that it is. Anger may point us in the direction of justice, but without the vulnerability of lament, it can harden, and calcify, and become immovable.
Lament can be a path to empathy for those with whom we find it difficult to empathize. This has been a particular struggle for me, far more of a personal temptation than the hardening of rage. I find it very difficult to access authentic, meek, and tender empathy for those who see their world defined by a totally different set of “facts”, “facts” that to me seem completely self-serving and deluded, and which are objectively lacking evidence. I constantly battle with the temptation to write people off as willfully ignorant, blind, or weak minded. Tell me I’m not the only one who struggles with this! But lament can be an anecdote for these very ungenerous thoughts and feelings. When I find myself beginning to roll my eyes in derision (a decidedly dishonoring relational posture), I voice a lament of grief for the ways we have all been deceived and manipulated and for the unspoken fears we all feel, which are invariably used to control us, undermining the freedom we have in Christ and replacing it with freedom as the world defines it. This practice of lament allows me to access authentic empathy for others without excusing their destructive behavior and loyalty to untruth.
Lament can be a way of bearing witness to the pain of the oppressed without centering ourselves. How often those of us in positions of power seek to save, fix, and overshadow the pain of others with our own shame and guilt. I repent of the ways I’ve dominated those experiencing oppression by centering my own feelings and seeking to solve problems using the same supremacist systems that have caused harm. Denying the existence of oppression or remaining silent in its presence, however, is potentially even more harmful. As an alternative to centering myself and engaging in saviorism or, worse yet, denial, I am practicing lament, communing with those who are expressing their own grief and oppression.
This practice also allows us to acknowledge the ways in which we all lament the consequences of systems of oppression, the ways in which we all, oppressed and oppressor, are harmed and dehumanized by the power structures of the world, to which Christ is the living alternative.
Lament might be a mechanism of unity (even if we are not lamenting the same things). Common projects can bridge gaps that ideology never will. Imagine if we made mutual acknowledgment of grief our common project? Imagine if we were able to hold a service of grief for all that we’ve lost and suffered, without being told by anyone that you don’t have the right to grieve, or that what you’ve lost doesn’t really count as a loss at all? I think that corporate practices of lament, even if we are not lamenting the same things ideologically, might have the potential to be a peace making tool. Acknowledging another’s pain, even if you don’t think it’s justified, might be a first step in getting to work on a mutually beneficial community project of healing. Unity can be a fraught concept in the face of such clear and present harm, but seeing and listening to another’s lament might be a step in the right direction. Perhaps corporate lament is a way of erasing zero-sum thinking, which tells us there is only so much room for sorrow and need, forcing us into a protective posture around our own sense of loss.
Lament can be a form of protest against injustice. We are well practiced in recognizing injustice though anger, but lament might be an even more powerful recognition. It can be a form of peaceful protest that wails a reverberating cry for change, a cry that says, “Do not make yourself blind to my sorrow. I am still here. My pain exists, and I exist in it.” In the book of Lamentations, the poet sends this cry to God, and it has been passed down to us both as a record of the specific pain of one people in one moment of history, and as a model for acknowledging our own specific pain in protest. We cry out to God and to one another in a vulnerable voice, asking to be seen and loved, asking for mercy and justice and change.
Lament can allow us to accept complexity. Complexity bias is such a powerful drug. Evangelical culture in particular is vulnerable to our preference for tidy stories of good and evil. We are well cultivated to accept these simplistic, self-serving stories in which we will prevail because we are clearly the preferred people of a mighty king, who may have ridden in to Jerusalem on a donkey, but will surely return on his white steed. But these narratives, for the very same reason they hold power in our limited imaginations, are narrow and dishonoring to our actual lived experiences. More often than not, we face life as a series of interlocking, complex relationships and outside forces-we are almost never either the hero or the villain, the rescuer and the rescued. We are all of us the result of a good creation seeking to be redeemed from chaos, but also required to dwell in that chaos as a means of sanctification. To lament allows us to stare this reality directly in its face without qualitative judgement. It allows us to be present to the complexity of our human experience in a way that is curious and hopeful, humble and courageous.
After all of this contemplation, I am left wondering why we have chosen to relegate the powerful spiritual practice of lament to a relic, dusty and forgotten. The culturally centered desire to triumph surely plays a significant role, as does our discomfort with difficult emotions. I wonder, also, if a culture of misogyny, a very narrow definition of what it means to be a loving, nurturing, maternal presence, might also bear some of the blame.
Imagine with me, fellow curious disciple…
There is a large house of hospitality in which all are welcomed. It is inhabited by a set of sisters, all of whom have their role in the house and in its welcoming of strangers, it’s welcoming of the other. Joy is the sparkling hostess, Hope the attentive nursemaid. Meekness is the tenderhearted listener, Faith the courageous, trustworthy servant, and all are covered in the beneficent generosity of the matriarch, Love.
In all these sisters, we might see a through line of the kind of femininity that is celebrated and venerated. These sisters are some combination of Mary and Martha, attentive and hardworking, present and sincere.
But there is someone inhabiting this home who is less often called down from her dusty attic chambers, and her name is Lament. Her sisters love her, but the guests of the house don’t. The guests welcomed into this house of discipleship see her as lacking the strength of stoicism, complaining and self-entered, even hysterical. The guests see her as dour, or just too complicated to get along with; why can’t she just smile through it, like Joy appears to do, or lose herself in service, like Hope? Why can’t Lament be the picture of acceptable femininity we admire, and leave behind the parts of femininity we see as weak, distracting, or a waste of time?
What they do not realize is that Joy is only able to smile when Lament has said her piece; Hope only has the wherewithal to serve when Lament has given voice to hopelessness.
While her sisters welcome wayward guests as the public faces of the house of discipleship, Lament gets no invitation to the party. She makes us feel uncomfortable as we are forced to confront and simply accept our own pain and powerlessness. But her sisters can do so very little without her.
Let’s get to know this gift of Lament, inviting her down from her perch in the attic and listening as she gives voice to our grief.
She is complicated and mysterious, but she is not opaque. She is sorrowful and expressive, but she is not hysterical.
She bears faithful, unwavering witness to pain, but she is neither hopeless nor joyless.
Let’s link arms with her, as we link arms with her sisters.
x Nicole
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