Lament: an invitation

In these times of the coronavirus crisis, I’m finding myself drawn to the practice of lament.

A lament is a passionate expression of grief, often in a creative form, like a poem or song. It is an honest, unfiltered, intense offering of hard, painful thought and emotion to God. It is clearly something that a reader of the Bible like myself should be no stranger to. After all, the whole book of Lamentations is a series of laments about the destruction of Jerusalem. It is estimated that two thirds of the Psalms are laments.

For a long time I’ve appreciated lament as an art form. I’ve appreciated that the Bible puts the full array of human emotions, including the negative stuff, on display.

But I haven’t really felt the necessity or ease to put lament into practice for myself.

Now I am a person who longs to be good, to do the right thing, to be honourable, unimpeachable. Negative emotions, like deep sadness or anger, have never sat well with me. I have usually tried to suffocate them by giving them as little oxygen as possible. And if I am forced to acknowledge them, they have been accompanied by a load of guilt that complicates my ability to walk through them in a healthy way.

Bringing God an unfiltered, festering pile of hurt or anger or betrayal or humiliation or sorrow or loneliness or disappointment or bitterness or frustration or anguish has not seemed to me to be honouring. Thankfully, I’m learning that this is not the case.

Lament is actually a way to honour our feelings, indeed, to honour ourselves as wholehearted beings before God.

I’m learning that lament lets us meet with God in our pain. It lets us bring together two things which seem not to belong and so we tend to keep separate: the truth and goodness of God, and the pain of what we’re going through.

I’m learning that by giving voice in words (colourful and loud and sometimes ugly words!) to my painful, negative emotions before God lets me process my emotional pain in a safe place. After all, there in God’s presence I am cradled in love by the one who knows me best. And not only that, but I am in the presence of the expert, the master of redemption, the author of human flourishing, so there is the chance for something to result that is completely beyond myself.

And when I’ve practised lament, I’ve felt something lock in – a rightness in bringing what I’ve so long felt to be dirty, ugly feelings right to God’s face. I’ve discovered it is not dishonourable to God after all. I haven’t necessarily had answers right away or even been released from pain. But there has been an exchange. Lament uncovers and pries open the cracks of my brokenness. It creates the space for more of God to seep in, and to seep deeper. Then it is not up to me to make the mess presentable. God does the righting.

I’ve never been as aware as I am right now of the value of, and need for, lament. Coronavirus lockdown is a strained situation, even for those of us who are relatively unscathed. For many here and many more beyond our shores, this pandemic is a nightmare of pain and loss and uncertainty, devastation of lives and livelihoods. For me, at times in the last few weeks, painful negative emotions have come rushing to the surface.

Even in my safe, well-supplied family bubble, sometimes my heart hurts – for myself, and reflecting the collective atmosphere of pain. The pain, whether my own or other people’s or the world’s generally, is real. It aches.

Lament is a practice that seems made for this moment. Lament can be both personal and collective, I think. It can express the pain that is purely our own – the betrayal we’ve received, our failure, our loss. But there is also a place for lament for the collective. In lament we may legitimately traverse our response before God to the pain, suffering, injustice, tension or violence around us, things we may not claim as our own but that some of us carry nonetheless. Lament is a way of grieving this too.

For me, the lament laden melodies are the tunes ringing most true at the moment.

Oh God, secure in your faithful and unshockable love, we bring our full selves before you. We give voice to our cries. We lay the hard and ugly things out. And we dare to look to you even with this before us. We seek your face in what we are going through and in what we see happening around us. Meet us here, merciful God.

What is your experience with lament? How have you found that lament helps you?

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