Lament

Copyright "Lament" Kathie Kollwitz

Neil and I were at a conference two weeks ago on “Theology and Disability”.  Many of the attendees were persons who had a disability themselves or were close family members of a person with a disability.  One of the discussion sessions was about how church communities can welcome/respond to persons with a disability.  Of course, there were many horror stories of when it had went wrong as well as some success stories.   One of the biggest complaints was the perception everyone gives at church is that life is perfect and everything’s great.  Over and over people shared  church was not a place where it felt they could share hurts or difficulties.  It seamed more a gathering of happy people who came together to sing happy songs.  If they or their child could not fit in with the happy norm they felt like outcasts.  For many, church was nothing like real life. It was fake people wearing happy masks.  Some pointed out the need to break out of this fakeness and become a community where pain can be honestly expressed.  The subject quickly turned to the need to be communities that include lament (which often precedes rejoicing).

The Psalms of Lament are the biggest single category of psalms in the Bible.  They comprise over one third of the book of Psalms.  Yet our worship rarely draws on them.  Walter Bruggerman in his writing on the Psalms notes in Anglican liturgy all the lament psalms are ignored except psalm 22.  He argues that we would probably like to ignore that one too except Jesus quotes it so they grudgingly admit that it exists. 

Real life is messy but often our church experience is one where we don’t feel free to express what we are really going through.  Bruggerman also points out that because lament is so seldom used in our churches and those ideas are so seldom expressed that people who are having trouble feel either; guilty that they aren’t all happy and joyful like those around them or; they themselves just go into denial mode and add to the fake smiling masses. 

Lament is real.  It is honest.  We all have things in our lives from time to time that are lamentable.  The lament psalms follow a pattern.  They begin desperate, laying out a situation with no hope.  Brugerman calls this part of the plsams “disorientation” often when tragedy hits us it challenges what we assumed to be true.  As David Kennedy (the grief counselor that developed the Grief Matters material we use to train staff) puts it “our assumptive world view is challenged”.  Suddenly things don’t make sense.   

The lament psalms do not leave us in the disorientation stage though.  Each of them (with one possible exception) moves towards hope.  The psalmist always comes around to holding on to the truths they know about God.  Psalm 13 is a great example.

Psalm 13:1-6 (NIV)
¹ How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?
² How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and every day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me?
³ Look on me and answer, O LORD my God. Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death;
⁴ my enemy will say, "I have overcome him," and my foes will rejoice when I fall.
⁵ But I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation.
⁶ I will sing to the LORD, for he has been good to me.

Brugerman calls the last part “reorientation”.  The lamentable situation is not removed but the psalmist is hopeful that God will work somehow.  Often these portions draw on past times that God has come through.

One of the men who was at this conference who serves as a pastor and himself is a person with  a disability stated that he often experiences this same pattern when he is introduced to a new church.  In his opinion,  often when churches encounter a person (or pastor) with a disability their assumptive worldview is challenged.  They go through disorientation and slowly work to reorientation.  Having someone who doesn’t fit “the mould” challenges the pasted on fakeness and makes it ok for people to admit where they may be finding life hard.

It is OK to lament.  God already knows how you feel.  You can’t fool God.  Why bother trying to fool everyone else.  Lament but be hopeful.  Be honest with God while remaining respectful.  Draw hope from those times he has come through.

Mark Wallace