A Beginner’s Guide to Lament
I love that my kids have gotten into my favorite Pixar movie Inside Out. There’s a scene where Riley’s childhood imaginary friend Bing Bong sees all his favorite memories with Riley disappearing. He’s devastated. The character Joy energetically attempts to cheer him up, to no avail. It’s only when Sadness sits next to him, listens, and says, “Yeah, that’s sad” that a profound turn happens. This is a powerful image for the place of lament in our spiritual lives.
How do we respond when bad news drops that scares us to death? The diagnosis from the doctor that makes the world stand still? The conversation with our kid that utterly shatters our heart? The legal decision that leaves you high and dry? When the injustice and sadness of the world just erupt without warning? Where do we go? What do we do? Where is God?
Lament is solidarity with a hurting world, hurting friend, a hurting neighborhood. In lament, we name out loud that this world is not the way it’s supposed to be. We tell the truth about our hurt, our loneliness, our sadness, and our grief in God’s presence. Lament says, “This is wrong,” “I am not okay,” or “The world is not right.” In this way, it is a form of protest against injustice, suffering, and evil in the world.
What is lament?
Western culture, and by extension the Church in the Western world, has a deep aversion lament. We want to sweep all our negative emotions under the carpet and jam-pack them into the shadows or our inner selves. When we’re not careful, our corporate worship can look like a high school pep assembly with everyone on the stage as cheerleaders.
I was once in a worship service on a Sunday that happened to be Valentine’s Day. A singer on the stage opened the service by saying, “Who’s here with their honey this morning?” From the corner of my eye, I caught an older gentleman standing by himself. I knew that his wife had recently passed away from cancer. I thought to myself, “What a thoughtless way to begin a worship service.”
Writer and professor Soong Chan-Rah says, “Lament in the Bible is a liturgical response to the reality of suffering and engages God in the context of pain and trouble. The hope of lament is that God would respond to human suffering that is wholeheartedly communicated through lament.”
Lament is the natural, human response to loss and grief. The Christian community lives by the conviction that Scripture tells the truth about the state of the world, about what God is like, and about what God is doing in the world. And because we bring our lament to our conversation with God, there is hope—even if it’s dangling by its last thread—that God will act.
The “why” of lament
When we don’t give space to our negative emotions, when we ignore and deny that our pain and hurt are real, that the pain and hurt of our neighbor across the street are real, we live in a delusion. We can easily become like that character in The Matrix who just wants to go back to the lie so that he doesn’t have to deal with the struggle of real life.
One December several years ago, our church decided to host a “Blue Christmas” service in order to create space in our community to acknowledge the loss that often remains hidden during the holidays. During a time of quiet prayer, a man who had heard about the service in the community approached me. While he didn’t share with me the details of his story, he whispered to me, “This is the kindest thing a church could do.” Spaces of lament provide the opportunity for catharsis amidst the disappointment of life.
When we don’t have healthy spaces to process and express outloud our negative emotions, we make ourselves vulnerable to a variety of self-destructive behaviors. They always escape. They often leak out sideways. And despite our fiercest determination, they come out that the least convenient times.
Practicing lament also prepares our hearts for those moments or seasons when it appears that God is absent. We come to expect that there are seasons of plenty and seasons of lack. It strikes at the root of some of our entitlement that everything should be awesome all the time. Likewise, it reminds us that pain and suffering are not the final word in our stories. We are reminded that God is with us, even in the hurt.
Finding lament in the stories of Scripture
Up to 40% of the Psalter can be classified as psalms of lament. (I’ve heard Rah say, that by comparison, among the top 100 currently played worship songs, only 5-10 could generously be described as lament songs.) “Wake up, O Lord! Why do you sleep? Get up! Do not reject us forever. Why do you look the other way? Why do you ignore our suffering and oppression?” writes one psalmist. It may feel scary to bring such raw honesty before God, but there it is in the Bible.
In one of my favorite stories in the Bible, the patriarch Jacob has a knock-down, drag-out, bare-knuckled brawl with God all night long. It ends in a draw, but Jacob is left with a limp and a new name—Israel, or “The One Who Wrestles with God.” It’s no accident that the name of God’s chosen people in the great story is then “The People Who Wrestle with God.”
Nowhere is this idea better illustrated than the book of Job. Here is a man who has done everything right. He’s used every formula in the book of Proverbs to live the good life. And yet, he experiences tremendous loss and demands that God should explain himself. “If I have sinned, what have I done to you, O watcher of all humanity? Why make me your target? Am I a burden to you?”
There’s an entire book in the Old Testament called Lamentations that expresses the extraordinary loss of the exile. In the midst of these poems we find the line that inspired the old hymn “Great is thy faithfulness.” It shows how even our most extreme pain, there are glimmers of hope when we bring that pain before God.
Paralleling the story of Job is the story of Jesus on the cross. Naked, bloodied, and abandoned by his closest friends, Jesus cries out the words from the ancient psalm, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Jesus himself prays psalms of lament.
Some practical first steps into lament
Engage a rhythm of encountering the whole Bible. Whether through the lectionary or daily office, submit yourself to a pattern experiencing the entire story of the Bible. We often gravitate to our favorite feel-good stories or passages and skip over the hard parts.
Find an opportunity to serve and get to know someone who does not look like you. Volunteer at a food pantry or a homeless ministry. Resist the gravitational urge to “do something” and simply be with someone who is marginalized in some way. Hear their story. Be willing to stretch yourself to recognize systemic power and its abuses. Remember that justice is a part of the character of God and not to be politicized, not limited to the domain of any human political ideology.
Immerse yourself in the season of Lent. Lent is an entire season dedicated to lament. It’s a time of fasting, repentance, and rightly naming the frailty of the world around us. Most importantly, Lent has its eyes on Easter Sunday to remind us that, in God’s economy, on the other side of every death is resurrection.
Final words
When we practice lament together, even when we don’t feel it, we create space to validate those in our midst who are living through hell. We see them. We communicate to them that their pain matters. And we can remember together that God cares and God is determined to do something about it.
Like when Sadness sits with Bing Bong and says, “I know,” lament opens up new opportunities for hope and healing we didn’t know were there. This is what makes lament an essential practice in our spiritual lives. As God tells Moses at the burning bush, “I have certainly seen the oppression of my people in Egypt. I have heard their cries of distress because of their harsh slave drivers. Yes, I am aware of their suffering. So I have come down to rescue them.“
If you’d like to dig deeper, be sure to check out Prophetic Lament: A Call for Justice in Troubled Times by Soong Chan-Rah. If you’re a caregiver or pastoral counseler you might explore I Will Walk With You: Following Jesus to the Side of Those Who Suffer.