Returning to Lament
“Lament” by INTVGene. This photograph has not been modified and is covered under CC BY-SA 2.0I am on the leadership team of an online ministry with Community of Christ that supports those in the middle of faith transitions. This is the text of a talk I was recently asked to give.
Tonight our theme is lament and so I am going to be talking about grief and lament a lot this evening, where I define grief as feelings of loss and lament as the passionate expression of grief. I want to begin with some caveats and invitations here as we begin this discussion of lament.
So, I’m going to begin with a story of some of the things that have caused me grief. I also want to say that the things that have caused me grief that I wish to lament and express that grief are maybe different from the things that you grieve. If my griefs are not the same as your griefs, I want to invite you to identify your griefs as you read this. I also invite you to find ways to lament those griefs, both as a spiritual practice and as a pathway to self-empathy and emotional health.
At the beginning of the pandemic, I was trying to stay on top of my grief by naming all of the things I was losing: quiet alone time in my office at work, the physical presence of colleagues and friends, sharing coffee and meals with others, getting to visit my sister and her family, my children attending school in person, and singing in person with my congregation. I have spent various chunks of the past 18 months feeling my grief and alternatively just wanting everything to be fine. And now there is part of me that feels like I should be used to this by now. Life must go on, I tell myself. I am tired of grieving and so I feel I must be done. Especially at the beginning of the pandemic, we spent so much time in my congregation talking about our grief.
At that same time and also at the beginning of the pandemic, I heard a lot of people talking about hope. I did not know what to do with hope. It seemed like hope was something to grab at that was not grounded in anything real – like maybe hope was kind of a bullshit concept like the tooth fairy – something we tell ourselves to feel better about difficult moments but has no depth.
Then summer came and so many plans were cancelled. My husband and I are both professors and have our summers off from work – this is a tremendous privilege that we have. We can schedule a lot of fun things during this time. I had been busy making plans for the best summer ever when the pandemic began. Perhaps the cancelled plan that hurt the most was that my kids were going to go to Girl Scout Camp for a week. This was going to be a good growth experience for them. I spent my teenage years at a Girl Scout Camp and I was eager for my kids to do something similar. Their time at camp was also going to give my husband and I a week to ourselves – our first time alone since they were born. When those cancelled camp days came and went, I felt devastated.
But the more I shamed myself for complaining about all of these big and small griefs, telling myself that others had it worse that I still have my home and my family and my job, the worse I felt.
I learned that lament is different than complaining. Lament is letting yourself give voice to your griefs in a way that you can feel throughout your body. It is expressing the passion and sadness you feel about the things you have lost. If complaining is casual, lament is full of intent.
Lament is also sacred. There are a number of Psalms of lament that give voice to feelings of despair when we feel like we’ve been abandoned by God we have loved. And we hold these Psalms, like other scriptural texts, as sacred.
And for those of us here tonight, we’ve likely felt abandoned by a God we have loved and held onto, to a church that we loved and provided us with stability, and to a sense that God made the world right through divine intervention. If we are here tonight, we’ve probably spent considerable time lamenting the things we have lost in our faith, even if we have gained new faith.
We might feel grief about our church wounds, but there are also plenty of other things to mourn while we are at it. The pandemic has highlighted so many things to grieve in our society: racial injustice, transphobia, misinformation and polarization, the stress we may have experienced over the election, feelings of terror at watching the events of January 6, the stress and grief of watching family and friends get sick and die, the inflation of prices while wages remain stagnant, and the list just keeps on going. It is overwhelming. I don’t always know how to express lament in the face of so much loss, but scripture offers some models that feel timeless.
Habakkuk 1:2-4 (NRSV) reads
O Lord, how long shall I cry for help,
and you will not listen?
Or cry to you “Violence!”
and you will not save?
Why do you make me see wrongdoing
and look at trouble?
Destruction and violence are before me;
strife and contention arise.
So the law becomes slack
and justice never prevails.
The wicked surround the righteous—
therefore judgment comes forth perverted.
In these verses, I see a reminder that the feeling that we have been abandoned by God to a world that is out of our control is a sacred human experience – even if it is a painful one.
I want to offer that engaging in intentional grieving and lament are practices that can help us stay connected to our empathy. When we attempt to shut off or distance ourselves from our feelings, we shut down empathy for ourselves and have less to give to others. When we open ourselves up to feel our grief and express our lament, we open ourselves up to a greater diversity of human feelings.
About a year ago, I gave the peace lesson for the Beyond the Walls congregation. The election was about to happen and I was full of despair, grief, and anxiety. In the months preceding that, some loved ones came out of the closet as transgender and nonbinary. I was happy that they were discovering and sharing their true selves. I also worried about their safety in a world where their gender identities were a focused target of the alt right.
I chose to give the peace lesson on lament and as part of that lesson, I read Psalm 102:1-11. As I read that, I felt like I was praying my own prayer of grief: where are you, God? It is lonely here and I am afraid.
As I let myself feel my feelings through speaking those words, I also felt something else: a deep hope for the world to change. This was the elusive hope I had been hearing so much about. But it was not a shallow thing, not a nonsense concept, but something deeply grounded in grief and lament. I had no idea that this is what hope was, but suddenly it showed up in this moment of grief and lament. And the world was no better and the alt right were still after trans people, but this hope thing was beautiful and comforting, whispering to me in my lament that we are called to build Zion and we have not given up on that yet.
And to be clear, I’m not saying that this experience of hope cancelled out the feelings of grief and loss. Rather, it gave more dimensions to my grief and helped me better hold my sadness. This hope thing, which I had not understood before, had real strength. Just as lament was about speaking the truth about grief and loss, hope was also telling an adjacent truth, that we can work to create the peace and justice that we long for. May we heed that invitation.
