I spent the majority of my twenties touring the States and a few other countries drumming for various Christian and Country music artists. Those years provided a wealth of friendships, memories, and life experiences. However, these were about the only wealth it offered. Even in Nashville (a.k.a. Music City), surviving as a musician-for-hire can be an art form of its own. This is especially true when you are terrible at managing money, and I was TERRIBLE at managing money. I would arrive home from tour, and my mailbox would be a cornucopia of sadness, splaying its bounty of bills onto my front lawn. And given my level of monetary astuteness, I responsibly “filed” my stacks of bills in the rubbish bin and went about my day.
Crazy as it sounds, there was a real sense in my mind at the time that if I didn’t look at these bills, they would go away. In other words – if I didn’t name the issue, it didn’t exist.
This phenomenon is not new.
In the worldview of ancient Israel and its neighbours, the act of naming held great significance. The Hebrew verb qara (“to call”) not only has the power to name but also summon. The biblical story of creation tells us that when the Creator “calls”, he gives clarity of form and function to what he has created. His act of naming calls into their purpose the Day, Night, Skies, Land, and Seas. He also brings the animals to the man to “see what he would call (qara) them”. (Gen 2:19-20)
It is as if there is something in the naming process itself that brings definition to the indefinite and makes the vague concrete. I think most of us have those things which we would rather keep beneath the surface and unnamed.
Maybe, like my touring days, it’s a financial struggle, or perhaps it’s the ache in our bodies that we don’t get checked because we fear the diagnosis, or the “elephant-in-the-room” issue that damages a relationship but that no one is willing to address.
In moments of crisis (like the Coronavirus), we can also have reservoirs of emotions: grief, fear, sorrow, and loss sitting just beneath the surface and yet we have not named or given expression to them. Perhaps this is because we grew up in a home where emotions were dismissed or even dealt with harshly, and so we learned to stuff them away, knowing if we began poking, the dam would burst. Maybe we learned to sit on these feelings through a culture that taught us, by and large, the values of self-sufficiency, personal power, and the inherent dangers of being truly vulnerable. It could also be that the particular faith communities we came from gave us the prayers of promise and victory but also forgot to teach us the prayers of frailty and suffering.
The Prayers of Lament, found throughout the Bible, are prayers of anguish, grief, and protest.
The poet of Psalm 88 cries,
“Why O Lord do you reject me
and hide your face from me?
From my youth I have been afflicted and close to death;
I have suffered your terrors and am in despair…
You have taken my companions and loved ones from me;
the darkness is my closest friend.”
Or Psalm 42:3 exclaims:
“My tears have been my food
day and night,
while men say to me all day long.
“Where is your God?”
These are not the writings of discourse or analysis. They are poetry.
Poetry invites us into the experience and the intensity of what is felt in ways analysis cannot. The poetry in the book of Lamentations expresses the catastrophic grief and sorrow of a people in exile. Exile forcibly removes us from what used to be home. While exile can be geographical, it can also be mental, emotional, and spiritual.
In her commentary on Lamentations, Biblical Scholar Kathleen O’Connor writes:
“Lamentation names what is wrong, what is out of order in God’s world, and what keeps human beings from thriving in all of their creative potential. Simple acts of lament expose these conditions, name them, open them to grief and anger and make them visible for remedy. In its complaint, and anger, and grief, lamentation protests conditions that prevent human thriving and this resistance may finally prepare the way for healing.” -Kathleen O’Connor
This kind of radical expression can easily make us in the West uncomfortable. Allowing ourselves to express fear, grief, anger, and outrage can leave us feeling exposed and ashamed. Often our first instinct is to bury our frustrations and humanity before God, assuming he will be disappointed if he sees it. We are Adam and Eve, feeling unfit for the Garden, and we run to hide. Adam was ashamed of his naked state, afraid of the death penalty that was looming, and yet God came, not to condemn his nakedness but to give a gift precisely because of it.
Our interior worlds matter. The things that we refuse to name have a way of hijacking our lives. If we do not learn to attend to the depths of our humanity, it can have severe effects on us and those around us. In contrast, when we remain open and vulnerable, willing to be honest enough to name and take ownership of precisely where we are, we find that the same God who covered the ones hiding in the Garden comes and covers us as well.
Lament is not expressing a lack of faith. Great faith is not the absence of pain, hurt, or discouragement but the confidence to, with a bold hope, give it full voice.
Lament brings dignity to the experience of human suffering and tragedy in a world outside of the Garden, where we await with hope the fullness of New Creation. The fact that our sacred scriptures include prayers of lament not only gives us comfort that we serve a God big enough to hold the outer cosmos, but One who is loving enough to hold our inner one as well.
Practising Lament
The language of lament comes from the heart, but its expression can need the energy of a full-bodied experience.
- Find one of the many prayers of lament found in the scriptures that speaks to the inner cries of your heart and read it aloud as your own prayer to God.
- Memorise parts of the passage and find a space where you can freely kneel, lay flat, or shake your fists at the ceiling.
- Allow yourself to feel whatever comes. Don’t dismiss the sadness, anger, confusion, disappointment or sit in judgment of them. Bring your feelings to Jesus exactly as they are, without editing them.
- Take a deep breath, knowing that in the naming and releasing of your inner experiences, you have been heard and are profoundly loved and accepted by your Creator.
- Invite God to speak to you in that space or simply sit in the silence, resting in His presence.
A Few Prayers of Lament in Scripture: Psalm 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 17, 22, 25, 26, 27, 44, 58, 60, 74, 79, 80, 83, 85, 89, 90, 94, 123, 126, 129; Lamentations 1-5
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