Grieving is a Gift
Lament - a passionate expression of grief or sorrow
A bit about lamenting in the scriptures...Lament is a major theme in the Bible and particularly in the book of Psalms. To lament is to express deep sorrow, grief, or regret. The psalms of lament are beautiful poems or hymns expressing human struggles and are the largest category of psalms, making up about one third of the entire book of Psalms. These psalms are prayers that lay out a troubling situation to the Lord and make a request for his help.
There are two types of lament psalms: community and individual. There are forty-two individual psalms of lament and sixteen community or national psalms of lament.Community psalms of lament deal with situations of national crisis—they describe problems faced by all the people of God. Psalm 12 is an example of a community lament, expressing sadness over widespread sin:
“Help, Lord, for no one is faithful anymore; those who are loyal have vanished from the human race. Everyone lies to their neighbor; they flatter with their lips but harbor deception in their hearts” (Psalm 12:1–2).
This is an example of a lament we might call upon when belonging is at risk - and boy is belonging at risk in our world today. Now, I want you to stop and breathe for a minute, because by me saying this and reading these verses - tell me if I'm wrong - your mind automatically went to all the ways the world makes you mad or sad, right? So, for the sake of getting things off our chests, what are you lamenting over in terms of community suffering? Sit, breathe and lament for a moment. I want you to bring all the things up into your heart and mind - because if you do, what I talk about next might be healing. How does this make you feel when you think of these things? With that in mind, consider the words of Cole Riley Arthur in her lovely book, This Here Flesh:
"In lament, our task is never to convince someone of the brokenness of this world; it is to convince them of the world's worth in the first place. True lament is not born from that trite sentiment that the world is bad but rather from a deep conviction that it is worthy of goodness."
This completely rewrites the meaning of lament. She goes on to write, "I can only wonder why we have so many depictions of the cross with Christ looking stoic and resolved [and white] and so few with him crying out in pain and abandonment. When I read the story, he does not seem composed; he seems devastated. when we reconstruct a Christ whose very face remains unmoved, how are we to trust that he feels or longs for anything at all? A passionless savior cannot be trusted to save." I wonder if we prefer our Jesus without passion. Why? Because it makes us anxious to think that perhaps, just maybe, God's plan does not include a promise to make us happy. And I have to ask you, can you love a God who has more things on his mind than your happiness? This is a big question. Because it changes the way we approach suffering.
"When God bears witness to our suffering, it is not for his consumption or to demonstrate something. My gramma used to wonder what this all was teaching her, a rhetoric she absorbed from the church. But it seems cruel to believe that God would require grief to make a truth known. I refuse to believe we need to dissect our pain in search of purpose. Sometimes shit is just shit. It's okay to say so. I think when God bears witness to our lament, we discover that we are not calling out to a teacher but inviting God as a nurturer - a mother who hears her child crying in the night. She wakes, rises, and comes to the place where we lie. She rushes her holy warmth against our flesh and says, 'I'm here.' "
Cole Arthur Riley spends the entire book paying tribute to her ancestors, particularly her grandmother and father, for teaching her dignity-affirming spirituality. She challenges us and invites us to learn the lessons that she was taught and is embodying as a black woman academic living in a world that constantly challenges her right to be an intellectual, author, pastor, and spiritual guide living with a chronic unnamed disease that keeps her in constant pain. I need you to hear me. She suffers. And I need you to open your heart here and hear something else: her father was a person with a substance use disorder. There are so many ways that our culture, our own betraying brain, makes up stories that cause us to lament but not heal. I could read her book, as a writer myself, and think: man, that girl is so lucky, she can write a mean sentence without ever knowing that there are many days when she cannot move her legs. Or I could lament over all the wonderful, beautiful lessons that her father taught her and lament, man, I wish my dad had taught me one beautiful lesson of love. Her dad is amazing. Unless she self-discloses, I will know all the good parts of her and never hear about the way she felt when her dad lived in her basement, would OD and she would have to call 911. When she would see him with no teeth, no capacity to do one productive thing per day. It really matters how we think and believe and consider - and there are many more ways to tell your story than you have yet to consider.
The world can be broken and worthy of recognizing its goodness at the same time.
"In lament, our task is never to convince someone of the brokenness of this world; it is to convince them of the world's worth in the first place. True lament is not born from that trite sentiment that the world is bad but rather from a deep conviction that it is worthy of goodness." Cole's daddy is worthy whether or not a portion of his life includes SUD. Cole is worthy whether or not her great grandmother was a slave. The world and its people are worthy of goodness whether or not it feels like it is going to hell in a hand basket and humans continue to disappoint. My friend Yelena went home to Ukraine to bury her mother and ended up having to flee Ukraine mid-mourning when Putin invaded. Her warrior spirit wants to fight back. She wants this unjust, unprovoked war perpetrated on a democratic country with deep loving ties to Russia to end and wants the evil doers punished. But what she is doing is working tirelessly from her home in California, as a US citizen, to provide humanitarian aid to Ukraine and its refugees. This, I think is a sacred lament. We cry at the injustice and then we roll up our sleeves and get to work on behalf of goodness. Not all of us can be Yelena, but all of us can do something to live our conviction that the world is worthy of goodness - and so are you.
