Lament is an Art that Takes Practice and Imagination.
“Lament is the deepest, most costly demonstration of belief in God.”
There are too many empty seats around our dinner tables.
First three dear people in our lives died of cancer in quick succession. Then the news of three separate mass shootings arrived in rapid fire all in a week’s time - a local grocery market, a church gathering, an elementary school.
Our world felt shot through. All were unfathomable tragedies. The elementary school shooting was especially heartbreaking. At the same moment irises and lilacs are in bloom (as they should be) our elementary school children are gunned down at school (as they never should be).
Why can’t we shop for strawberries in peace, eat a meal with our church family, or be safe at school? Who are we to one another? How do we care for each other and not only our interests? Why are we not at the dinner table with all those we love?
Noticing the repeated disparity, the bone-ache of things out of place and innocence lost, felt like the continuation of something a long time coming and not quite realized. Our strength and resilience lies in not resisting the pain but feeling our way through, though not as an end.
I was crying out to a God who hears cries for compassion and freedom. Not false freedom in the ways our culture keeps demanding in so many old ways but in a new bondage breaking freedom like the Exodus of Moses or the cross of Christ.
Walter Brueggemann writes of the Exodus that “the moment of dismantling is the plague cycle”. Justice and compassion were already present and available in who God is but only began to come alive in the people of God when they finally cried out to the Living God. We might be standing at such a moment.
I needed practical ways to prevent numbing my heart, to keep feeling when my heart is twisted out of shape. If I hope to feel deep joy and peace, I cannot block the gut-wrenching feelings of grief, betrayal, horror, helplessness, and rage. As part of my growing trust in a good and beautiful God, I want to turn all of my senses, here and now in the middle of sorrow, hatred and injustice, toward God and his beauty, goodness and truth. This turning is both the art of praise and lament.
Practicing the gritty art of lament means we have not given up on God.
Practicing means we keep at it. Gritty entails some kind of rough or raw texture. Art suggest a hands-on expression of new creativity. And lament is the acknowledgement that something has gone wrong in the world.
So, I began practicing the gritty art of lament by:
• baking 2 loaves of bread, keeping one and giving one to a grieving family
• filling a Ball jar with flowers cut from my backyard
• writing victims’ names in my journal
• taking a nature walk with those names, saying them around the dinner table
• calling my sister who is a 3rd/4th grade teacher in Texas
• buying strawberries
• reading Psalm 5:1-3 aloud, again and again
• digging out my yearbook and remembering myself at age 9-10 (Terri McGee), and my teachers (Mrs. Huygen, Mr. Peel)
• teary prayers for the horror of the victims’ last moments, the burden of the first responders, and waiting, wondering and wailing of survivors
• making prayer beads with my grandchildren
Some of these are unique to this particular moment. For the slain children and teachers at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, I dug out my 3rd grade yearbook and remembered playing Sneezy in the school play of Snow White, being a tether ball champ on the playground, and learning how to use a Bunsen burner with my science teacher, Mr. Peel. I bought a carton of bright red strawberries in memory of Celestine Chaney who was buying them for strawberry shortcake at Tops Market when she was gunned down .
Others like making prayer beads designed by spiritual director Leanne Hadley might be helpful at any time as we are learning to share our strong emotions with the God who loves us and trust them to his safekeeping. Trust is hard won, not because God is untrustworthy but because we have forgotten He is.
art by Eliza Jo, age 6, after making prayer beads
These are small beginnings and we won’t despise them. We give them their high value. They are the working out of our human connections and disconnections with each other in the events of our time. We aren’t made to sail over our troubles any more than Jesus was his. He entered his actual life in the joy of wedding feasts and friendships as well as the grief of betrayal, tears, and death. We follow his way of trusting his loving Father at every twist and turn in life and death and new life. Just as Job learned to do and every Psalmist after him.
“As in other laments of Scripture, Job displays a brutal honesty that could only have been born out of a desire for a deep and genuine relationship with a God whom he believed could be moved to tears.”
We may think that lament takes us far from hope. But it is despair that does that. Biblical lament like Job’s reveals the despair offered up by the Accuser when he suggests lies such as God is not here, God does not hear/see/love you, God is not good, compassionate, or just, God has forgotten/abandoned you, you are on your own, darkness will overcome light, for what it is - counterfeit. And this revelation helps us turn toward the deeper side of God Himself where we find hope and resurrected life.
Musician and author Michael Card, writes of lament and despair as polar opposites, “Lament is the deepest, most costly demonstration of belief in God. Despair is the ultimate manifestation of the total denial that He exists.”
Healthy lament begins with our feelings. They need expression. Our lament goes somewhere, not to a void; to someone, not to no one. Addressing our feelings to the Maker of the universe, the same One who made our hearts, begins our trust. We can come to him with our small, afraid hearts, simply with what we feel, see, hear, smell, and taste.
When we come to him, we are claiming God is worthy to hear our cries. That he is a God who hears and sees and feels. He knows the deep pain and high cost of our love and rebellion. He willingly felt it on the cross and loved us still.
We do not weep alone. We weep together with each other and with our God.
Of course, actions need to follow our first feelings - simple kindnesses to friends and enemies despite how we feel, asking lots of earnest questions, prayers of many words and none, responsible voting, hugs and conversations with my grandchildren, growing in trust of our good God, and imagining and practicing more care, connection, and confession with each other.
Until then, may you walk, run, bake, draw, paint, garden, write, or through some other hands-on expression, find your way through your feelings as a first act of lament. May you begin in solitude with the Trinity and go on to share it in community.
A Prayer for Gun Violence in School - Kayla Craig
How has it gotten this dangerous to be a child in a desk in a classroom? We grieve for innocence lost by way of violence.
Lord, hear our prayer.
We ache for teachers who must prepare for the unthinkable.
Lord, Hear our prayer.
We pray for every mother and father who is forever changed by the unimaginable –
The death of a child at the hands of gun violence.
Our job as parents is to keep our children safe –
How do we do so? Give us eyes to see. Give us new vocabularies and courageous hearts to champion our children.
Lord, heal our collective wounds.
Lord, heal our individual hearts.
That crack into pieces every time our kids step onto the school bus.
Lord, may we see into your upside-down Kingdom,
Give us the courage and boldness to plead the case of our children. Deliver us from the evil one,
And may our action for a more peaceable world for our children
be a prayer of its own.
Lord, hear our prayer.
This prayer is from To Light Their Way by Kayla Craig.
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