Loving Lament

After concluding our three week journey into lament on Tuesday, a journey which eventuated in having an all-church lament service at Peoples Church, I have to say that I'm more impressed than ever at how important this practice is and how detrimental it is to our faith when we lose or under-use the candence of prayer known as lament.

This week, in response to an article on lament I wrote for our church email, a lady wrote:

"I am 36 years old and have been a Christian since the age of 7. I grew up in Tulsa in a preacher's, family, so I know that I am supposed to forgive. And I have forgiven -- and forgiven some more, and then more and more. But in late December, some things happened in my family that deeply disturbed me. And I started to get mad. And then I got angry and then I felt the feeling that no good little Christian should ever feel towards a parent -- hate. And, yet, I knew that, in all of this, I was supposed to forgive again, but how could I forgive when there was no acknowledgement of the sin or repentance for the sins perpetrated on myself and my brother and sister?

God has taken me from one of the lowest places in my life these past couple months to a place where I could do the grieving over my lost childhood and I could actually FEEL the anger and hurt and betrayal and abandonment that I had shoved down for so many years b/c I thought it was the Christian thing to do. Through all of this, I realize that this is the process that forgiveness is taking for me and my personal situation, but I truly believe that unilateral forgiveness is not required of us until sin is acknowledged. For me, the lamenting that I have been doing by feeling these deep emotions is part of my forgiveness process and part of my healing.

I lamented deeply, and did it with a gifted, Christian therapist who recommended a book for me to read through the process entitled: "Don't Forgive Too Soon . . . Extending the Two Hands That Heal"

Specifically it takes the reader through the five stages typically associated with grief, but does it in relation to working through forgiveness. It has prayers at the end too (such as Prayer of Examen, etc.). It's written by Roman Catholic therapists, and specifically addresses so many things I was fighting against w/r/t what the church tells you but with which I wasn't comfortable (you have to forgive no matter what, turn the other cheek, "move on", etc.), and couldn't reconcile in my heart.

Specifically the book talks about moving through the "Anger" stage of forgiveness and says that we honor our own integrity by giving anger and pain a place:

"The GIFT of Anger is that it locates our wound. Lingering anger usually indicates we moved too quickly through the forgiveness process. We believe that in an abusive situation we have no right to forgive until we have honored our anger. Anger at abuse and injustice is an expression of our integrity and our dignity as human beings. We must honor our anger before we forgive because authentic forgiveness comes from the same place of integrity deep within us"."

I thought that said it perfectly ...

After the church-wide lament service last night, Josh Lease and I were talking about how, in a paradoxical way, giving voice to our sense of victimization actually causes us to cease being victims anymore. It's a way, as one author I'm reading stated, "delimiting the experience". In other words, of saying, "Enough is enough!" It's an "expression of our integrity and dignity as human beings."

So much more could be said ... This lament business touches some really important issues

But alas ... "to everything there is an end" ... and to this as well ... One final thought:

Lament is grounded is love. The Psalmists can lament because they believe that God's "hesed", his stated, promised love for Israel, obligates him to hear and respond, that it is the context of their grieving; and they actually lament because they themselves love God and trust him to make good on his promises.

Is it possible that our inability to rage against heaven is tied to the dimness of our love?

How sad ...

Heal our numbness O God.

Journeying Into Lament

The journey into the lost art and practice of lament continued last night ... and I have to say that I found everyone's comments about their experience last week enlightening, exhilarating, and hilarious all at the same time.  I especially enjoyed listening to the commentary of one lady (who shall remain nameless) who said that when she walked in her initial thought was, "Wow, so Andrew's finally gone over the edge."

Oddly enough, that hit me as a bit of validation ... Pushing the envelope is kind of what I live for.  I digress ...

As we wrestled with the theological and existential meaning of lament, several important themes emerged, which I'll outline below:

1 - Lament serves as a sort of cleansing for the soul 

Many last night expressed something along these lines: "At first I wasn't sure if I would be able to 'get into it', but then all of a sudden my emotions got unlatched ... I cried and cried ... It was pretty painful, but when it was all over, I felt an overwhelming sense of peace."

The word we used is "catharsis" ... It's a Greek word that means "cleansing" and in modern American culture refers to an emotional sort of vomiting that results in a state of calm.  Lament surely serves that purpose.

2 - However, in the biblical tradition, lament is never purely catharsis, but rather issues in an earnest petition that God would demonstrate his faithfulness by bringing change.

It is simply too easy in our individualistic, consumerist culture to turn lament into another internal, existential experience that we consume for our own private benefit.  Of course, in the absence of a Divine "Other", what else could lament be than this?  But in the biblical tradition, lament is always undertaken vis a vis the God to whom Israel is bound by irrevocable promises.

3 - The "horizon" of lament tends to move from the individual/personal horizon to the cosmic and eschatological horizons.

Here we noted Psalm 22, among others, where the Psalmist's complaint turns to petition and then in a courageous declaration that Yahweh's arising will issue in justice for the whole cosmos.  This coheres pretty nicely with Romans 8, where Paul speaks of the suffering of the sons of God and then sets it against the backdrop of the "groaning" of all creation, a groaning both the Spirit and the Church share.  Lament is a way, so it seems, to get in touch with our groaning as a way of connecting with the wider groanings of both Creation and the Spirit.  This groaning, again, is a plea that God will arise, not only for the one groaning, but on behalf of the entire universe which itself is enslaved to corruption.

Part of the problem it seems is that we live in a culture that is so averse to any kind of suffering and so confident that the meaning of life is found in pleasure that whenever we get anywhere close to entering fully into our own grief (which again in the biblical witness is a pathway into the groanings of all creation) we immediately move to medicate ourselves.  We do this with food, entertainment, recreation, sex, etc., thinking that in so doing our humanness will be preserved.  But it will not.  It will, rather, be diminished as our capacity to really "feel" gets dulled through our consumptiveness.

We need to break through our numbness and feel again.  Only then will the status quo be shaken.  

As I journey into this thing called lament, I am becoming more and more convinced that fasting is a pivotal practice for those that wish to penetrate the numbness and begin to feel again.

Thoughts?

The Lost Art of Lament

Last night we engaged in an ancient form of prayer and worship called lament.  It was an incredible night of exposing our souls to God, and I got the impression that for many, new horizons of possibility for bringing the pain and anguish of their hearts to brutally honest expression were opened up ... We noted especially that lament is a daring theological maneuver, in that it presupposes there actually IS someone who is listening, that that person is not offended by our honest, even abrasive speech towards him, that in fact he invites it, and that our rage does not need to take us outside of him, but can and should actually take place within him.

Not the sort of thing we are used to ... But I tend to think that real redemption is only possible when we dare to journey THROUGH our pain, rather than around it

(This certainly is part of the meaning of the cross)

Thoughts?