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?