Learning to Lament

It happened again. 

Another senseless act of evil. This time in Manchester. The terrorization of people going about their daily lives, enjoying a concert—someone like me. I see my own fear in their faces. 

Our response is automatic by now. We raise our fists first to God, then to the politicians and leaders—all conspirators who seemingly allowed the tragedy by their incompetence or inaction.

We search for reasoning that satisfies the cause-and-effect simplicity we require.

We want to grieve with logic and leave our tears out of the equation.

We attempt to move on without the pain-filled prayers that eek out of us more in the form of a groan than a recognizable articulation.

We shake our fists full of questions at God and look to the best among us who write beautiful, biblically-informed things about national and international tragedies: surely the scripturally winsome can enable us to put aside the time-consuming work of lament.

But God didn’t write a book explaining why evil events happen, why children die, or why suffering overtakes our lives. Instead he took on tear ducts and brought them eternally into the Trinity so he could cry our tears with us.

Today’s Christians, all people really, don’t know how to lament because we have not been taught. We attempt to close our eyes and blindly stride through life in a parade of celebration rather than follow the call to live as Christ did—weeping with those who weep. Now it’s time we learn.

Lament feels the distance between your pain and your understanding of God.

Tears should find their way to the space between our hurt and who we think God is. In asking God why bad things happen to good people we put God on trial. Our best theologies wrestle as defenses for God’s goodness despite our lived experiences of Manchester or Orlando or cancer.

In contrast, lament sits in the space of unanswerable questions voicing the un-rightness of our world—our brother’s mourning, our sister’s mourning, and our self mourning. God is not simply a fix for this problem.

Words may be useless.

Even the voicing of lament will fall short, but lament chooses to remain in the suffering even with nothing to say. Lament takes Christ down off the cross and silently, bafflingly, carries his body to the grave. It waits through the anxious days of Friday and Saturday when all hope and words fail and fail again.

Voice reality.

Silence allows a new reality to arise, a reality in which clichés ring hollow. The cliché-maker abstracts hope by healing an abstract hurt.

Silence and grief, though, make space for the Holy Spirit working. And space for Christ weeping alongside the weeping world. When we ignore suffering and do not give voice to this new reality we miss this mystery of God’s presence among his people. We miss God.

Lament may well begin with an angry question for God to answer about God’s goodness. These questions, however, fade as we learn to sit in sorrow, even if one day all will be well, because lament knows the cheapness of a resurrection where death does not exist. Lament thus speaks the reality of our raw hurts abrasively, without smoothing down their sharp and painful edges.

Accept the limitations of being human.

Humanity teeters on the edge of tragedy and death unable to escape vulnerability. Lament makes space for the hard work of staring unblinkingly in the face of our being “only human.” We cannot fix our limitations. We struggle and strive to cover over them with all sorts of inventions trying to fool ourselves into thinking they have disappeared.

The greatest action of the Trinity did not seek to remove vulnerability. Instead God became limited. Before the magic of spit-and-mud healings and before the transformation of bodily resurrection, the incarnation accepts the limitations of thin skin and blood that leaks and leaks and does not return. The incarnation accepts bruises and betrayal not as obstacles to dodge or hurdle and leave behind, but as the bodies that make us. In accepting a first breath, the incarnation embraces death.

Our narratives of power cannot protect us from the rhythms of death that accompany life. In confessing this we begin to move toward Christ. Lament offers no explanation for suffering, as God offered no explanation to Job, as Christ did not immediately and forever do away with hurts. Instead, it abandons itself to the weakness of questions.

Sit with. Don’t fix for.

Platitudes of hope isolate the mourner, and pity builds walls to block out lamenting. Rather than presuming an answer, a fix, lament creates an open space between the hurt and the helper—holy ground, not to enter lightly. A space of lament invites the mourner to speak, to share her individual hurt. A lament space invites the helper to listen, to hear and sit with the particularities of the mourner’s pain.

Seeking a covenant of lament, vulnerability cries out in the night for someone to be with in the darkness, because enduring pain alone leads to despair. The listener commits her presence, not a flashlight. Lament-as-covenant recognizes the primacy of Immanuel, God with us, and participates in Christ’s suffering for the redemption of the world.

Calling God to Look and Remember

In giving voice to lament we call God to remember his covenant and character. We feel God’s absence and long for God’s presence. We invoke Immanuel. The goodness of God showed brightest in Christ’s death on the cross. This strange goodness was revealed in the strength of Christ weeping before the tomb of Lazarus and weeping over the city of Jerusalem even as the crowds shouted, “Hosanna!”

The Body of Christ

Tragedies such as what happened in Manchester shake us up because they poke a hole in the façade of a perfect and mostly risk-averse life—one without any need to grieve apart from the “normal” events like the death of a parent.

Rushing to make a case for the goodness of God in light of an event on the other side of an ocean is easier than following the call to live as Christ did—weeping with those who weep. In learning to lament we both step into our own pain and the pain of the world around us. Only then can the church be the body of Christ in the world.