Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: IVP Formatio
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
We need to rediscover lament to heal and hope again. We've lost the practice of lament. Most people don't know how to process personal or communal mourning and instead struggle to honor their tears, vulnerability, and the full weight of these disillusioning times. But tending our grief might be exactly what we need to reimagine a way forward. Tracing her difficult experiences of a catastrophic home fire, a threat to her child's well-being, and other devastating losses and upheavals, Terra McDaniel offers a clear framework for expressing heartache and burdens. McDaniel says, "Lament is surprisingly hopeful. As strange as that may sound now, I promise it's true. It's an act of trust both that we can face pain and survive, and that God cares about our anger, confusion, doubt, grief, and fear. Lament refuses to bury pain or, just as dangerous, to give in to despair." Hopeful Lament makes space for the powerful act of crying out before a loving God and offers provoking reflection questions, embodied practices, and applications for families with children. Learn how to journey gently through suffering.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 255
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
For my grandchildren, Sutton and William. This is your story. May you experience God’s kindness in seasons of joy and also when you encounter loss. May you know that you are, above all else, beloved.
For my godchildren, Myles and Simone. This is also your story. May liberation flow to and through you. May you know and be known by Love in every step.
For all who have loved, lost, and found the courage to keep loving. May these pages be a homecoming. May you find new ways to tend your grief and fresh hope within and beyond it.
And for my grandson Isaiah, who we will see in heaven. You know the fullness of which I’ve written far better than I. I look forward to meeting you someday.
Contents
Introduction
When the Last Resort Is the Only Choice
Blessed are those who mourn,
For they shall be comforted.
ONE AUGUST AFTERNOON, my mother-in-law accidentally set our house on fire. The temperature was over 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius), and there was a drought. The fire hydrant near our home turned out to be broken, which made it necessary to connect with another one much farther away—that ruined any chance of saving our home. Recovering and rebuilding after that loss and countless other heartbreaks over more than a decade, I have learned to lament.
I don’t believe anyone just wakes up one day with some inescapable wish to grieve. People don’t study it because of its intrinsic interest. We don’t want to engage it experientially because of its natural appeal. It’s the kind of thing that most of us, me included, resist. Lament tends to be a last resort because it involves pain and loss and unanswerable questions.
We turn to lament when life demands it. When there is nothing else to do but sprinkle dust in our hair, rip off (and maybe tear up) garments of normalcy or celebration, and let our tears fall. If you are reading these words, you or someone you care about might be grieving something profound. My hope is that this book can be a companion as you heal and discover the life you’re invited to within the grief and on the other side of what has been lost.
My encouragement is to take it all slowly. Be gentle with yourself as you enter vulnerable places. Invite a few close friends and family into what you’re learning and experiencing. You might also find it helpful, even necessary, to include a trustworthy therapist or spiritual director into the process with you. Most of all, I pray you’ll feel the freedom to invite the presence of the One who draws near to the brokenhearted into your experience.
Lament Is Essential
Lament tells the truth about what is. It refuses to ignore pain and injustice. It won’t turn its face away from the realities of losing something or someone precious. It is an expression of love. Lament allows sorrow to be expressed, both to honor beloveds we’ve lost and to honor the gap left in our communities and our souls by their absence.
In the apparently ever-expanding Marvel universe, a quirky series called WandaVision was released in early 2021, which at first glance appears to be nothing more than a nostalgic dance through the history of sitcoms starring two superheroes. It turned out to be a thoughtful and timely means of addressing grief.
When Vision, attempting to comfort Wanda as she spoke of feeling overwhelmed by her brother’s death, asked, “What is grief, if not love persevering?” the moment went viral. Many called it the defining moment of the series.1 It’s no mystery why those words resonated profoundly: Wanda’s experience echoed what was happening in the world. Alisha Grauso wrote, “She has not been able to properly grieve for her compounding losses, instead forced to carry on in her duty to others, forced to carry on in her role . . . not given the chance to slow down and fully process all that she has needed to” mourn.2
Like Wanda, we have been grieving. You and those you love have lived through your own losses, large and small. Some of those must be healed over time. In the past several years, people I care for have experienced cancer and marriage challenges. Some have lived through the sudden death of children and marriage partners due to illness, accidents, and gun violence. Others have struggled with depression and addiction. My heart has been heavy for loved ones carrying extraordinary weights of loss and grief.
Some of you reading this have experienced the death of a loved one and are learning how to survive with the ache of their absence. Some of you are living on the other side of a heartbreaking divorce. Or you’re enduring the more hidden grief of infertility or miscarriage, or a painful season of parenting when the energy and means to love your child well has been hard to find. Some of you love someone who is struggling with addiction or mental illness. You have been betrayed in your work or hurt by a church community. Some of you are being invited to bring past abuse into healing light. Others are waking up to what is yours to do to address systemic racism or human trafficking or unhoused neighbors or the ways people are harming the earth; or you’re healing from the personal experience of one of those horrors. Some are living with the kind of heartache that is difficult even to whisper out loud.
I have no doubt that for some of you reading these words, if the last two paragraphs were a checklist, you would have marked it multiple times. You’re living with pain and loss that touches many areas of your world, making the hard but good work of lament all the more essential but also more difficult and complex. Some of you are accompanying others through grief as a pastor, counselor, spiritual director, or other type of helper, even as you carry your own grief. And I hope you know that if what you’re grieving isn’t reflected here, that doesn’t make it any less real and meaningful.
Lamenting What We’ve Lived Through Together
Beyond the undeniable weight of personal tragedies is what we’ve lived through together. The past years have been exhausting with crisis piling upon crisis. Our world has been decimated by a global pandemic for the first time in a century. News of a novel coronavirus began to emerge in December 2019, and only a month later the virus was declared a global health emergency.3 Weeks after I’d jotted down that one of my hopes for the year was to travel more, people were advised to shelter in place around the world.
We started social distancing and relearning how to wash our hands. But that wasn’t enough to slow the spread of the disease. By March, the World Health Organization designated the outbreak a global pandemic.4 Children started homeschooling and adults began working from home. And as we sheltered in place and prayed that we and those we love wouldn’t get sick, some of them did. Many lost friends or family, often without a chance to say goodbye. Funerals became small affairs, sometimes without being able to gather in person.5
A little over a year after the first whispers of a new illness originating in Wuhan, China, nearly 125 million people had gotten sick and 2,746,397 had died.6 Life expectancy in the United States had declined by a full year due to Covid-19, the largest drop since World War II.7 The losses were more extreme for people of color, with Black Americans’ life expectancy dropping by over two and half years and Hispanic Americans’ dropping by nearly two years. By March 2021, over 500,000 Americans had died from Covid-19, more than the number who died in World War I or II or in the Korean or Vietnam wars.8
And the tragically steady diet of disasters has been exacerbated by hate, violence, racism, fear, and division. Families and friendships have been disrupted by very different understandings of events, fueled by social media echo chambers and conspiracy theories. It all brings to mind Jesus’ chilling proclamation that “one’s foes will be members of one’s own household” (Matthew 10:36); he was echoing a passage in Micah 7 that describes widespread bribery, perversions of justice, and corruption.
Particularly for those in the United States, the #MeToo and #ChurchToo movements have served as an unmasking. And between March and June of 2020, for the first time in its history, more than half of the calls to the National Sexual Abuse Hotline were placed by minors as children were trapped at home with their abusers due to stay-at-home orders.9
We’ve also lived through what has been referred to as a racial reckoning in the United States and abroad.10 The brokenness and evil of racism that has harmed my marginalized brothers and sisters in overt and subtle ways is not new. But the Unite the Right Rally in 2017, in which white supremacists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, served as one flashpoint among several igniting an era of heightened awareness of racialized and police violence.11
In spring 2020, after an officer knelt on George Floyd’s neck for over eight minutes, his very public death along with that of several other unarmed men and women of color, particularly at the hands of police, began to capture attention and outrage in a new way. Protests erupted in Minneapolis and then around the United States and globally. Reports indicate that at least fifteen, and up to twenty-six, million people in the United States participated in demonstrations.12
And hate crimes against Asian Americans rose by nearly 150 percent during the pandemic.13 This was related in part to anti-Asian rhetoric associated with Covid-19. On March 16, 2021, a young white man killed eight people (six of whom were of Asian descent) at three different Atlanta massage parlors.14
Meanwhile, Syria has been at war for a decade, resulting in more than half of the country being displaced, widespread destruction, and countless lives lost.15 Rohingya Muslims were targeted for slaughter in Myanmar.16 The Israeli-Palestinian conflict was reignited with deadly results, including for children.17 The psalmist’s cry of “How long, O Lord” is as achingly timely as ever (Psalm 13:1-2).
All that pain and death and division and destruction touching so many areas of life. Even reading about these events may have left you with a weight on your chest or a lump in your throat. Of course, I’ve left out countless details and important facts. And all this doesn’t include your own experience of loss, but it does surface the larger context your suffering has occurred within and may shed light on why your grief might have felt particularly difficult and persistent. Which makes this a good moment, by the way, to take a deep breath, let your shoulders drop, and say a quiet prayer for yourself and all who have lived through these personal and corporate griefs.
We need to know how to lament. We need to know it is possible to engage safely, that grief can be practiced in a way that does not overpower but rather frees us. If we refuse to lament, we will not be able to move on without carrying brokenness, or trauma, that will replay unprocessed pain in and around us. Lament is about giving grief—and the love hidden within it—a way to be expressed so that it doesn’t end up doing violence to us or those around us. In that way, lament is a life-affirming gift.
How We Forgot Lament
But many of us in the West have forgotten how to lament. It didn’t happen overnight. The word, and so it seems its practice, slipped away slowly.18Lament and similar words like mourn, grieve, and sorrow started appearing in English literature less and less frequently starting in 1800. Around the year 2005, they all dropped off even further to become virtually nonexistent on our pages, leaving a gap in the way grief and loss are (not) processed. I think this reveals something important about our cultural willingness, and even our capacity, to face and process pain. There has been a slight resurgence of lament and related terms in recent years in American publications. But the gap remains.
Part of the absence of lament might have to do with the fact that we tend to live longer and (thank God) must bury fewer of our children than was true before the nineteenth century; but fewer is not none. If you are mourning the loss of a child, my prayer is that you’ll feel held in the ache of your grief. Our discomfort with sorrow is likely also connected to an Enlightenment sense of independence and greater disconnection from communities that both celebrate and mourn together. Charles Taylor points out that in the premodern world “the common weal [good] was [understood to be] bound up in collective rites, devotions, allegiances.”19 This is much less true in our hyper-individualized society. Loneliness was being called an epidemic even before years of extraordinary isolation and disconnection due to the pandemic.20 Since processing the pain associated with complex losses can begin as an individual endeavor but doesn’t often remain so, our separation has made it harder for us to grieve well.
There is no doubt that our widespread amnesia with respect to lament also has to do with the obsession with forward thinking and positivity that characterized much of the twentieth century in the West. The belief that humanity was destined to keep getting better was shaken but not broken by things like the Spanish flu, the Great Depression, and two world wars. Along with an overreliance on optimism, a resistance to and even denial of negative emotions grew within parts of the church as well as the larger culture. As Henri Nouwen said, “Who wants to be reminded of their weaknesses and limitations, doubts and uncertainties? Who wants to confess that God cannot be understood, that human experience is not explainable?”21
But loss and suffering and uncertainty are part of life. To deny the hard ultimately also diminishes the beautiful. In the Christian story, death comes before resurrection. As John O’Donohue wrote, “Light cannot see inside things. That is what the dark is for: minding the interior, nurturing the draw of growth through the places where death in its own way turns into life.”22
Lament refuses to bury pain or, just as dangerous, to give in to despair. It is an ancient practice lost in many modern contexts, at least among grownups who feel awkward wailing in public. And it’s essential to embrace in a season of abundant loss and pain. Grief is sometimes framed as negativity or immature faith, but it is vital we be present to sorrow before healing can be sustainable.
Engaging Lament
It is high time to reclaim the gift many of us have lost. We must rediscover what has been forgotten. Some, particularly among the marginalized and oppressed, never lost the practice of lamenting because the realities of their lives didn’t allow it. Part of the good work ahead will be to continue learning from the hard-won wisdom of those who have faced grief head on. And for all of us, it is to remember that God welcomes the full range of our experience. It’s human to celebrate. And it’s just as human to grieve when there’s suffering or injustice. Lament is more than mentally acknowledging the reality of loss or pain. It’s holding our grief and letting ourselves fully experience it instead of numbing or ignoring it, hoping it will go away. It’s about tuning into the emotional and embodied experience of heartache and bringing all of that into the loving presence of the Holy.
Each chapter that follows includes stories of how engaging lament can help you and your loved ones heal, and offers practices to try. My hope is that you will add your own wisdom and experience and creativity to practicing lament as you go. I encourage you to experiment, coming up with ways that work for you. And please invite trusted friends and community into all of it. There is power and healing in sharing our pain with others and with the Spirit.
Lament isn’t a magic wand or a one-time fix. It is a practice we’re invited to: embodied rituals to return to as often as we need, layered in with other habits of grounding and prayer that help us connect with God and our own souls. Lament can address personal pain and losses. And it is something we can practice together when facing communal losses.
As you proceed, remember that lament is heavy lifting. It is restful in one very real sense because it means we’re not denying or distancing from what’s really happening. But at the same time, it can be hard and even scary work at times. With its complexity and unknowns, it might feel like grief will overwhelm you because it’s so big at times.
That means engaging lament will sometimes require a surprising measure of energy. There might be moments when you are tempted to bury this book and forget it. You might even be tempted to throw it across the room. It will mean cultivating resilience to engage complicated and painful emotions. As you stay with me in reclaiming (or going deeper into) the difficult yet indispensable act of practicing lament, trust it will be worth it.
Jan Richardson, a contemplative Christian well acquainted with grief, wrote that loss might require some undoing. She said, “Some things you have protected may want to be laid bare . . . though it may be hard to see it now, . . . this is where you will receive your life again.”23 I encourage you to dip your toes in and take small sips of these things. Be gentle with yourself. Allow lament to become part of a rhythm of practices that help you stay present to what’s true, while remaining connected to grace and hope. Whatever your history, wherever you come from, you are welcome to this good and holy and necessary work.
And know this—lament is surprisingly hopeful. As strange as that may sound now, I promise it’s true. It’s an act of trust both that we can face pain and survive, and that God cares about our anger, confusion, doubt, grief, and fear. And when we’re not stuck suppressing or spiraling in grief, we’re freed up to act for goodness and freedom and justice.
Ashes for Beauty
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
You must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
Catches the thread of all sorrows
And you see the size of the cloth.
AS THE FLAMES OF OUR HOUSEFIRE were making their way through my daughter’s carefully preserved keepsakes and the shelves of our beloved books, our ordinarily cranky neighbor stood outside sobbing for us. My dazed father-in-law wandered around the yard looking for his socks. And I was barefoot in 100-degree heat, holding my phone.
In the midst of the chaos, I tweeted a message from the book of Job: “The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21 CSB).
I must have been in shock. I remember cracking a joke with our youth pastor as orange flames roared through the roof and blackened the limestone walls of our home. He wore the blank expression of a deer in headlights, while I was recalling a funny moment from several years prior. On that earlier night, the fire department had been erroneously summoned when commuters noticed an unexpectedly lively bonfire, meant for spiritual contemplation and roasting s’mores, in our backyard. I imagine I sounded crazed to chuckle while my house was being consumed behind me. Or maybe I seemed flippant, like I couldn’t care less about what was happening.
When I think about that post today, I’m not sorry I shared it. But just as that proclamation was only the beginning of Job’s journey through pain and loss and sometimes misguided comforters, so it was for my family and me. I think where people of faith often get it wrong is to stop with praise or trust like Job’s. Or, just as harmful, to fast-forward to Job’s encounter with God that leads to his confession of God’s sovereignty and power, which is quickly followed with his restoration. As if the lives of his newborn children could replace his sons and daughters who died. As if all that came in between—the aching and the questions and confusion—are incidental. They aren’t. They are essential parts of a mysterious and perplexing story with a troubling end. And I love that the Bible doesn’t turn its face away from any of it. We do so at our peril.
An Ancient Source of Help . . . and Hard Questions
Job is a book of poetry that describes the life of a righteous man and his experience of suffering and loss. What those of us reading his story know—that Job’s friends did not—is that Job was innocent. Was he, were they, being tormented to settle a divine argument about why Job worshiped God? Satan argued Job was faithful because of God’s provision of wealth, vitality, and family. But God maintained Job was blameless and gave Satan freedom to take everything he had—and he did exactly that. Job’s oxen, donkeys, sheep, camels, and his children all died violently in a single horrific day. Messengers arrived, one after the other, to tell Job about attacking Sabeans, wildfires, Chaldeans, and windstorms.
And Job refused to blame God. He got up, tore his clothes, shaved his head, and called out, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there; the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21). That response to suffering and loss leaves me in awe every time. I copied some of those words when my house was on fire, but I can’t say that I grasp what they really mean, then or now. There is a steel and grace in them that is beyond me.
Job’s and his unnamed wife’s misery wasn’t over yet. God again pointed out Job to the Accuser. He asked him to notice how Job still honored God and turned away from evil. Satan snorted in derision, “Take his health and you’ll see how quickly he turns against you.” Again, God allowed it. Job’s wife told him to give up. She figured death was better than the kind of life in which the Divine seemed to want him to suffer.
Job’s friends heard the news and left their homes to comfort him. From a distance, he was so disfigured they didn’t recognize him. They cried for him. And then they did precisely what was needed—they met him where he was in his grief.
In the film What Dreams May Come, Robin Williams and Annabella Sciorra play bereaved parents trying to figure out how to live again after losing their two beloved children in a car crash. It’s a story of the afterlife filled with rich images drawn from various faith traditions and literature, including Dante’s visions of heaven and hell. When the mother, Annie, isn’t able to cope, she commits suicide and is condemned to hell. Her husband, Chris, refuses to abandon her there and risks his sanity to try and find her.
When he does, he’s struck with the revelation that it wasn’t her grief but rather his refusal to allow either of them to fully mourn their children that separated them. Sitting with her in what looks like the ruins of their home on earth, he recognizes he was part of the problem; “Not because I remind you [of them]. But because I couldn’t join you.”1 In the film, his belated willingness to meet her in the fullness of her grief and engage his own unlocks a healing connection that ultimately frees them both.
Like Chris, Job’s friends didn’t simply observe from a polite distance. They joined him in his grief. They tore their robes as Job had rent his. They covered themselves with dust as he was covered in ashes. They sat with him in silence. After a week, Job was ready to say something.
And what he said is breathtaking. He cursed the day of his birth—because never having lived seemed better than surviving within his loss and pain. Or if he must have been born at all, why couldn’t he have died at birth since he would be with those who were now at rest? He wailed, “Why is light given to one who cannot see the way, whom God has fenced in? For my sighing comes like my bread, and my groanings are poured out like water. Truly the thing that I fear comes upon me, and what I dread befalls me” (Job 3:23-25). His cries of agony will be familiar to all who have known grief. His words and his actions are part of the excruciating truth-telling that grief requires: it’s called lament.
Moving Through Grief
It’s never a good sign when people start comparing your life to a biblical figure known for pervasive suffering. But that’s what started happening to my family a few years before our house fire. Things were falling apart, and our once tight-knit family connections were significantly strained.
We had just reached a new, more-settled normal and were trying to embrace hope for the future. My daughter and I had just gotten matching tattoos of the word hope alongside a swallow in flight, inspired by Psalm 62:5-6. And then, our house burned to the ground. We had much to lament.
Ancient practices like Job’s, lost or forgotten in many modern cultures, also appear in the Gospel story of Jairus’s daughter. That’s the story of a local synagogue leader who seeks Jesus’ help for his ailing daughter. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all tell the story of Jesus agreeing to help and following Jairus toward his home before being interrupted by another healing, that of a woman who’d been hemorrhaging for twelve long years. After pausing to affirm her faith, Jesus continued on his way.
But it was too late. When they arrived at the leader’s home, the girl had already died. Their friends and neighbors had gathered to grieve, crying loudly and playing music to mark her loss. When Jesus told the mourners she wasn’t dead, their tears vanished and they started laughing. In the past, I assumed their performance of grief was by definition insincere and took their apparently mocking laughter as evidence of that fact. Similar practices of enacting grief, like wearing rough clothing, tearing garments, and pouring on ashes, also seemed inauthentic and overly dramatized to me.
But I’ve come to believe that practices like these and the inner healing work they’re connected with are essential. Lament is more than mentally acknowledging the reality of loss or pain. It’s holding our grief and letting ourselves fully experience it instead of numbing or ignoring it, hoping it will go away. Spoiler—it won’t.
Lament is carrying our questions and complaints before the Spirit of God. It is expressing pain in an embodied way where it doesn’t turn into violence directed at ourselves or anyone else. And there’s no question it’s something many of us have to learn how to do. James K. A. Smith says, “Mourning takes practice.”2 It doesn’t come naturally to most of us.
But the alternative is to bury our grief or anguish so that it becomes toxic to ourselves or those around us. This can be true for individuals and families, and even entire nations. Pain can make us so hypervigilant about avoiding more of it that we miss out on life around us. Grief can make it harder to learn from our mistakes.3 Unresolved pain and anxiety can cause us to exaggerate the risk of bad outcomes.4 Trauma is intense grief related to an overwhelming event or series of experiences. It changes us physically: recalibrating our brains, increasing stress hormones, altering systems that help us distinguish relevant and irrelevant input, and “compromises the brain area that communicates the physical, embodied feeling of being alive.”5 When you remember trauma, your body experiences it as if it’s happening again.6
Therapist Resmaa Menakem distinguishes between what he calls “clean pain” and “dirty pain.” Dirty pain avoids, blames, and denies. It is an overflow of unhealed wounds that makes people prone to lash out or run away. It always creates more suffering. Clean pain still hurts, of course, but it is pain that can mend and create growth. When “the body metabolizes clean pain, the self becomes freer and more capable,” with access to insight and energy no longer needed to focus on grief.7 Lament is clean pain. It is a way of taking ourselves as whole people—with bodies, souls, and spirits—seriously.
Permission to Grieve
I’m sorry to say that I used to disparage stories of people escaping fires without taking as much as a photo album with them. If it were me, I’d grab at least a few important papers or family photos, I’d think to myself, not realizing how cold and unkind or downright wrong I was. When I heard my mother-in-law yelling, clearly frightened, I stepped out of my bedroom and saw a wall of orange flame outside the kitchen window. I raised my eyes farther and saw sparks beginning to shower into our study that held a collection of books my husband and I had been carefully curating since we’d gotten married two decades before.
I’d just thrown on clothes after showering, so I was stepping outside with wet hair and bare feet. I had time to make sure my family was outside and to grab my purse and our twenty-five-pound French bulldog. My hands were shaking so badly I
