“Holy Week invites us into a world full of betrayal, abandonment, violence, and
ultimately death,” writes Christine Valters Paintner in her blog this week. Today we begin
walking into a time full of pain and grief and sorrow. Or, to be more exact, making sacred space
for wrestling with pain and grief and sorrow. In this week we make sacred space for looking at
suffering and death. Sacred space for remembering that spirituality is not simply about
happiness and feeling good.
Perhaps you’ve heard it before: we can’t get to new life without death. We can’t get to
Easter without Good Friday. We can’t get to full joy without deep lament.
That’s an alien concept in white Western culture. The dominant milieu demands that
we always feel upbeat and optimistic. If we don’t, we’re supposed to go out and buy
something. Or numb ourselves. Or feel ashamed at a supposed failure to feel fine. Or lash out.
Weeping and tears and grief get shoved aside, even derided sometimes. We generally don’t
make room for lament for ourselves or the world around us.
The week ahead of us is full of lament: weeping and wailing women. Tears. Grief.
Fearful prayer. Horrific death. Suffering.
And the world around us needs our lament. The world needs us to weep and grieve. To
wail and moan. To let tears flow freely. The First Nations version of the New Testament
suggests that when Jesus wept over Jerusalem, “He could taste the salt from his tears as he
opened his mouth in anguish.” Christ knows there is much to weep over. Endlessly.
I know that sometimes I have felt like if I ever started to cry over all there is to lament in
my personal sphere and in the world, I might never stop.
We know there is much to weep over. Wars. Genocide. Hate and bigotry of many
stripes and the death they breed. Domestic violence and abuse. Street violence.
Environmental devastation. Poverty and homelessness. Xenophobic fear.
Today’s scripture reminds us that stopping to weep and lament and wail in grief for the
world’s suffering is a sacred practice. We do not know the things that make for peace. The
Holy One weeps for us. We need to weep as well. The world needs lament.
And we don’t understand this at all.
Perhaps we think that lament serves no purpose. It doesn’t do anything. Or that it
speaks, mainly, of despair and hopelessness.
In a book called This Here Flesh, Cole Arthur Riley challenges this perspective repeatedly.
In this book, Riley weaves together her family’s history of slavery, abuse, suffering, and
addiction and extracts the wisdom and spirit from it. She doesn’t send a sweet and safe
message of overcoming. Instead, she invites us excavate our lives honestly and painfully in
order to dwell in all of its fullness. Including lament.
“At some point you must ask yourself,” she says, “are you so committed to the delusion
of positivity that you will stand by unmoved as those who bear the image of Christ cry out in
pain? Will you walk past the tears of Christ, pretending not to notice?” (102).
“We will not heal divorced from our emotions,” she declares.
We can’t heal ourselves or the world unless we enter and express the deep pain within
ourselves and all around us. We can’t heal unless we lament.
And sometimes events in the world surprise us into touching our own pain and lament.
For example, Riley tells of her father watching the space shuttle Challenger take off and
explode into oblivion almost forty years ago. “My father didn’t know how to grieve [the violent
deaths of friends] until the whole world stopped and grieved” (104). Likewise, grieving for the
world can stir lament for our own lives. And Christ weeps with us and for us.
Christ weeps with us and for us because “In lament our task is never to convince
someone of the brokenness of this world; it is to convince them of the world’s worth in the first
place. True lament,” says Riley, is born from the conviction that, “the world is worthy of
goodness” (98).
Our lives and the lives of those we love are worthy of goodness. So we weep. So Christ
weeps. The life of the world and all its inhabitants are worthy of goodness. So we weep. So
Christ weeps. Lament is an act of love. Lament is an act of hope. Riley writes that “Lament
itself is a form of hope. It’s an innate awareness that what is should not be.” In lament we
acknowledge the world crumbling around us and we wrestle with our pain and “something is
written in our hearts that tells us what we are meant for” (101).
We are meant for joy, and lament is a way of getting there.
We are meant for compassion, and lament is a way of discovering it.
We are meant for love, and lament is a way of befriending what gets in the way.
We are meant for shalom, and lament bears witness to its barriers.
In lament, we weep with Jesus and share in his love and hope for the world. And for
ourselves. And we can share in the spirit of this prayer by m. jade keiser:
Gentle Presence,
Patient Listener,
Holy Holder of it all,
My prayer is this:
I am so sad.
It’s not an ask.
It’s not a confession.
It’s an offering.
The only one I have today.
I’m praying it with hope.
I know grief is a lifeline—
tethering me to the world that should be.
The one worth fighting for.
As a practice of faith
I will not deaden these feelings
that let me know all is not well.
I will not adjust to cruelty or disregard for life,
detaching myself from humanity—mine or others.
I will not allow once unimaginable scenarios
to be turned in everyday losses
that no longer pierce my soul.
And so here are my tears,
and here is my tired body,
and here is my foggy, distracted mind
bearing witness to the place within
that aches for the ones I love,
for friends and strangers,
for everyone being pushed into impossible situations.
My sadness is a testimony.
It is not my only one.
Tomorrow, hope or fight or curiosity
will bear their truth,
and pull me back from the labors I love,
in the company of others.
But today the only riot in me is this sorrow,
refusing to quiet your cry from within:
“We are made for so much better than this.”
Christ knew we are made for so much better than this. We are made for the ways of peace.
May we learn to lament its absence, and weep with the love of the Holy One within us and
beside us.
-Rev. Ruth Moerdyk