The Earthiness and Wonder of Lament
How the laments woven throughout the Psalms teach us to pray with honesty, hope, and mystery
Truthfully, this post has been in my thoughts for weeks, but the discipline to sit down and actually WRITE about lament has been lacking. I’d like to blame it on the recent power outages here in Northern California (we had FOUR of them, three of which were back-to-back, for a grand total of 9 days without power in the month of October!), or even the very busy season of life and ministry that we’re in this fall. But really, it’s because I’d rather remain distracted than acknowledge the need for lament, even in my own life. It’s so deeply personal, and all too real.
As a culture, we can be quite averse to lamenting. When someone expresses their sorrow or pain or doubt, we can be quick to offer cliche responses like, “Things will get better." "You’ll look back on this years from now and be grateful, because everything happens for a reason.” “God doesn’t give us more than we can handle.” (I literally cringed as I typed that last one.) Though co-lamenting seems the natural response, most often I give in to the temptation to circumvent or minimize it, as though I have to immediately come to the conclusion that God will somehow make something sweet out of bitter circumstances. I can have such a hard time sitting with another person in their pain that it’s no wonder I’d rather avoid or narcotize my own!
Earthy Words
And yet, in God’s word to us, we find lament after lament, cry after cry, complaint after complaint. Within the Psalms, the book that gives us our language of prayer, is mostly made of laments, whether they are first-person or communal cries out to God to see our suffering. The questions of “Why?” and “How long?” and “Where are you, God?” are so familiar:
Psalm 13:1-2: “How long, LORD? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me?”
Psalm 10:1: “Why, LORD, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?”
Psalm 22:1-2: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish? My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer, by night, but I find no rest.”
Psalm 42:3: “My tears have been my food day and night, while people say to me all day long, ‘Where is your God?’”
These words are the language of prayer, friends. God actually wants us to pray this way! He invites us to pray with honesty, even when it’s ugly and uncomfortable, even irreverent. In Out of the Depths, Bernhard Anderson calls the Psalter “earthy,” in that “all the moods and passions of human life find expression here. The psalms do not point to a transhistorical world of pure ideals—the good, the true, and the beautiful; rather, they are concerned with the historical scene of change, struggle, and suffering where God meets people and lays a claim upon them” (p. 88). I love that. The psalms are “earthy,” raw, dirty, organic.
The words of Psalm 22:14-15 come to mind: “I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint; my heart has turned to wax; it has melted within me. My mouth is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth; you lay me in the dust of death” (NIV). Eugene Peterson calls this “primal speech” in his book on praying the Psalms: “When we engage in the act of prayer itself, there is no preparing, no getting the right words, no posture to take, no mood to assume. We simply do it. Prayer is primal speech. We do not first learn how to do it, and then proceed to do it; we do it, and in the doing we find out what we are doing, and then deepen and mature in it” (Answering God, p. 35).
The freedom to come before my God, with every emotion I’m experiencing, no matter how human, is astounding to me. What a gift, to know that my feelings matter to God! But even more astonishing is freedom in knowing that no matter what I may feel, even when God seems so far off and I’m drowning in doubt, He is there.
The psalmists fearlessly tell God when He feels distant and that circumstances aren’t right or fair, but they also prayed with a stubborn, persistent conviction that God would show Himself faithful.
Hope and Wonder
Lament creates this space to live in this in-between, liminal reality of the world’s brokenness and God’s faithfulness. This collision of lament with hope is all over the psalms, because lament is rooted in the concept of hesed. This Hebrew word most often translated as “lovingkindness,” “covenant faithfulness,” or “steadfast love” refers to God’s loyal covenant with His people. It’s a word that scholars have struggled to properly translate into English, because try as we might, no English words can sufficiently communicate its meaning. God is always faithful, even when we are not, and he promises that even if we feel forsaken, He will never leave us. Hesed is the reason we can lament. God grants us freedom to cry out to Him, to tell Him that life isn’t fair and we don’t understand why He’s allowing certain things to happen, because His love will not fail. Lament, then, is deeply rooted in trust, in hope.
A few weeks ago, I was texting a friend and wrote these words: “Hope is one of those beautiful, stubborn things that I can’t let go of. Even if I lose it for a minute, hope always sneaks back in.” Bryan and I have been in a long season of waiting for the Lord to move, and the lament of waiting has become all too familiar. The words of Psalm 27 have been a great comfort to me, as it’s a psalm that seems to ride the up-and-down, back-and-forth rollercoaster of lament and hope, fear and faith, waiting and trust. The whole psalm, but the last few verses in particular, have been hitting a tender place in my heart these days:
The LORD is my light and my salvation—
whom shall I fear?
The LORD is the stronghold of my life—
of whom shall I be afraid?
When the wicked advance against me
to devour me,
it is my enemies and my foes
who will stumble and fall.
Though an army besiege me,
my heart will not fear;
though war break out against me,
even then I will be confident.
One thing I ask from the LORD,
this only do I seek:
that I may dwell in the house of the LORD
all the days of my life,
to gaze on the beauty of the LORD
and to seek him in his temple.
For in the day of trouble
he will keep me safe in his dwelling;
he will hide me in the shelter of his sacred tent
and set me high upon a rock.
Then my head will be exalted
above the enemies who surround me;
at his sacred tent I will sacrifice with shouts of joy;
I will sing and make music to the LORD.
Hear my voice when I call, LORD;
be merciful to me and answer me.
My heart says of you, “Seek his face!”
Your face, LORD, I will seek.
Do not hide your face from me,
do not turn your servant away in anger;
you have been my helper.
Do not reject me or forsake me,
God my Savior.
Though my father and mother forsake me,
the LORD will receive me.
Teach me your way, LORD;
lead me in a straight path
because of my oppressors.
Do not turn me over to the desire of my foes,
for false witnesses rise up against me,
spouting malicious accusations.
I remain confident of this:
I will see the goodness of the LORD
in the land of the living.
Wait for the LORD;
be strong and take heart
and wait for the LORD. (NIV)
It’s not a straight line from lament to hope. Once again, Eugene Peterson nails it: "In the lives we actually live and in which the Psalms teach us to pray, experiences of lament are not organized into the first week of each month, followed the second week by experiences of thanksgiving. Experience arrives randomly. Jack-grief and Jill-pain tumble over one another down the same hillside. Doubt and faith are in a wrestling match, first one on top and then the other, in shifting supremacies. We cannot order our lives into discrete categories: life comes—in Hopkins’ adjectives, 'dappled, fickle, freckled’" (Answering God, 107).
Prayer is itself a mysterious paradox of lament and hope, simultaneously earthy and otherworldly. Earlier in Answering God, Peterson talks about prayer inviting us into wonder and mystery, where we can freely express our real-life anxieties and problems, but then also enter the holy presence of God. “In prayer we intend to leave the world of anxieties and enter a world of wonder. We decide to leave an ego-centered world and enter a God-centered world. We will to leave a world of problems and enter a world of mystery. But it is not easy. We are used to anxieties, egos, and problems; we are not used to wonder, God, and mystery” (p. 23).
As you and I learn to lament, I pray we’d experience the wonder of sneaky, persistent hope in our God of hesed, and sing the paradoxical words of the psalmist: “Let the bones you have broken rejoice!” (Psalm 51:8).