The Place Of Lament In The Christian Life

By Brian L. Webster and David R. Beach

[Brian L. Webster is Associate Professor of Old Testament Studies, Dallas Theological Seminary, and David R. Beach is Counselor, 4 Health Family Resource Center, Saranac, Michigan, and Adjunct Professor of Spiritual Formation, Cornerstone University, Grand Rapids, Michigan.]

“I wish the pathologists then would tell us what is the use of grief in the economy, and of what good it is the cause, proximate or remote.”—Thomas Jefferson to John Adams[1]

Lament As Response To Pain

When deep pain invades life, it demands a response. Some of life’s pains are deeper than others and therefore more difficult to respond to. For many Americans the attacks on September 11, 2001, were a mind-staggering event. Two landmarks of the New York City skyline crashed to the ground, killing thousands who had sought no conflict with their attackers. There were immediate responses at the site—attempts to escape the building’s collapse, emergency personnel implementing a disaster plan. Watching or hearing of it at a distance, many felt stunned. Meanwhile America’s enemies around the world responded with celebration. The aftermath required more than physical cleanup and the need to establish new national policies. A combination of questions and moans imposed themselves on people’s minds as they grappled to make sense of the events and mourn their losses.

Pain, loss, injustice, anxiety—these can lead to lament as a vehicle of response. Lament, however, is not limited to national disasters. Lament need not be kept in a vault to be retrieved and dusted off for events that occur only once in a decade or century. Lament in the Bible speaks of betrayal and abandonment, disappointment with God, injustice and enemy attacks, illness and death. It is both personal and corporate. Lament psalms are the most common type of psalms, which indicates that lament was voiced regularly.[2] But a survey of most hymnals shows a startling lack of hymns that express lament, a gap also noted in contemporary Christian music.

This dearth of expression of lament in Christian music contrasts with the fact that many books address the subject of pain. Two of C. S. Lewis’s works about pain illustrate this variety. A Grief Observed chronicles his experience and reflections on the loss of his wife,[3] while The Problem of Pain is an apologetic addressing the question of why a supremely loving and powerful God allows pain and suffering.[4]

Life’s deep pains include events, belief systems, emotional and relational processes and expressions, and hopefully some form of resolution. To a degree, discussions of pain touch on each of these, but they tend to focus on one or two. Some books focus on telling the story of someone’s particular pain or loss. They assist readers by inviting them along the same journey, to find expression for suffering vicariously and feel an eventual resolution.[5] Other works focus on the pains that stem from infertility, miscarriage, stillbirth, death of a child or spouse, divorce, abuse, physical injury, the holocaust, and others.[6] Still others approach pain in a more apologetic style. These books wrestle with important intellectual questions about pain in life. While striving to be relevant to real life, they are considerations made at more of a distance from pain, expressed in a philosophical discussion or a commentary on Job or Lamentations.[7] Another approach to processing pain is through expressing it or urging its expression in art, poetry, liturgy, or song.[8]

The lament psalms are some of ancient Israel’s expressions of responding to and processing pain. They are sung with emotion, and they also wrestle with intellectual issues in seeking a conversation with God. In a sense these songs are mislabeled, for the word “lament” too readily brings to mind the mourning associated with death. While these prayers may include a component of bemoaning personal distress, they are cries for help. As cries to God, biblical laments are a vehicle for responding to pain and approaching God. Given the importance of both processing pain and pursuing God, why has there been resistance to lament?

Resistance To Lament

A variety of reasons may discourage the use of lament. Cultural influences, relational styles, theological perspectives, and misunderstandings discourage the use of lament in the contemporary, Western, relatively wealthy church.

Cultural Influences

In the film The Green Beret John Wayne encounters a young Vietnamese boy whose surrogate soldier-father was killed in the jungle just before they were to fly back to the United States. The young boy, realizing his favorite soldier is dead, begins to weep. It is easy to wish that the Duke would scoop up the little boy and just hold him as he wails. But John Wayne’s line is a hardened, battle-weary Marine’s reply, “Be brave.” This is a strong influence for some— battlefield survival strategies. Other stories have strong, enduring influence as well, often played by hardened, bitter, vengeance-driven men. The common cultural view, that real men do not cry, crowds out room for biblical lament.

Years ago the jeremiad became part of the American way of dealing with catastrophe and suffering. The jeremiad is a sermon or similar work that accounts for sufferings as just retribution for great social and moral evils. While it may also express hope for change and a better future, the causal link between suffering and sin is intended to provoke anxiety and to exhort wrongdoers to change.[9] This is similar to witch-hunting and demon-chasing, in which the goal is to find the Achan in the camp or the Jonah on the ship, the assumption being that one person’s sin must be hindering the group’s “manifest destiny.” Whether it is John Wayne in The Green Beret, Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven, a jeremiad, or simply the comfortable numbness of watching news reports that tell of faraway horrors in brief prepackaged news bytes, cultural influences powerfully and often subtly shape and mold people’s responses to pain and suffering.

Relational Style(S)

Resistance to lament also flows out of relationships. Perhaps parents were actively or passively abusive and the child’s early objections were met with anger and shaming or what is often worse— silence. Perhaps the response was to internalize guilt and/or shame for having objections, for feeling hurt, or for expressing different opinions. As a result, hurt people may decide to avoid such conversations. They may think, “It’s not worth it; it won’t matter anyway. My experience isn’t important; it will just be met with disdain, contempt, or worse.” And so these people seek to avoid conflict.

Alternatively a struggle with an inner rage may lead to avoiding difficult conversations in order to maintain relationships.

Theological Short-Circuiting

Following the stillbirth of a son, a friend of one of the authors attempted to give encouragement by quoting Romans 8:28, “All things work together for good” (NKJV). Though the expression was sincere, it was out of place. The casual application of this verse and others stands among several theological or exegetical notions that would short-circuit the expression of lament. Whether these notions are a cause for disparaging lament or the symptom of another cause is not easy to discern. That is, do they arise first from an understanding of the passages, or do the passages simply provide an occasion for cultural influences to find expression in the thinking of the church? Such short-circuiting notions may stem from the ideas that “God has a plan,” that God is trying “to teach you something,” that “you need to have faith,” or “God is with us in everything.”

It is popular to memorize and take comfort in such verses as Joshua 1:5 in which God promised Joshua, “I will be with you, I will not fail you or forsake you.” Typically this both misinterprets what it means for God to be “with” someone and then presumes that God’s promise to Joshua transfers to everyone today. Less likely are people to cite Jeremiah 23:33, where the Lord declared, “I will abandon you.” Probably the same tendency to one-sidedness blocks consideration of verses like 2 Chronicles 15:2, “The Lord is with you when you are with Him. And if you seek Him, He will reveal Himself to you; but if you abandon Him, He will abandon you” (authors’ translation). And the same is true of the lament question in Psalm 22:1, “My God, my God, why have You abandoned me?” (authors’ translation). If “knowing” that “God is always with me” is the starting point, then the other verses get demoted to the status of being ignored or explained away. While contemporary culture may hold the phrase “God is with me” to mean some kind of existential experience, an abstract feeling of God’s presence, this is largely lacking in Scripture.[10]

In the Old Testament for God to be “with” someone meant to give him success in a task, often an assigned task, and may have also highlighted divine protection.[11] This is generally true in the New Testament as well. For example Jesus’ well-known words, “I am with you always, even to the end of the age” (Matt. 28:20), is in the context of a given task, the Great Commission.

God’s being with Joshua meant He would give him success in conquering the land. Thus the people began to know that God was with Joshua when he parted the Jordan River (Josh. 3:7). And when Jericho was destroyed, the narrator summed up the story with the words, “So the Lord was with Joshua” (6:27; italics added). Then when Israel lost to the forces of Ai, Joshua and the elders lamented (7:6–9), and the Lord said that He would not be with them anymore, unless or until they would carry out His command (7:12). So we see that God’s promise to be with Joshua did not preclude not being with Joshua, if the people were not with God. Similarly this accounts for David’s genuine concern in Psalm 51:11, “Do not cast me away from Your presence, and do not take Your Holy Spirit from me.” This was a plea that God not take away His support from David in his role as king, as He had with Saul.

The expectation of God’s presence is what led biblical characters and psalmists to ask where God is. The anticipation of God’s attentiveness led to the questions, “Why do You hide Your face,” and “How long until you listen?” But today it seems that the promise of God’s presence is used to smother these questions. Biblical lament is not without trust in God. Indeed most lament psalms include expressions of confidence in God. But that confidence prompts rather than precludes the expression of lament. Similarly one cannot get to Romans 8:28 without first passing through the groaning mentioned earlier in the chapter (vv. 22, 26).

This reveals the common misapplication of what it means to have faith in God. For many, “having faith” means mustering up the intestinal fortitude to put up with their circumstances, bolstered by the belief that God is with them and is working out a plan or trying to teach them something. Often that is simply a strategy for avoiding conflict. It may pressure people to be “tougher,” but it may not necessarily lead them to know God better. The psalms, expressing both confidence and lament, engender honest expression in hopes of finding mercy and grace in time of need. The lament psalms express real experiences of pain, not philosophical considerations of pain.

Feinberg discusses this distinction between the intellectual problem of evil and the religious problem of evil. “The religious problem of evil (the problem about one’s personal struggle with pain and suffering and how that affects one’s relation to God) is not primarily an intellectual problem. Instead, it is fundamentally an emotional one.. .. My problem. .. was about how in the midst of affliction I could find comfort and how I could find it in myself to live with this God who was not stopping the suffering.. .. At this point I understood that the religious problem of evil requires pastoral care rather than philosophical discussion.”[12]

In a chapter called “Recipes for Disaster, or How Not to Help the Afflicted,”[13] Feinberg addresses several improper responses to people in pain. Rather than succeeding in their intention to help, they represent a way of thinking that short-circuits lament by minimizing the legitimacy of feeling pain. The psalms of lament are for people in pain, to help them live with God.

Misunderstanding Providence And Theodicy

Hughes discusses the decline of lament in Christian thinking. As early as the sixth century B.C. the Greeks had passed laws restricting certain mourning activities in funeral processions, including the use of set lamentations.[14] Additional laws were passed in the following centuries, some of them referring specifically to women’s mourning practices. Seeing death as a natural end, Plato in the fourth century advised that funerals should take place three days after someone died, without extravagance and without lamentation.[15] He also criticized the poets for having male characters engage in demonstrative lamentation. According to Hughes, Plato’s “rejection of lamentation, as a form of negative femininity, exemplified by Achilles, survived in the influential critique of Greek lament by the Fathers of the Christian Church.”[16]

Hughes also notes that “of the Cappadocian Fathers, Gregory Nazianzen pioneered in developing the Christian funeral oration, which completely excluded lament,”[17] and among the Western church fathers, Ambrose (A.D. 339–397), in step with Plato, “clarified the appropriate attitudes in the face of death. Men should confront death in courage in the name of faith, nation, and justice; and excessive grief, as displayed particularly by women, is improper.”[18] In a similar vein Augustine felt guilty for feeling grief after losing his mother, leading Billman and Migliore to comment, “Grief. .. seems to be so aligned with inordinate carnal affections that sorrow over any worldly loss falls under suspicion.”[19]

“During the first four centuries of the Christian era, several Church Fathers formulated doctrines of providence as substitutes for Greek concepts of fate and lament.”[20] The doctrine of providence—which included elements of theodicy in wrestling with how a good God who is all-powerful can permit suffering and evil—developed into formulations that preclude lament, viewing such an activity as a sinful failure to recognize God’s sovereignty. For example Hughes argues that “Calvin’s doctrine of providence was promoted to arouse fear and humility in us toward God, to be courageous in the face of death, and to attain rest with tranquility. The doctrine was the culmination of a long theological tradition which rejected lament as a form of sin, from the Church Fathers through Thomas Aquinas to Luther. Calvin’s rigorous and comprehensive arguments for providence essentially prevented any further consideration of lament in theology.”[21]

Some theologians sought to make sense of God’s power, goodness, and foreknowledge. But in doing so they suppressed lament in various ways, and this conflicts with the Scriptures, which regularly legitimize lament. Lament dominates the psalms. God receives laments as parts of dialogues in the prophets. God Himself laments (e.g., Ps. 81:13–16). Jesus lamented. Even saints in heaven lament (Rev. 6:10). The view that providence precludes laments fails to correspond to the Scriptures.

Mischaracterizing Lament As Grumbling

One reason lament may be restrained is the lack of understanding of what it means to lament and specifically how it differs from grumbling and complaining, from rage or venting. The lament psalms, with their language of appeal to God, as well as the lament dialogues in the prophets show that lament is part of turning to God. That attitude clearly sets it apart from grumbling and complaining.

Misunderstanding The Old Testament And The Church Age

Other objections pertain to the relevance of the Old Testament and its relationship to the New Testament.[22]

One objection. Some may object to laments by arguing, “Hasn’t Jesus’ resurrection effectively eliminated the need for lament? Aren’t the Old Testament cries of anguish superseded, rendered unnecessary? Might they even be a sign of unbelief now that God has raised Jesus from the dead?”[23] Resner’s answer includes a helpful image. Just as the moon is often still visible in the morning sky, so the old age is still here—death is still present and believers are still waiting for its destruction.

Another objection. “But isn’t the act of lament an act of raising questions for which born-again believers now have the answer? In Christ isn’t there an answer for every lament?”[24] Yes, there is an answer in Christ for every question, but these questions must be faced by Jesus’ followers. No one of the four Gospels opens by saying, “Now here is the good news of Jesus Christ, ‘The stone was rolled away, He rose from the dead, and He is coming again.’ So there you have it.” The Gospels record the fact that Jesus was rejected by many of His own people and was then crucified. According to Resner, “The good news is only good news because the bad news has seeped into every fiber of our being.”[25] And to those who find only answers Wiesel says, “Man raises himself toward God by the questions he asks Him. That is the true dialogue.”[26] Also, “There is a certain power in the question which isn’t found in the answer. It is the power of the question that the lament explores.”[27]

A third objection. Others may say, “But if Jesus’ followers really believed in His resurrection, if they really believed in the power of God to overcome evil, and provide joy and comfort in His Spirit, then the lament wouldn’t be needed. Maybe laments are for those who can’t really believe as they ought.” (This is similar to the first objection, which views lament as an absence of faith, except that this objection contends that lament shows lack of enough faith).

Grief over loss—the painful absence not only of a person but also of a relationship—also involves pain in waiting, waiting for a time in the future when everything will be righted. And during the waiting, someone or something is absent.

Many biblical laments cry out to God, “Why, Lord?” and “How long, O Lord?” These questions introduce many of the laments. Death is not gone. Sin is still present. Creation is not at rest. In fact God Himself has subjected the whole creation to frustration. “We know that all creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies” (Rom. 8:22–23, NIV, italics added). When John wrote, “Come, Lord Jesus” (Rev. 22:20), he was virtually joining all creation in asking, “Why do You linger? How long must death and sin be among us?”

The Legitimacy Of Lament

In contrast to the objection that the Cross eliminates the need for lament, it actually demonstrates and invites lament. The cry “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?” is not the only part that Psalm 22 plays in the Gospel narratives. Matthew and Mark allude to other parts of the psalm in explaining Jesus’ passion.[28] Johnson details the parallels between this psalm and the Gospels to demonstrate that Mark invoked the entire psalm to make his theological point that Jesus cried out to God for deliverance in agony but not in despair.[29] “Jesus, in lifting up the lament from Psalm 22, is situating himself directly within that long line of servants who have suffered unjustly for God.”[30] In that place we are in solidarity with Christ. And “it is precisely because God hears Jesus’ cry that our cries also are heard.”[31] Since Christians suffer, is not Christ’s lament a model for the members of His church? It is a model that persists from the cross to Revelation 6:10, where the saints who have died and gone to heaven are lamenting. “Living in the mystery of Jesus’ cry, then, means to allow both the question—real and harrowing as it is—and the answer—truly an answer but also an eschatological one—to play their necessary and legitimate roles. It is only by living in the experiential gap between question and answer, between promise and fulfillment, that we can truly embrace the cry rather than squelch it.”[32]

Believers fellowship with Christ and have His character built within them not just in suffering, but also in lament.

Suggested Uses For Lament

Pastoral Counseling

Billman and Migliore assert that the life of faith is supported by prayers of lament through their offering a needed language of pain, granting permission to grieve and protest, challenging inadequate understandings of God, preparing the way for new understandings of God, purifying anger and the desire for vengeance, increasing solidarity with those who suffer, and revitalizing praise and hope.[33] Lament is “the language of the painful incongruity between lived experience and the promises of God.”[34] These elements often become issues for pastoral counseling. Rather than a philosophical discussion of suffering or some quick answer, using lament in pastoral counseling honors the process in moving through one’s own suffering.

Journaling

The many laments in the Psalter testify to their intent for repeated use. These psalms often use general terms so that worshipers can pray the same prayers, filling in details of their own circumstances as they approach God. These psalms may refer to enemies, illness, or sins, but individual petitioners today can use the same words to refer to their own particular adversaries, afflictions, or wrongs.

Viewing the psalms as adaptable to the particular situations of present-day petitioners implies an invitation. It is as if God is saying, “It is all right to talk to Me in this way, and I want to have a relationship with you that is based on your freedom to express your concerns.” Journaling is a way of voicing cries for help that are commonly called lament. Journaling involves both reflection and expression. The process invites those uncomfortable with verbal conflict to let go of their fears of retribution gently. It eases them at their own pace into a more robust spirituality.

Card has encouraged believers to offer lament as an act of worship and to journal those laments. He includes Job, David, Jeremiah, and Jesus as examples of lamenters.[35] In A Sacred Sorrow: The Experience Guide he offers ten weeks of reflections. On the fifth day of each week he invites his readers to compose their own laments as they reflect on the material for the preceding four days of that week.[36] Though his books are primarily a call to revive lament and not instruction in the form of lament prayers, his invitation to journaling laments is a welcome one.

Prayer

As prayers, the lament psalms are pleas for help because the psalmists were turning to God in their reactions to pain. For believers to voice laments in prayer most effectively, they should keep several parameters in mind. First, it is legitimate to voice pain. Second, it is important to be aware of the often unhealthy ways people react to pain. Third, proper lament should be distinguished from grumbling and complaining as well as from cathartic venting. Fourth, it is helpful to have an understanding of what elements make up lament psalms and how believers can employ those elements in their own life situation.

Confession

Many but not all biblical laments include confession of sin. As the psalmists turned to God, their self-examination often led to their confessing sins. In addition other lament psalms include protestations of innocence. Revealing the seriousness of sin, the psalmists used words that safeguarded them from casually assuming forgiveness. Though forgiveness is free, it was not viewed lightly.

Further, the communal lament psalms teach readers to stand in a community, not only sharing or sympathizing in the community’s pain, but also identifying themselves with its sins. Nehemiah confessed sins of the community which he himself had not committed but which he mourned (Neh. 1:5–7), and Daniel did the same (Dan. 9:5–19). Confessing community sins can spur members to participate in helping establish righteousness and justice in the community. The individualistic nature of American culture tends to discourage such an approach, but corporate confession can confront individuals with potential complicity. It is not necessary to have had ancestors who owned slaves to confess the sins of one’s forebears and to be persuaded of the need to help establish justice in response to continuing marks of those sins in one’s community.

Reconciliation

Reconciliation demands a forum for dialogue that allows both victims and perpetrators to tell what happened during conflicts. That dialogue often includes some of the basic elements of lament psalms: address, lament, turning to the other, and petition. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa has set a pattern now being followed around the world in war-torn areas—Argentina, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Chile, East Timor, El Salvador, Fiji, Ghana, Guatemala, Liberia, Morocco, Panama, Peru, Sierra Leone, and even the city of Greensboro, North Carolina. Nancy Lee, a Fulbright scholar who has studied postwar Croatian society, states, “In the absence of lament, the status quo is more likely to remain.”[37] She adds,

Unexpressed lament and unresolved anger and grief may contribute to the current social interactions in the former Yugoslavia. Pain over atrocities committed long ago is cherished as desire for revenge rather than expressed before God, who is believed to be capable of alleviating the suffering. Witness the absence of worldwide prophetic critique of what has been going on in the former Yugoslavia in recent years.. .. Lament speech assumes that the power to find lasting solutions to a social crisis resides within a people through their liturgical conversation with the divinity, and not outside this framework where the solution is simply for humans to rid society of their nemesis through long-standing tribal conflicts.[38]

Lee names a vital resource for these national crises—the churches and their liturgies.

Liturgy

The Center for Action and Contemplation has created on online template for a liturgy of lament. “The basic premise for a Liturgy of Lament is to provide a space—a safe and sacred place to lament—for those who are suffering and those who stand with the suffering.”[39] The template is simple and easily adapted to different groups. It includes reading Scripture to prepare for lament, to express communal lament, and to conclude the service. It also includes music and opportunities for individual expression.[40] “Liturgy, and particularly the liturgy of lament, has the power to reshape the larger world.. .. Lament speech is not only a response to suffering but holds the power to shape society and history by nonviolently combating destructive social forces before they wreak total havoc.”[41]

Lament As Part Of Spiritual Formation

Pursuit Of Truth

Jesus’s quotation of Old Testament verses encourages His followers to enter their own “present” moments unafraid of their own questions. Rather than following Jesus’ model, people are often shaped by memories of conversations in which they have allowed others to shape them with fear, shame, or doubt. The lamenter may need to learn to trust God and not be defensive, abusive, or contemptuous.

Instead of avoiding conflict Jesus often pursued truth through powerful questions. For example in John 18 He asked six questions: “Who is it you want?” (vv. 4, 7, NIV). “Shall I not drink the cup the Father has given me?” (v. 11, NIV). “Why question me? Ask those who heard me. Surely they know what I said” (v. 21, NIV). “If I said something wrong. .. testify as to what is wrong. But if I spoke the truth, why did you strike me?” (v. 23, NIV). “Is that your own idea, or did others talk to you about me?” (v. 34, NIV). These questions passionately pursue the truth for the sake of others. “Everyone on the side of truth listens to me,” Jesus said (v. 37, NIV). Biblical lament is also a fierce pursuit of truth with powerful questions—a way of joining Him in pursuing the truth.

Bearing Witness

In 1993 Carolyn Forche published the largest anthology of “poetry of witness” to date.[42] A collection of writings produced in life’s extremities, this book presents another function of lament—bearing witness. Armenian genocide, Bosnia, the Shoa, Vietnam—these and others are the crucibles out of which poetry of witness emerges. Israel has certainly had its share of suffering and its poets—David, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea, to name a few—have written an inner witness that connects generations of their descendants to Israel’s tragedies. Perhaps resistance to lament indicates an unwillingness to bear witness to God on behalf of and in solidarity with humanity. Perhaps by overemphasizing “bearing witness” to humanity on behalf of God, the church has neglected a concern of the heart of Christ—interceding to the Father for the world.

Pursuit Of Relationship

Through lament, the one praying engages in relational conflict in order to pursue relational depth—choosing full disclosure and honesty which opens up possibilities for intimacy that otherwise would not exist.

Lament As Part Of Life

After the death of his son and after writing of his grief in Lament for a Son, Wolterstorff presents a compelling case for lament as part of life. He maintains that like poles on the globe, praise and lament orient the life of the believer. Both are essential in the life of faith, since life involves joys and sorrows, celebration and suffering, praise and lament. “Lamentation is the language of suffering and the praise of God is the language of joy.”[43] It is impossible to appreciate one without the other. Each extreme demands walking on the edge of language, the edge of human experience, employing rich imagery to describe the indescribable. Wolterstorff opines, “It’s an illusion to suppose or to postulate that there could ever be a relationship with God in which there was only praise and never lamentation.”[44] In critiquing Western culture in its attempts to “disown” grief, he comments that “owning one’s grief bumps head up against a fundamental feature in our modern Western attitude toward the world; this attitude, ‘If you don’t like it, change it. Instead of coping, conquer. If you don’t like hot weather, get an air conditioner. If you don’t like your headache, take an aspirin. If you don’t like that hill over there, get a bulldozer. If you don’t like what’s going on in Washington, throw the bums out.’ All of this because to own your grief is to admit failure, to admit vulnerability—that you weren’t in control of everything.”[45]

Pursuit Of Christlikeness

The most important reason for learning lament and letting it become an integral part of life is that Christ lived it, prayed it, and embodied it. Along with praise, lament was part of His conversations with His Father. “In the days of His flesh, He offered up both prayers and supplications with loud crying and tears to the One able to save Him from death, and He was heard because of His piety. Although He was a Son, He learned obedience from the things which He suffered” (Heb. 5:7–8). Refusing to learn lament is refusing to follow Christ’s example. Pursuing the image of Christ means learning to pray as He did, to love as He did, to join in solidarity with a lost and dying world by crying out on their behalf as well as for the petitioner’s own suffering.

Conclusion

Thomas Jefferson had at least two opportunities to write an emancipation proclamation for slaves. At least twice he declined for political expediency (and perhaps personal political ends, not to mention the fact that his own slaves maintained his private residence at Monticello while he was away in Philadelphia and later Washington). Not until more than sixty years later would freedom come to slaves, not until another president came who had suffered like a slave under his own father, a president who had taken lament into his soul—lament for his own grief and for others. Understanding something of the use of grief, Abraham Lincoln accomplished with much bloodshed what Jefferson might have accomplished with the stroke of his pen. Of what use is grief? Jefferson asked. For believers it means following and standing with the suffering Messiah, the slaughtered Lamb, for a suffering world. For love’s sake. That is the use of grief. That is also a use of lament.

Notes

1. Lester J. Cappon, ed., The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 467 (italics his).
2. Hermann Gunkel first classified psalms in genres, identifying thirty-nine psalms as individual laments or “complaint psalms”—3, 5, 6, 7, 13, 17, 22, 25, 26, 27:7–14, 28, 31, 35, 38, 39, 42, 43, 51, 54, 55, 56, 57, 59, 61, 63, 64, 69, 70, 71, 86, 88, 102, 109, 120, 130, 140, 141, 142, 143—as well as other sections belonging to “liturgies and mixed genres” (Introduction to Psalms: The Genres of the Religious Lyric of Israel, trans. James D. Nogalski [Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1998], 121). He also cited several communal “complaint psalms”—44, 58, 74, 79, 80, 83, 106, 125—as well as several from “liturgies, mixed genres and reworkings” (ibid., 82). While there is no consensus on the classification of all the psalms, over a third of the Psalter is composed of the genre often called lament.
3. C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (New York: Seabury, 1961).
4. C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (New York: Macmillan, 1944).
5. Examples of books that process pain in a journaling style include Nicholas Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987); Merton P. Strommen and A. Irene Strommen, Five Cries of Grief: One Family’s Journey to Healing after the Tragic Death of a Son (Minneapolis: Augsburg/Fortress, 1996); John S. Feinberg, Deceived by God? A Journey through Suffering (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1997); J. I. Packer, A Grief Sanctified: Through Sorrow to Eternal Hope: Including Richard Baxter’s Timeless Memoir of His Wife’s Life and Death (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2002); Nancy Guthrie, Holding on to Hope (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 2004); Carol Kent, When I Lay My Isaac Down: Unshakeable Faith in Unthinkable Circumstances (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2004); and Jerry Sittser, A Grace Disguised: How the Soul Grows through Loss (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005).
6. Two examples are Dan Allender, The Wounded Heart: Hope for Adult Victims of Sexual Abuse (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 1995); and Steven Tracy, Mending the Soul: Understanding and Healing Abuse (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005).
7. Philip Yancey, Disappointment with God: Three Questions No One Asks Aloud (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1988); James Dobson, When God Doesn’t Make Sense (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1997); Philip Yancey, Where Is God When It Hurts? (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1997); Gary Poole, How Could God Allow Suffering and Evil? (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1997); D. A. Carson, How Long, O Lord?: Reflections on Suffering and Evil (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2006); Stanley Hauerwas, Naming the Silences: God, Medicine, and the Problem of Pain (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990); Gustavo Gutiérrez, On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1987); and Walter C. Kaiser Jr., Grief and Pain in the Plan of God: Christian Assurance and the Message of Lamentations (Fearn, Scotland: Christian Focus, 2004).
8. Ann Weems, Psalms of Lament (Louisville: John Knox, 1995), includes fifty contemporary poems written in the wake of her son’s killing. This is a nonjournaling example of putting pain into words. Calls for lament include Kathleen D. Billman and Daniel L. Migliore, Rachel’s Cry: Prayer of Lament and Rebirth of Hope (Cleveland: United Church, 1999); Sally A. Brown and Patrick D. Miller, eds., Lament: Reclaiming Practices in Pulpit, Pew, and Public Square (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005); Michael Card, A Sacred Sorrow: Reaching Out to God in the Lost Language of Lament (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2005); and idem, A Sacred Sorrow: The Experience Guide (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2005).
9. Donna Campbell, “Forms of Puritan Rhetoric: The Jeremiad and the Conversion Narrative;” http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/jeremiad.htm (accessed July 30, 2007).
10. Besides the presence of Christ and the role of the Holy Spirit in the New Testament, God’s presence is presented in several ways in the Old Testament. In theopanies God’s presence was temporarily manifested at certain locations and then God left. God’s presence was also specially associated with certain locations, such as the temple in Jerusalem, or objects such as the ark of the covenant. Elsewhere God is omniperceptive (aware of everywhere), a category that gets taken up into the relatively infrequent motif of omnipresence. The passages pertinent to our concerns are those in which God is with someone (indicated by the preposition עִם or אֶת) or near them. See Brian L. Webster, “Divine Abandonment in the Hebrew Bible” (Ph.D. diss., Hebrew Union College, 2000), 193–220.
11. Ibid., 211–12.
12. Feinberg, Deceived by God? A Journey through Suffering, 34–35.
13. Ibid., 37–58.
14. Richard Hughes, Lament, Death, and Destiny (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), 18. Plutarch is the source for Solon’s law in Athens in the early sixth century B.C.
15. Ibid., 18–19.
16. Ibid., 19.
17. Ibid., 76.
18. Ibid.
19. Billman and Migliore, Rachel’s Cry: Prayer of Lament and Rebirth of Hope, 50.
20. Hughes, Lament, Death, and Destiny, 81.
21. Ibid., 113. Though Hughes’s comments here may be overgeneralizations, it is important to note that antilament sentiments were present in the writings of some theologians of the past. These comments have contributed to a negative view of lament by the church despite the fact that those same theologians sometimes expressed other perspectives in their works.
22. Andre Resner Jr., “Lament: Faith’s Response to Loss,” Restoration Quarterly (1990): 129–42.
23. Ibid., 129–30 (italics his).
24. Ibid., 130 (italics his).
25. Ibid., 131.
26. Elie Wiesel, Night (New York: Hill & Wang, 1960), 15.
27. Resner, “Lament: Faith’s Response to Loss,” 130–31, paraphrasing Wiesel, Night.
28. William Stacy Johnson, “Jesus’ Cry, God’s Cry, and Ours,” in Lament: Reclaiming Practices in Pulpit, Pew, and Public Square, 81. Johnson shows that the deliverance recorded in Psalm 22 applies to Jesus as well. Thus neither the psalmist nor Jesus was totally forsaken.
29. Johnson, “Jesus’ Cry, God’s Cry, and Ours,” 84, 86.
30. Ibid., 84.
31. Ibid., 86.
32. Ibid., 88.
33. Billman and Migliore, Rachel’s Cry: Prayer of Lament and Rebirth of Hope, 103–27.
34. Ibid., 107.
35. Card, A Sacred Sorrow: Reaching out to God in the Lost Language of Lament.
36. Card, A Sacred Sorrow: The Experience Guide. See Brian L. Webster and David R. Beach, “Review of A Sacred Sorrow and A Sacred Sorrow: The Experience Guide,” Bibliotheca Sacra 163 (October–December 2006): 496–97.
37. Nancy Lee, cited by Deborah deBoer, “Can Songs of Lament Change the World? Union’s Fulbright Fellow Looks for Answers in Croatia” (accessed July 31, 2007)
38. Ibid.
39. “Liturgy of Lament Template” http://cacradicalgrace.org/getconnected/Liturgy-%20of%20Lament%20Template.pdf (accessed July 31, 2007)
40. Ibid.
41. deBoer, “Can Songs of Lament Change the World?”
42. Carolyn Forche, ed., Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness (New York: Norton, 1993). In the introduction Forche says this work is “the result of a thirteen-year-effort to understand the impress of extremity on the poetic imagination” (ibid., 30).
43. Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Lament as Part of Life,” videotape, Calvin College Video Productions (Grand Rapids: Calvin Productions, 1996).
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid.