By the rivers of Babylon—there we sat down, and there we wept when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our harps. For there our captors asked us for songs, and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!” -Psalm 137:1-3 (NRSVUE)
How different is this biblical song from the upbeat worship music we hear sung every Sunday morning in most U.S. churches? Laments like this one give powerful expression to a whole range of emotional experiences: sadness, anger, weeping, mourning, grief, rage. No church-ready smile required.
When we read the laments of the biblical psalmists and prophets, we might feel a sense of permission to express our own sorrow, too. Our experiences might differ from those of the ancient Hebrew poets, but we likely know the pain of loss: perhaps of a home, a loved one, a community, a relationship, a set of beliefs, an identity, a sense of safety or belonging. And we grieve the loss and violence suffered by so many people in our communities and our world.
This is all part of our human experience, and we do ourselves no favors when we pretend otherwise. We cannot afford to buy into a lie of peace and prosperity. The prophet Jeremiah’s searing lament that there is no peace rings just as true in our country and in our world today as it did in his. From immigration raids to climate crisis to genocide, our wounds, and the wounds of others around us, are serious, indeed.[1]
Scriptural laments make room for our emotions of grief or rage in the face of these realities. They invite us to voice our own laments, and to be transformed in the process. Dr. Brenda Salter-McNeil writes,
“Lament is a voice that refuses to be consoled and calls us into a journey that will change and transform us at deeply fundamental levels. It is a protest against the brokenness of the world. It causes us to come face-to-face with hurting people and places that desperately need the healing presence of God. Lament forces us to come close enough to see the horror of what is really going on around us. It also allows us to tell the truth and to name the crisis for what it really is.”[2]
Lament speaks truth, no matter how difficult. No matter how horror-filled, it does not turn away. But it is not the same as despair. Rather, it is born of a deep hope. Our words of lament bear witness to the reality of what is deeply wrong in our world, in the hope that it might not remain this way.
In lament, we share the biblical poets’ longing for justice. We join them in railing on powerful people who willfully neglect the concerns of the vulnerable and marginalized, or who actively terrorize them. We confront the violent structures, systems, and ideologies that prop them up and give them power. We appeal to a God who judges justly.
And our lament does something — in our bodies, in our communities, in our world. The movement that comes of it might feel subtle. It might not always do what we’re looking for it to do. We might not feel that it does enough. But it does do something—something meaningful.
Ruth Everhart writes,
“All lamentation, including that found in Scripture, does three things that are inherently part of the social order and hence political: it expresses emotion, exposes wrongdoing, and advocates for justice. These are positive and necessary acts.”[3]
They are all meaningful; they are all necessary parts of a process of healing.
Just as significantly, lament invites us into solidarity. I think of Ijeoma Oluo’s lament on behalf of Black women:
“In our struggle for justice and equality, we are often exploited and discarded…And even though Black Lives Matter was founded by black women, even though black women have been at the heart of every feminist movement in this country’s history―nobody marches for us when we are raped, when we are killed, when we are denied work and equal pay. Nobody marches for us.”[4]
When Oluo voices her laments against patriarchy and white supremacy and their interconnections, she often feels alone. The experience of loneliness, of being gaslit or not taken seriously when trying to expose something deeply harmful, is sometimes a worse injury than the initial harm. But if we learn how to lament in community, we might begin to heal this sort of wound.
We might hear and join in with one another’s laments, with one another’s anger. We might come together in communal lament as a way of saying, You aren’t alone. We hear you. We believe you. We acknowledge the injustice and don’t deny it. We want to march together. We want to make things right, together. In a world where cries of suffering and injustice often fall on ears unwilling to listen, this, in itself, can be incredibly healing.
Laments help us acknowledge and honor our sadness and anger. They help us learn how to stand in solidarity with one another in the different ways injustice impacts us.
And they might help us imagine, together, the kind of world we want to see. They might help us wonder, as Jacquelyn Gill writes,
“What could we accomplish if we stood together and faced the danger? What seeds might we plant today that will one day take root above our bones? What if the future was better than the past? What if it was beautiful?”[5]
What if something good and healing, life-giving and community-building, could arise out of our sadness and anger, our grief and rage? Voicing the truth of our experiences, especially in the context of a community who hears and joins in, opens up potential for healing. We name the injustices, and in so doing we open up a path forward to move toward justice. We do all this in profound hope for a better world. And we do it together.
References:
[2] Brenda Salter McNeil, Becoming Brave: Finding the Courage to Pursue Racial Justice Now (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2020), 101.
[3] Ruth Everhart, The #MeToo Reckoning: Facing the Church’s Complicity in Sexual Abuse and Misconduct (Westmont: IVP, 2020), 210.
[4] Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race (New York: Seal Press, 2018), 74.
[5] Jacquelyn Gill, “The Asteroid and the Fern,” in Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility, ed. Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2023), 128-9.
Liz Cooledge Jenkins is a Seattle-based writer, preacher, former college campus minister, and the author of Nice Churchy Patriarchy: Reclaiming Women’s Humanity from Evangelicalism. She writes regularly at growingintokinship.
2 Responses
Thankyou for your article. It validated for me personally the difference between despair and lament.
It also gave me a vision when we come together to pray in our churches it might be transformational to identify the pain of those we bring to God in prayer and even lament in a pause of silence for their sufferings.. again as an intercessor this article was a blessing❤️
How refreshing it is to hear this perspective from a Christian framework, that our lament, our feelings of sadness and anger and grief are not to be avoided or problems to be solved. I think God gifted us the superpower to feel these feelings to understand his heart for justice. I see a lot of despair around us these days, and what a powerful point that lament incorporates hope that distinguishes it from despair. Thank you for this thought-provoking piece!