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Living Theology inthe Metropolitan Chicago Synod
Volume 8, Number 3
Fall 2003
Reclaiming Lament

 

 

 

 

A Personal Journey Into Lament

JoyceM. Bowers

Inthe aftermath of September 11, 2001, there has been renewed attention to therole of lament in public and private life. Lament involves the recognition that we are not in control.  It is a healthy corrective in a culturewhich focuses on success (presumed to be attainable) and on being in control ofour lives both individually and collec­tively. 

As aculture, we do a great deal of criticizing and complaining about whatever wedon’t like or feel is wrong, from cafeteria food to U.S. foreign policy.  Such criticism implies that some human beingor agency should have done things differently. Unlike our everyday complaints, in and out of the church, lament isprayer addressed to God.  It impliesthat God is in control but that the lamenter, who is on speaking terms withGod, has a right to question the Almighty.

Thechurch should not need a tragedy of the magnitude of September 11 to focus itsattention on lament.  Our heritageincludes powerful examples of and resources for lament, many of which arediscussed in other articles in this issue. Unfortunately, much of the time we have ignored those resources.  For example, many Psalms of lament have beenomitted from the lectionary and from the Psalms printed in the pew edition ofthe Lutheran Book of Worship.  We skipfrom the pain of Good Friday to the joy of Easter with hardly a thought aboutthe profound confusion and despair of Holy Saturday.

Despiteour readiness to criticize and complain about others, there are strong elementsof both popular culture and Christian culture which inhibit our ability toadmit feelings of pain, anger, or despair to ourselves, let alone express themto God in prayer.  “How are you?”  “Fine, thanks” rolls off our tongues soautomatically that it takes a certain amount of intestinal fortitude to say to anyone,“No, actually, I’m not fine right now. I’m really struggling.” 

I goto church, hoping to find some strength or comfort in my distress, and itappears that everyone else really is “fine.” People are smiling and singing songs of praise when I can barely open mymouth.  It rarely occurs to me thatothers may also be in anguish, and they think I “have it all together” becauseI too present that image.

I wasraised in a conservative/fundament­alist church and spent two years at a veryconservative Bible college in South Carolina. From childhood through early adult­hood I was taught that Christianscould always have victory in Christ, no matter what happened.  (The biography of the Bible college’sfounder is titled Always in Triumph, and on the book jacket anotherbook, The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life, is promoted.  My childhood pastor gave the latter to meand my husband as a wedding gift.)

Inthat religious context it was common for people to “give testimonies” inpublic.  It seemed that the only timehardship was mentioned was as a backdrop for the won­derful deliverance,victory, healing or answer to prayer the individual had experi­enced. 

As ayouth, church was a lifeline for me in the midst of a very problematic homesitua­tion, and I followed its teachings 110%. I am still thankful for people who took a personal interest in me,showed me kindness, and provided rides so I could partici­pate in churchactivities.  But there was a totaldisconnect between family experience and what I was taught in church.  In my highly dysfunctional family, one ofthe cardinal rules was DON’T TELL. I never talked about the family situation outside the family (certainlynot with the pastor); the topic was verboten even among my siblings andmyself.

Thereare more reasons than I can identify why I had a deep, unarticu­lated sense ofshame.  In the context of the ChristianLife as I understood it, the only possible cause for feeling bad wasunconfessed sin.  I was taught that sinseparates us from God, and we needed to “keep short accounts” by confessing oursins in private prayer so that sins wouldn’t accumulate or be forgotten.  I tried hard to keep all the rules, whichwere many, and make sure my confession of sins was up to date.

Inthis context, lament in the Biblical sense was virtually unthinkable.  Though we were Biblical literal­ists,knowing Bible content cover-to-cover and striving to obey it in all things, itseems we ignored a lot of the Psalms and other parts of the Old Testament.  If you had a spiritual struggle, you wouldhardly name it to yourself, let alone others, and least of all in church.  Prayer meant addressing “the Lord” inthanksgiving, praise, confession and interces­sion.  You could confess your own shortcomings and pray about theshortcomings of others, but expressing anger to “the Lord” or chiding Him wasinconceivable.

I gotmarried and immediately thereafter began life 6000 miles away from my family oforigin as an educational missionary in Liberia.  In my youthful enthusiasm, I thought I could cope with whatevercame.  “Take it to the Lord in prayer.”  “Jesus is the answer.”  Etc. 

Ayear and a half later, in 1968, a critical situation arose for which I felt Itruly needed guidance.  I was preparingto give birth to my first child in a “bush hospital” in Zorzor, Liberia,staffed by missionary midwives.  Anolder midwife, Esther Bacon, was a legend in her own time for her skill atsaving the lives of mothers (and babies) in complicated childbirth, but I couldrelate better personally to the two younger, newly-arrived midwives.  There were no prenatal classes, but I hadcheckups by all three midwives and read a book and thought I would befine.  As to choosing which midwifewould handle my labor and delivery, I didn’t want to offend anyone and decidedto let the Lord guide through circumstances. I prayed long and fervently; whoever was on duty when I arrived at thehospital in labor would be the one.

Theday came.  I arrived at the hospital andspoke to the young midwife on duty.  Shesaid her shift was ending in five minutes and I should wait for Esther, whowould arrive momentarily.  Somewhatconfused in light of my prayer, I agreed. The hospital did not have a private labor room, so after an initialcheck, Esther invited me to her house near the hospital.  I would learn in the next 20 hours thatEsther essentially ignored anyone whose labor was normal.  While Esther was busy at the hospital, I wasleft alone for hours at a time with increasing pain and fear and without anypain relief.  The whole experience,though medically normal, was a horrendous extended nightmare I would reliveagain and again in the years to come. Later I learned that either of the young midwives would have handled mylabor and delivery much differently.

Thisexperience became the focal point for accumulated (and previously “stuffed”)faith questions.  Living in the after­mathand struggling to make sense of it, I had no way to handle the situation infaith as I understood it.  Isecond-guessed my “guidance”; after all, Esther was not, strictly speaking, themidwife on duty when I arrived at the hospital.   The only choice I saw was to shelve my internal sense of faithand quit talking to “the Lord,” even as I continued to go through the motionsof a Christian life as a missionary wife and mother.  It would be 35 years before I could fully express to God thebetrayal I felt at that time, as described below.

Itwas not until I had been a Lutheran for many years and the sense of God’s unlim­itedgrace and mercy had begun to take root in my soul that I began to think andread about lament as an option for Christian prayer, both publicly andprivately.  Although I found WalterBrueggemann’s writing about the virtue of total honesty with God veryconvincing intellectually, and had a gut-level sense that his teaching wassignificant for me personally, I was not ready to address God directly inlament, especially the lament of anger.

A missionary friend shared with me his lament,expressing his feelings when he was in horrible pain in a hospital in India,hanging onto life by a thread as a result of receiving grossly substandardcare.  (He was eventually sent toSingapore via Medevac and recuperated there.)

ABeliever’s Lament

by Phil Dailey

There are times when I would cease

         Tobelieve in You;

         If Icould, I would.

PerhapsI should,

         So thatthe pain would not be so

         Personal.

                    Youfrighten me.

That pain has been for me so great –

         Screamssnapping me into the air,

         Spasmsof muscle and mind;

Or exhausted screams

         Whimperingexhalations

         Throughslack lips.

                    You frighten me.

If I did not believe in You,

Then I might not have to hate You as I do,

         For thepain, made by You.

                    Youfrighten me.

And I believe You hate me too.

I do not know what I have done;

         Or cando, to escape from You.

                    Youfrighten me.

Is that why You do not kill me now?

Do You delight in my suffering?

Do You like to hear me beg for water? For death?

                    Youfrighten me.

If I were safely dead

         Youcould not hurt me any more.

Death: what a miracle.

Why do you cheat us with this gift of Life?

See what you have done to me!

                    Youfrighten me.

There it is.

And now You know – 

I cannot stop believing in You,

Knowing You,

Feeling You always by my side.

                    MyGod, You frighten me.

LaterI wrote a lament in the voice of my mother-in-law, whose cherished onlydaughter had been murdered and who, in her deep grief, felt God had abandonedher.  (See the November 2003 issue of LutheranWoman Today.)  Still, it was severalmore years before I could express my own anger at God.

Thechild who is secure in a strong bond of love between him and his parents cansay on occasion, “Mommy, I hate you!” In contrast, the child who fears rejection or abandonment, perhaps withgood reason, wouldn’t dare.  Thisdynamic may be played out in our relationship to God.  Even when that relation­ship seems solid and secure, there may bea sense of risk if we say something offensive to God.

Forme, the growth in my ability to express anger toward God has come hand in handwith a deeper knowledge of God’s love, largely mediated through a wise andsensitive spiritual director.  At a timewhen I had received some reassuring evidence of God’s love and was seeking toknow that love more deeply, I decided to meditate on the account of Jesus andthe children in Mark 10, using my imagination to place myself in the story, asdescribed by David L. Miller in his book Friendship with Jesus (Minneapolis:Augsburg, 1999). 

When I made the attempt, however, I found myattention riveted instead on the next story in Mark 10, that of the rich man’sencounter with Jesus, recorded in verses 17-22.  Setting aside any attempt at proper exegesis, I wrote myemotional reaction upon watching Jesus. Excerpts follow:

This morning the rich man got his chance for aface-to-face conversation.  Just whenJesus was starting out on a journey, the man dashed up to Jesus, threw himselfdown, and blurted out, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternallife?”  There was a sort of desperate,now-or-never quality to what the man did. He didn’t even greet Jesus before he spoke.

I expected Jesus to respond warmly, but he immediatelyput the man off with a criticism: “Why do you call me good?  No one is good but God alone.”  Later Jesus appeared to realize the man’ssincerity and stopped sparring with him. I saw a look of love on Jesus’ face, and my hope for a real answer from Jesusgrew.  Jesus said, “You only lack onething,” and it felt like creation itself was straining to listen, waiting forthe final, definitive word.

I couldn’t believe what happened next.  Jesus might as well have thrown a bucket ofcold water on the man.  “Sell what youown and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come,follow me.”  Sell all you have!?  The man’s face fell; his proud shouldersslumped and his beautiful rich robe was dirty and rumpled from kneeling on thedusty road.  He covered his face with asleeve as he walked away slowly, grieving, “for he had many possessions.”

Jesus, I just don’t understand.  Why did you demand that the man do the onething he couldn’t do?  You didn’t askthis of others. . .  I saw you look atthe man.  You appeared to love him, butthen you drove him away.  What kind oflove is that –  jerking people around bybeing tender and inviting one moment and harsh and rejecting the next?

I was watching you, Jesus,waiting to see what would happen. . . You left us feeling like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, when theyuttered those saddest of all words, “But we had hoped . . .”  And now I too am grieving, because it seemsyour love is so capricious and unpredictable. We had hoped you would show us a kind of love and compassionwhich could lead us to the one you call Father, but now our hopes aredashed.  I’m not sure the joy some seemto find in you is worth the pain of uncertainty and betrayal.

Iprobably wouldn’t have had the courage to write those words without knowing Icould discuss them with my spiritual director. Part of me still felt that surely God would now write me off once andfor all.  But, daring to trust mymentor’s under­standing of God’s grace and my spiritual journey, I read myaccount as though it were a confession of sin. I will never forget his reaction: “Joyce, the angels are singing anddancing with joy at your honesty with God.”

Manymonths later, with a growing gut-level confidence that God’s love and mercyincluded a desire to hear whatever I had to say, I revisited the painfulevents related to the birth of my first child. For a week or more I pondered and recalled how I had felt toward God,searching for words and metaphors that captured my experience. 

Then one morning I woke up at 3:00 a.m. feeling itwas time to write.  Bundled in a warmrobe in my favorite chair in my cold, dark living room (it was winter and theheat was down for the night), it seemed that the only thing in my universe wasthe screen of my laptop and the words appearing on it in fits and starts,almost as though written by hands other than mine.  Excerpts follow.

                    Betrayal

I was young.

My faith was pure and simple.

I placed the decision

         andmyself – my very Self –

         intoyour hands.

Circumstances conspired against me

         and Itook the wrong path,

         hopingit was the right one;

         trustingyou to guide me.

But you didn’t guide me.

You betrayed me.

I asked for an egg

         and yougave me a scorpion.

You rewarded my ingenuous trust

         byturning your back.

No – worse than that –

You played games with me.

I was dangled on a cosmic cord

         over anabyss;

         abandonedand alone,

         utterlyhelpless.

My hands groping and grasping

         forsomething to hold on to

         andfinding nothing.

My feet searching frantically

         forground to stand on

         whichwasn’t there.

I couldn’t cut the cord;

         and evenif I could,

                    Iwould have fallen into the abyss.

You looked on with bored detachment,

         watchingme writhe;

         jerkingthe cord now and then

                    justto show who’s in control;

         just toremind me

                    thatmy connection to you

                    couldn’tbe severed,

         though Idesperately wished it could.

I was trapped by my baptism – 

         markedwith a cross forever.

The pain of your betrayal

         wasdeeper and more enduring

         than theanguish I suffered

         from thebad decision.

I stopped praying;

Why should I believe

         in acosmic bully?

My faith was in ashes.

The fire that stoked my spirit

         was furyand indignation.

But you didn’t care.

You had other things to attend to

         likerunning the world . . .

         supervisingthe universe . . .

What did I matter to you?

I was a worthless trinket

         toentertain you for a moment

         with myartless trust,

         my naivedevotion,

         and thento be tossed aside.

I wish I could say I came to understand,

         but Inever did.

After many years I put the whole thing away

         in a boxmarked

                    “unansweredquestions,”

         lockedin a trunk labeled

                    “painfulmemories,”

         andthrown into a river

                    driftingto nowhere.

Eventually I returned to faith

         becausethere was nowhere else to go.

It was a tougher, grittier faith – 

         sinewswithout flesh –

No longer overwhelmed

         bysorrow and desolation,

Wounds covered over by cold cynicism.

And I still say, with Teresa of Avila,

         “If thisis how you treat your friends,

         It’s nowonder you have so few.”

Oncemore it was critical for me to share this with my spiritual director.  This time I did not feel the sense of shameI had felt earlier, but perhaps resignation: “Well, there it is, for better or for worse.”  I was astonished when my companion said gently, “Those words arenot only addressed to God.  They comefrom God.  It is the work of theHoly Spirit in your life that has made it possible for you to write them.”  As we talked quietly, we both felt a keen(and for me, surprising) sense of walking on holy ground. 

Theevents that had triggered my sense of God’s betrayal had long since been dealt with.  From my present perspective, my passivity in1968 seems incredibly naïve, and I don’t have (and no longer need) an “answer”or explanation as to what God was up to at that time.  The central issue for me in this whole journey is that Godinvites us to recognize, express, and accept all of our feelings andthoughts in prayer, even those deemed most unacceptable by whateverstandards. 

Whathas followed my deepest expression of lament has been a slow growth of a senseof joy in my life.  Little sprouts ofjoy and delight have appeared in some stony, hard places, including situationsapparently unrelated to the subject of my lament.  Some of those sprouts seem to be developing into vigorous greenplants, with roots penetrating deep into the soil of my life.  That soil has been enriched by my particularlife’s load of “garbage,” composted into dark, rich humus by time, faith, andmy own work, assisted by years of professional help both in therapy andspiritual direction.

Thereare other painful situations in my faith life which have been not yet becomethe subject of my lament.  I wonder if,or when, they will appear on my lament screen. If they do, I trust I will deal with them honestly. 

Thejourney into lament – and through it – continues.

Joyce M. Bowers

Member, Grace, Mt. Prospect