Liturgy of Lament

Lament is the beginning of giving voice and/or language to those who weep in silence, even those whose voices have been muted; and lament also begins the process of hoping for the return of God’s voice and with it his favor towards those in distress in both this lifetime and the next.

Dear Church,Please don’t mistake my blunt words and harsh criticisms as a cowardly way of expressing the pain that has been stifled within me. I seek to only enrich you with honesty and truth as one who has walked though the depths of emotional suppression and seen the bondage of being told that what I feel is not acceptable or godly. Yet I long to model that expressed laments need to have their place among us instead of being cast out to be consoled among those who do not have the hope of Christ within them. This response stems from our individualistic mindset that makes dealing with suffering an individual duty instead of letting our church be a healing community. People are uncomfortable with suffering, and therefore lament, because it is not taught from the pulpit or modeled by the leaders, which in turn makes it feel irrelevant and unnecessary.Please hear me that I do not mean to offend except in the case that offense is the only way to bring change. If the walls could speak of what they see under the roof of a Sunday morning service they would speak of the secret pain that penetrates the hearts of the attenders. The pain is real but the voice to speak of and share of this pain is silent. Why do we neglect to see what is before our eyes or live in ignorance of the very suffering that plagues our congregation? I long to open your eyes to what has been long before I entered in to the doors of the sanctuary. I am not realizing anything new but draw attention to what has remained hidden and left in the dark corners, hidden by false realities of facades.Our facades are not just on a Sunday morning but have been built up through our use of social media and its proclamation of only one side of ourselves. We no longer exist face-to-face but live behind our screens. We hide behind smiles and neglect our pain in front of everyone--creating a dichotomy in our selves. Either we only show our happiness or we only feel that we can communicate honestly on the web and hide behind technology to say what we need to be heard. This media has created a culture that does not know how to engage with authentic and holistic realities of people. We say that we are friends with someone just because we are Facebook friends. We think we know someone by looking at their Facebook profile, yet we only see a highly sifted reality. Our need for relationships has not changed just because we changed the means of achieving them through mediated interactions.Our church is set up to leave us in our seats, isolated, with the incentive to walk alone and leave alone. We get up for the brief greeting time then return to our seats with plenty of space between one another. The Church, the living members and body of Jesus Christ, was not meant for isolation and individualization but unity and intimacy. While we try and reach out and be counter cultural in our neighborhood, we are instead a mere reflection of the individualistic, lonely society that we live in. Our problems remain simply that—our own. Where is the lament that comes from the voices of many? How can we recognize that people are hurting and need someone else to carry their burden because they cannot go on any further?

Our faith is not a façade we erect to convince ourselves and others that pain doesn’t hurt. Rather, it is an oak tree that can withstand the storms of doubt and pain in our lives, and grow stronger through them.Godly lament does not repel people from the gospel, but instead draws them to our Lord; it strengthens rather than destroys the faith of others. 

In seeking unity, I am not attempting to create conformity. Rather I want to tear down the altar we have built to individualism. People have become a number instead of a face—a face that has a name and a story. We isolate people so indefinitely that there becomes no genuine connection between people.Community is built externally but not fostered within the church. We look to build authentic and open relationships with our people but invest in it outside of the church because there is no safe place on a Sunday morning for genuine relationship. Sundays only seem to be an extension of the weekday relationship. Why is it easier to be real and known in a home than in the pews of the church? Can we recognize that vulnerability was meant to be safe within the church yet that is one of the last places we feel like we can be fully known?

The sad irony is that our culture has to have so many safe spaces right now because the Church has largely ceased to be one. More and more young people have come to view church as a hostile environment, one which demands their assimilation and interprets questions as insubordination.

What would it require to make our church the safe place it feels like on a weeknight in the living room of a home? We need a place to be known, yet we seem to implement this ideology that we can only express an artificial happiness on a Sunday morning.We try to pass it off with smiles and small talk so that no one gets close enough to see that it is a half-truth. While some of it may be genuine, our experiences are rarely black and white; we are often left to live in the gray. Our experiences are complicated and complex. We need to give each other the freedom of expression to be more than who they are on Facebook.We all have stories and our stories are rooted in the pain of reality, not the ignorant bliss that we all preach at ourselves hoping that someday we will actually be able to believe it. We build each other up with false confidence that our strength comes from within and our faith is our own. It once again becomes about us and what we are able to endure, instead of others and how we can hold each other up. "Lament is an act of love." We are called to love each other well by being honest, even when that means that we recognize and call out the ugly pain.We have limited our liturgies, the rituals of the church, to model the safe topics that we are comfortable with because they do not push into the realm of darkness that is painful to enter. Yet, by neglecting to talk about what is real and hard we take away its relevance in the church. We are then left to make sense of our doubt and struggles where people are willing to talk and listen—outside the walls of the church. How can we change this so that people feel free to be who they are in a safe place? What can teach this? "Maybe older leaders can begin discipleship groups of their own, places where young teens can be themselves without feeling ashamed. If there’s a specific group in your congregation you feel is being neglected, make them a priority in your spiritual life." Change starts with what is taught and what is modeled for us. It is modeled in our liturgies.It is not as simple as simply changing up the songs or preaching one new sermon. It's about creating a space for silence and living in the tension for a moment. I've seen it before: when there is finally courage to speak up at church, we have trained each other to respond before we ever finish listening. Words leave mouths before the silence can fill the room—the silence needed to break walls of fear and insecurities by truly being heard and known. The response each time seems to be the same and makes God seem isolated from our situations and our suffering. It's as if who God is takes away the pain of our experience of suffering and therefore our need for an expression of any emotion that is not happiness. This just isn’t biblical! Suffering will bring pain. It does not become irrelevant just because Christ came but becomes more bearable.I do not want to preach at you the words I myself have been taught to say as if it will bring change. We are uncomfortable and do not know what to say so we just mumble that “everything is going to be ok because God is in control” or “you do not need to be afraid because God is good and will bring good from it”. Both are true but only leave wounds more sore. These words which repeated in my head only left me bitter during my moments of crisis and struggle. I knew the right things to say in agreement but they suddenly seemed to be depleted of their truth as I looked at a failing world that seemed to preach a gospel contrary to the one I knew.

At one sense our worship may be genuine, but it is also genuinely misleading. It appears that we are afraid of other's pain and so have lost our ear for grief. This lack of honest address for suffering means we also lack the vocabulary to engage misery. Are tearful whispers between friends in secluded church bathrooms really adequate to address our seasons of suffering? Are the small groups the only place left to acknowledge pain and fear? (Between Pain and Grace, 104).

I did not know how to recognize God in my suffering. My upbringing insinuated the tension between God’s mighty otherness and His place among suffering. When you neglect to preach about suffering from a biblically grounded perspective, it teaches that there is no allowance for a space to coexist between our experience with pain and God.You instead seem to preach a message that believing in the sovereignty of God negates the pain of suffering because God is in control; God’s sovereignty, however, should inform and be an intimate part of our suffering because it is what gives us hope as we long for God to make all things right. Our pain is not irrelevant but essential as it prods us into deeper intimacy with God. Intimacy with God is founded on honesty. So why is it that we think we can push past our emotions and fake it with God like we do with each other? We can hide behind our facade of happiness yet our laments bring to attention what is hidden in the heart; laments may feel disrespectful in their raw and liberal fashion but allow them to be made of real language because they are meant to be truthful and real.As a Christian, it is not easy to be courageous when you know you will be shut down for being honest. The few times I had the courage to speak up I was choked out by an automatic and rehearsed response instead of a compassionate love from people willing to lament with me by my side. People were too afraid to deal with a Christian who seemed to have given up. Instead, they felt it was their duty to bark their thoughts at me until I conformed to the belief that I had been raised to believe. I was raised to know that God was good and sovereign and was in control of all things, yet when my life was falling apart and my fears were uncontrolled I was left to think otherwise. What I needed was a safe place to acknowledge where I was without being chastised for my struggle. A place to bring those doubts into the light.The discouragement left me to return to the inward isolation. The suppression brought shame into a heart that was already vulnerable and feeling a loss of identity. I had forgotten who I was and was given an identity tied to my experience of suffering that I could not escape. I no longer was my own but was only referred to in relation to the members of my family who also experienced the same suffering. I recognize that you meant well, yet when I was only asked how other members of my family were and no one asked how I was holding up I felt the weight of being forgotten and overlooked. Any hope that I had of being seen and known by you felt wasted. You thought your knew me by looking at the Facebook posts and you cared for me by contributing a "like" to the post.  What I needed you to know I was too ashamed to ever post. I needed to be looked in the eye not given false community.What no one knew about me allowed for greater deception. I continued in the hidden secrecy of the darkness of my heart. I dragged on feeling the shame of my doubt locking me deeper within myself with no hope of an escape, left bound by not being able to meet the expectations you had for me. The journey to freedom would require strength that I did not have in myself. I needed a savior to come in and take me, but no one talked about a savior who would save a doubter like me. You only talked about the savior who came for those who had never believed before. What does doubt look like in the church? It is real and a part of the congregation yet we never address it. People cringe when they hear about doubt, and if anyone knew that I was doubting, they would surely label me as one caught on the hit list—someone to not associate with.Instead of bringing me back to the freedom that is in Christ, you made excuses and tried to answer the unanswerable questions which only led me to desire the deception of the lie. Darkness was sweeter and safer. I was so overcome that I began to forget about the light. My hope was only a flickering flame in the darkness of an empty sanctuary. I still came and still longed to be a part of a torch but was never close enough to join the flame of another sitting in the pew next to me. Shoulder to shoulder but never face to face.In and out. You seemed to have no time for anything other than the schedule and controlled rituals and sanitized liturgies of the church. No time for honesty. No time to admit what I truly needed and what I longed for. You are about time and efficiency, keeping people pleased and at ease instead of offering the time and space that is actually needed to lament. You were pleased and congratulated yourself for healing me and bringing me back from my misguided ways when my questions were asked less; however, if you only stopped to look into my eyes you would see the pain soaked tears welling up within me.My questions remained just were no longer voiced. It became easier to be voiceless and accept invisibility than to fight for a place to be known. In and out, every Sunday. It became easy to fake it, believing that no one was willing to take the time it would take to actually hear of the pain and see the wounds. Because the worship guide told me so, I used everything I had left to stand and worship alongside you because if I remained in my seat you would notice but not understand.

What myths are we struggling with that have overwhelmingly limited worship to one primary emotional expression? The forces of marketing and appearance are stifling our need to cry out and voice our pain to God. People with hearts crippled by profound pain are forced to stand and clap week after week with little if any mention of the dark trials that fill their hearts. Is this a moral way of treating the hurting in our midst? Wounded people among us "smell" a form of pretense that is as programmed and insincere as the canned laughter of sitcoms. They are correct. Shunned grief is spiritual hypocrisy (Between Pain and Grace, 105).

I learned your ways and what I could do and say to try and stop getting asked your questions that never reached beyond the surface. I was constantly talking about the situation of my suffering but never processing it. It did not hurt as much anymore but I was not healed, just left numb. You did not have to have a relationship with me or share in the depth of my pain to know about my most painful experience because you already read about the details on the social media posts. The posts that made everything public but left my pain private.You took what was intimately mine and talked about it with each other and did not listen as I needed to share in the community. I did not have a community and I lost my identity along the way. Talking about it all day yet never learning to lament, that was my pain. That is what kept my suffering subsided but never dealt with, acknowledged but unhealed—a prolonged suffering.I needed to not just put words to my story but allow myself to grieve the pain while remembering the truth, not being forced to choose between one or the other. Church, we need to lament. Lament is not something that is to be done alone but is always in dialogue. It is a dialogue with God, for He gives us the freedom we need to honestly acknowledge ourselves and our disposition before Him. "Lament is not merely an articulation of unhappiness; rather, it seeks in the midst of unhappiness, to recover communion with God” (William Soll). Why do we seem to hide from the One who knows everything?Our theology must be reflected in the way that our church functions--our liturgies. If we truly believe that Christ not only came and suffered in our place but suffered so that He might know our suffering and suffer with us, we would live differently. We—as the body of Christ—are called to live with one another in unity, as one body. As a human body experiences pain in all areas when one part is physically experiencing it and does everything to care for it, so we are called to care for others as they experience pain. However, we forfeit our ability to care because we are unaware.Our liturgies cannot become infiltrated with lament unless we learn to have voices and believe that God actually cares about our pain. What we believe about God will change how we relate and respond to Him. If we believe, as it appears by our current actions, that God is indifferent to our pain then we are not going to come to Him expressing our suffering. However, knowing that God tells us that we will experience suffering and the pain of it, we should know that suffering is not in opposition to God’s character but aligned with His plans for our refinement; only God can take what we experience as suffering and make good of it.Lament is only something that can be done by believers. We are called to lament because we are called to remember the hope that is within us. Our hope is not determinate on superficial or physical things. Even people are physical and will disappoint and leave, but our hope is for something eternal, someone eternal. Our suffering lets us strain for what is good and will bring us greatest joy, the glorification of God. Church don’t be distracted and think that hope can come from anything else and that healing comes from within. We can only experience healing in Christ who has suffered and conquered the consequences of ultimate suffering, death.Let our theology not just be in our love for one another outside of the Sunday morning service. It needs to infiltrate our worship, preaching, and greeting. What we say or choose not to say has meaning and makes an impact. Remember your own story and let it be told courageously. Do not forsake what is yours by replicating the voice of another as I did. The story of the Church is not one story but many that together make up the story of God's redemption. Let this be what we proclaim from the pulpit on a Sunday morning and sing loudly as we praise God for who He is while simultaneously remembering the pain that God has allowed us to walk through together.Church please do not tell me what I should be but remind me of who I already am. In lament we remember who God is and in turn remember who we are. May we not neglect to do this in community, for it is in unity that we collectively are the body of Christ--not each his own. Our stories together are a communal song. We each have our piece to carry in the music, so we remain steadfast in our part, each harmony not meant to stand alone but to be added to the beautiful arrangement. We are to be tuned to the melody but remember the harmony that we are called to sing.Sincerely,A Woman in Healing