Hopeful Lament
What does it mean to live, to stay, in an attitude or a posture of "hopeful lament"?
This is a question I've been reflecting upon these last weeks. The phrase as it stands comes from Daniel Hill's book "White Awake", which I will speak about another time, in the context of learning to live with the reality of racial injustice, in a posture that at once laments the injustice that exists, without presuming that it will be 'solved' any time soon, alongside a posture of hope, a hope that is placed in the God who can, and does, set things right.
For myself, I have been thinking about this question across three different, interrelated, dimensions. Firstly, I have been reading and reflecting on the psalms, as a whole, both in personal reading but also in a writing project. Secondly, I have been reading and thinking at length about issues of racial reconciliation inside and outside the church. Thirdly, my own experiences of personal and relational brokenness have moved me to individual lament.
Brueggemann speaks about lament psalms as being psalms of Disorientation - they are psalms which emerge out of a recognition, and in fact the experience of life that has been violently wrenched from what it should be. Life marked by disaster, calamity, disorder, injustice, loss, grief, hostility, and so on. And yet, more than that, psalms of disorientation are an act of profound faith. Unlike psalms, or prayers and songs more broadly, which celebrate life as it ought to be, which offer up praise and worship, psalms of disorientation boldly deny a veneer of optimism which itself is in denial of reality. Our inability to confront, collectively and individually, the disordering of our lives, the sheer wrongness of a state of affairs, is a self-deception that undermines our grasp on reality, and so the honesty of our relationship to God.
In this sense, to enter into lament is always an act of hope. Lament is not despair, Psalm 88 notwithstanding. It is a wrestling with God and his fidelity. It is an acknowledgment, and a summons, for God's presence in the darkest moments of human life, human suffering. It asks why he seems absent, and calls him to be present. It hopes, even when there are no signs for optimism. This, precisely, is the gap between optimism and hope: optimism sees reasons, evidences, traces that give an intimation that things will get better. Hope does not, but it lives on in hope regardless.
At the church level, I think it is true that the church broadly does not know what to do with lament, precisely because a posture of triumphalism is far more glitzy and attractive. Triumphalism may have a theological grit around which the pearl forms, in the sense that the good news of the gospel, the victory of Christ over sin and death, is joyous news of hope for the world. And yet, when Christianity proclaims a message of "everything is going to be alright now", which is the heresy of prosperity, the heresy of health, the heresy of pretending that once you accept Jesus, your life will be great, and your nation too - these are all a dysfunctional triumphalism that ignores the disorderings of life, and wilfully and wantonly turns a blind eye to injustice in the world and the church.
When I speak about injustice in this context I intend something like, "when a state of affairs isn't right", and that runs right across society, and inside the church. It is certainly true in issues related to race in Australia. There is no treaty between Australia and its First Nations people. Enslavement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders continued until the 1970s here. A vast number of our First Nations' people were effectively killed in genocide. Until there is a reckoning for the past here, inside the church at least, if not outside, until there is truth-telling and justice, we ought to remain in lament. There is no fast-forward here to joyous praise.
So too in our individual lives, hopeful lament allows us the freedom to express two, almost paradoxical, impulses at the same time. It gives space to sit in grief and grievance that things aren't right. To pour out one's soul to God in pain and tears, and acknowledge the rawness of feeling. At the same time, it is a hope that things can, and will, be set right. That might be eschatological, because some things will never be set right in this world or in our lifetimes; that may be sooner, because God is still at work in this world and in our lives, and he can bring justice, peace, healing, and reconciliation. As long as we are waiting, we may wait in hope, and give voice to distress.