I've been thinking a lot about lament this year. Partly that has to do with personal reasons, but those personal reasons have lead me into greater reflection on Scripture, as well as reading. One of the books I've picked up in more recent times is "Prophetic Lament: A Call for Justice in Troubled Times" by Soong-Chan Rah (A book review will be forthcoming). That, in turn, is because I've benefit greatly from listening to a podcast called, "Where Ya From?" which features interviews with Christians from minoritised backgrounds (primarily African-American). All of which is a roundabout way to get to today's reflection.
Very early on in his book, Rah makes the point that Psalms, etc., tend to go in one of two directions: praise and lament.
"Psalms that express worship for the good things that God has done are categorized as praise hymns. Laments are prayers of petition arising out of need." (p21) Lament "is a liturgical response to the reality of suffering and engages God in the context of pain and trouble." (p21). A little later on he makes the punchy point that the American church, by and large, does not have lament as a category. He draws on Bureggemann and the idea of the theology of the "haves". The "haves", have a theology of celebration. The "have-nots" have a theology of suffering and survival.
In another post, I'll explore how Rah applies this at a national level and in the context of race in the US, and how that applies to Australia. In this post, I want to explore it more generally by moving back and forth from the personal to the corporate to the personal.
In church(es) we overwhelmingly sing songs of praise. Where the Psalms have a roughly 60-40 split of praise-lament, churches have something more like a 95-99% praise. Why? Let me suggest some reasons.
Christ has secured forgiveness for sins and defeated death, so we rejoice.
The Christian life is supposed to be marked by joy.
Christians are blessed and so sing praise.
Life for Christians in our churches is mostly trouble free and they are celebrating the status-quo.
All of these are true, in their own way. Notice the subtle shift in the movement from 1 to 4 though. The view of modern, mostly white, middle and upper class Christianity is baked into a view of success that is very secularised, sanatised, and has less and less place for dysfunction. Even, I dare say, in those strands of Protestantism that find greater traction in working class and poor demographics, namely charismatic, pentecostal, and straight up prosperity preaching, actually have little place for lament, because they are so invested in a narrative of "your life was hard, you found Jesus, now you are living the triumphant victorious Christian life", that post-conversion suffering is a jigsaw piece that doesn't fit, and so is mostly jettisoned as your own personal failure.
When lives of faith are both individualised and forced into a celebratory mode, so that lament has no place and indeed is a forgotten practice, it also means that churches lack the resources to practice, or even imagine the practice, of corporate lament. How could we wrestle with things not-being-right when:
We tell a collective narrative bound to 'success', in both sacred and secular dimensions
We are pretty okay with the status-quo of our society
We are bound to a version of "authenticity" that says you can't engage in group actions unless you "feel it in your heart"
The notion of collective guilt doesn't make sense for us anymore
And this takes on a multi-generational dimension. The lived stories of peoples, including Christians, who experienced not just years, but generations of exile, of slavery, of suffering, of injustice, is the bedrock of lament as the cry to God that things aren't right here. For those of us whose multi-generational story is one of having, we struggle to see the world as one in which things aren't right. And the failure of communal practices of lament in turn fuels the inability to practice individual lament.
Because when our community teaches us that all there is, is praise, and fails to articulate a practice of lament, then when things in our own personal lives fail to 'work out', we don't have any where to go with that. We instead will try anything else - to disengage with the suffering, to downplay it, to write it off as not that big a deal; or to try to solve it, fix it, with technique, to control and manipulate and manage our way with human, or less than human, endeavours. The one thing lament teaches us is that there is another way. Not the turning away, nor the turning to ourselves, but the turn to God. To wrestle with him in all our pain, sorrow, grief, discontent, longing for things to be set right. To call on him to act in his mercy and goodness. To turn lament, one day, to praise.