Learning to Lament
My friend Carolyn Dewhirst died yesterday–my heart hurts as I consider this loss. I long for words that give voice to the heartache that comes with death. My spirit seems to know that I need a channel of expression for this ache and not just to push it down inside and act like nothing significant has happened. With those thoughts swirling around I began preparation for Sunday School by studying 2 Samuel 1-5. In those passages David had just gotten news of Saul and Jonathan’s death and he pours his heart out in lament. Eugene Peterson’s thoughts answered my heart need as he commented on these chapters. My eyes lingered over one particular phrase. “A failure to lament is a failure to connect”. He reminds me that our culture really has become a pain rejecting and death denying culture and yet our living constantly confronts us with the reality of pain and loss.
“Denial and distraction are the standard over-the counter prescriptions of our culture for dealing with loss; in combination they’ve virtually destroyed the spiritual health of our culture…If we’re not taught to lament…we’ll grow up believing that our immediate feelings determine our fate. We’ll deny every rejection and thereby be controlled by rejection. We’ll avoid every frustration and thereby be diminished by frustration. Year by year, as we deny and avoid the pains and losses, the rejections and frustrations, we’ll become less and less, trivial and trivializing, empty shells with smiley faces painted on them…Learn to lament. Teach one another how to take seriously these cadences of pain, some coming from hate, some coming from love, so that we’re not diminished but deepened by them–find God in them, and beauty. Put form and rhythm and song to them. Pain isn’t the worst thing. Being hated isn’t the worst thing. Being separated from the one you love isn’t the worst thing. Death isn’t the worst thing. The worst thing is failing to deal with reality and becoming disconnected from what is actual. The worst thing is trivializing the honorable, desecrating the sacred. What I do with my grief affects the way you handle your grief; together we form a community that deals with death and other loss in the context of God’s sovereignty, which is expressed finally in resurrection.” Eugene H. Peterson, Leap Over A Wall, p. 120.
Today, I am freed up to weep and wail and to express and to take seriously the deep connection that I shared with sister Carolyn.
David took up this lament concerning Saul and his son Jonathan, and ordered that the men of Judah be taught this lament… 2 Samuel 1:17