Well, it is May. “April is the cruelest month” T. S. Eliot tells us, but May … May is a delight! If we have a yard or garden it is likely bursting with greenness. Birds can be heard singing sweetly in the trees. People are out and about, even more so this year.
This year, (and you know what I mean …), this May is a May of stark contrasts. Everything is as it should be in the garden, but not everything is as it should be in the home, street and neighborhood.
I learned on Thursday, March 12 from our bishop that we would not be having Sunday service in the church building, and that this would be reviewed on March 31. Of course, we’ve had to suspend so much since that time, and even now we don’t have a timetable to reengage even a portion of what we used to enjoy. We’re a full 50 days into this season of church leaders are calling “shelter in grace,” with the understanding that taking prudent measures are another way to love our neighbor, even when it leads to our own disadvantage.
Often over the last 50 days I’ve awakened with a sense of grief, a sense of loss, a sense of heaviness. Not that my own life is suffering, comparatively speaking. Not at all. For that I am grateful and undeserving. Nevertheless, there is loss.
Early in the 50 days I rise for the day and for the brief moment of slumber’s lingering peace, do not recall that we’re living in the midst of a pandemic. It is a blissful moment but one that is fleeting. Reality right now is cold and unbending. Reality does not know how to pronounce the word “grace.” There is currently no preventative vaccine or prevalent and conclusive treatment leading to a cure for COVID-19. Much remains unknown about this unseen enemy that is wreaking havoc around the world.
I am disadvantaged in minor ways while others are suffering in much greater ways: illness, unemployment, literal confinement, shouldering financial burdens, losing loved ones – and that often at a harsh distance. I need so see my own setbacks in the light of others’ much greater setbacks.
And yet there is a sense of loss that I can – and do – enter. Plans set aside. Children’s expectations thrown overboard. Colleague groups that can no longer meet in person. Endless Zoom meetings and accompanying video conferencing burnout. Church community uncertainty. A cloudy future.
You and other members of your household may be dealing with this in greater or lesser ways. If you are, have you considered taking this grief to the Lord?
This past Sunday I invited children in our Godly Play circle to share what they are missing most about this stay-at-home time. They replied, “seeing my friends,” “my teacher,” “going to the pool to swim.” I then invited them to send me what they write down and I would take their emails or cards and be able to pray for them as they lament their losses.
I invite you to do the same.
There is good biblical precedent with putting our losses and griefs before God. It is called Lament.
The dictionary gives “an expression of grief or sorrow” for lament, but in the biblical understand of Lament, it is “edited language to give expression to our unedited emotions,” as writer David Taylor puts it.
Laments are found chiefly in the wisdom literature of the Old Testament – Psalms and Lamentations especially. Laments follow a basic pattern with an initial complaint (yes, we are given permission to complain to God!), followed by a petition that makes a request of God to give redress to the complainant, and then at its close the speaker comes to a place of resolution, putting the writer back into the care and protection of God, often ending with praise to God.
On Sunday we saw this in the Godly Play circle as we thought about Psalm 13 from the International Children’s Bible (ICB). You can follow the structure easily.
Psalm 13
Complaint
13 How long will you forget me, Lord?
How long will you hide from me? Forever?
2 How long must I worry?
How long must I feel sad in my heart?
How long will my enemy win over me?
Petition
3 Lord, look at me.
Answer me, my God.
Tell me, or I will die.
4 Otherwise my enemy will say, “I have won!”
Those against me will rejoice that I’ve been defeated.
Resolution
5 I trust in your love.
My heart is happy because you saved me.
6 I sing to the Lord
because he has taken care of me.
David Taylor offers the following for reflection[i]
What is one thing from this past week that you feel needs to be lamented in your own life? What is one thing that calls for lament in your own community? What is one thing that deserves o be lamented at a national or global level?
What is one thing that is hard for you to lament? What are things that might be easier for you to lament?
What do you think might be lost by not sharing our sadness and our laments as a community? What do you think might be gained by sharing these feelings as a community?
Write out your own psalm of lament, following the basic pattern … write your complaint to God. Write a specific petition of God. Write a resolution to trust that God will hear and heed your petition in a timely fashion, even if it is not according to our timetable. Give yourself permission to end, like Psalm 13, on a tone of hope, or like Psalm 88, in the dust and darkness that may feel all too real. Trust that you are not along in this experience, but that God in Christ is with you, that the Spirit of God interceded for you “with sighs too deep for words” (Romans 8:26), and that others are in a similar place.
What to do with our griefs, minor and major?
We take solace lamenting our woes before our friends, but our friends can only be empathetic. Take your griefs and set them in the context of ordered prayer. Lift them before the Lord.
Laments to pray through: Psalms 6, 11, 17, 26, 38, 41, 44, 74, 77, 79, 80, 83, 85, 86, or 89. Some of these are individually-oriented psalms while others express the lament on behalf of the community. Both are part of the biblical testimony.
Once again, David Taylor:
[Laments] offer a beginning, a middle, and an end, instead of a seemingly meaningless narrative. They present a rhythm of sounds instead of a cacophony of noise…. And in offering these things, the psalms reframe our sense of life.
In the chaos of these days God is still at the center of all things, and through the gift of the psalms of lament God invites us to be centered in him.
[i] See W. David O. Taylor, Open and Unafraid: The Psalms as a Guide to Life, pp. 67-79.