AMC Spirituality: The Healing Power of Lament

ANGELA MERICI CENTER: LAMENT The Healing Power of Lament

BY GINNY SCHAEFFER

How long, O God… —Psalm 13: 2

A quote from one of my childhood heroes has become my prayer of late. Popeye, a one-eyed sailor with an abnormally large forearm, would put up with the shenanigans of his nemesis, Brutus, as long as he could. When his patience had reached its limits, he would declare, “Enough is enough and enough is too much!” He would then eat cold spinach straight out of the can and put Brutus in his place.

That’s about how I feel these days: “Enough is enough!” The straw that broke this camel’s back was the EF-4 tornado that decimated my hometown of Mayfield, Kentucky, just weeks before Christmas. This monster of nature came roaring out of the depths of the underworld hell-bent on destruction. It seemed to be starved for death and devastation and its appetite was insatiable,

killing seventy-seven people in Kentucky alone. Livelihoods, homes, factories, grand old trees, majestic churches and 150+ year old buildings chewed up and spit out. There is no way to describe the horrors of the aftermath this beast left in its tsunami of a wake. Words and pictures do it no justice.

Enough is enough, O God!

Russia has invaded Ukraine, a young democracy, with unfounded allegations of genocide and neo-Nazi leadership. Not satisfied with attacking only military targets, they have moved on bombing suburbs, hospitals, schools and apartment buildings, killing innocent civilians, some who were fleeing during a supposed cease-fire to allow travel out of an active combat zone. It is believed that nearly five million refugees could flood Europe as the war continues and we can only watch in horror as the death and destruction continues. Enough is enough, O God!

We are three years into a global pandemic that has killed at least six million people world-wide and going on one million in the United States. In spite of vaccines and other known ways to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus, we faced yet another more infectious variant. Graph lines measuring the infection rate shot straight up beyond the heights of previous surges. Even though the omicron variant was less virulent, the sheer numbers of those infected overwhelmed hospitals, closing schools and even some countries.

Enough is enough, O God!

Gun violence runs rampant on our city streets, killing more people than ever before, not even sparing the lives of innocent children sleeping or eating in the onceperceived safety of their own homes.

Enough is enough, O God!

As this prayer continued to well up within me day after day, it dawned on me that this had also been the prayer of my spiritual ancestors who also experienced destruction, violence, plague, oppression and death. I wasn’t just whining or feeling sorry for myself. I wasn’t becoming like Eeyore who lived under a perpetual dark cloud. I was lamenting.

I found solace and companionship with the psalmists who cried out to God millennia ago:

How long, O God? …I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night, but find no rest.

Enough is enough!

There are many psalms of lamentation: Psalms 6, 13, 22, 77 and 88, to name a few. There is the story of Job, the Book of Lamentations, even the prophet, Jeremiah who cried out, “You duped me, O God, and I let myself be duped.” Jer 20:7

I know that in reading these lamentations it would be easy to think that these folks could benefit from a strong dose of an antidepressant and months of therapy.

Well, maybe or maybe not. Rather than following the conventional wisdom of our day to “Get over it! Suck it up! Stop wallowing!” or “Get on with your life!” they seem to have chosen a more wholehearted way. Instead of choosing denial, shutting down and numbing out, they chose truth, authenticity, vulnerability and intimacy. Even in their darkness, they chose life.

Some might argue that lamenting is like going down into the basement to dig holes, that the only logical result would be that we would fall head-first into the abyss of grief, pain and despair, never to be seen again. Yet, something else seems to happen. In another psalm we hear the experience of someone who comes out the other side:

When I kept it all inside, my bones turned to powder, my words became dry long groans.

The pressure never let up; all the juices of my life dried up.

Then I let it all out…

Suddenly the pressure was gone…” —Psalm 32:3-5

Giving expression to pain, fear, grief, guilt and shame makes room for a shift in our consciousness. Despair gives way to hope, weakness to strength, fear to courage and darkness to light. Over and over again those psalms of lamentation end in words of hope, remembering how God healed and made whole those who suffer, trusting that the Source of all that is will do the same for them and for us.

As we continue to live through days of grief, uncertainty, pain and anxiety, let us remember, as we say back home, “God’s a big boy,” or “girl,” if you prefer, and can take whatever we throw at him/her. I dare say that the Lover of us all even welcomes our naked honesty because it is then, when we are open and vulnerable, that God’s love has room to enter our hearts, to heal, restore and transform.

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