Lament

On the holy work of naming our sorrow

In early 2021, newly ordained and just four months into ministry, I conducted my first funeral in a surreal, liminal pause between lockdowns. Holding space for an inconsolable family, mourners limited to just thirty people.

Thirty masked relatives, scattered across the chapel.

As the curtains closed in their silent farewell, a bereft daughter sprinted to touch the coffin, a desperate need to express her final goodbye, seeking physical reassurance that her mum had once lived. Crematorium staff followed, hastily cleaning the place her fingers had brushed against soft pine.

And I stood by, a helpless observer, bound by consequences of protocols designed to protect us, while costing something deeply human. In that moment, I recognised the loss of our capacity for lament, when we needed it most.

A witness to grief veiled, literally and figuratively.

What happens when we deny the holy ritual of weeping and lament?

What is lament?

Lament has its origins in Scripture, held so sacred by the writers of ancient texts that they devoted an entire book to it, Lamentations, the only book named for an emotion.

Lament saturates Scripture with raw pain, melancholy, and howls of anguish threaded through the Psalms, and voiced in the unforgettable agony of a bereaved mother, whose cry echoes through millennia:

A voice is heard in Ramah,

weeping and great mourning,

Rachel weeping for her children,

refusing to be comforted,

because they are no more.

(Jeremiah 31:15)

Lament is an emotion that transcends theology, a mode of weeping, a venting of our sense of injustice in the only language capable of expressing it.

Lament is also a place, leaving a tangible imprint on the soul, an ache borne of deep wounding, demanding to be heard, overflowing into the spaces where words are inadequate. In the seasons of life, it is a recurrent winter that leads us, slowly, toward spring.

Lament is honest despair. It’s a collective and individual response to trauma and the first step in naming what is, and the beginning of healing.

Who does not silently weep and rage over the injustices and innocent suffering of our broken world right now?

‘You have taken from me friend and neighbour, darkness is my closest friend.’
Psalm 88

Lament doesn’t disappear, it lies in the darkness, waiting to be set free. If we don’t stay with it, name and transform it, our body holds our suffering until it overwhelms us, manifesting in chronic pain, illness and anxiety.

After my brother died, the impact of that sudden loss was a rush, a slamming of my soul and body. The physical consequences were real, a heart murmur, panic attacks, days of nausea, an abruptly halted menstrual cycle that did not recover for several years. I didn’t know then that my body was holding what my mind could not yet process.

In the first shock of grief, lament is impossible, we cannot contemplate the enormity of loss. Yet it offers transcendence in times of immense sorrow, and a way beyond our decimation into hope, if we allow ourselves to sit with it.

‘Trauma is perhaps the most avoided, ignored, belittled, denied, misunderstood, and untreated cause of human suffering.’ The Myth of Normal, Gabor Mate

Writing our lament

On a residential weekend in my first year after ordination, we were encouraged to write our own psalms of lament, to privately spill out our own agonies, our own Gethsemanes, our own hours at the foot of the cross. For if we cannot cry out to the divine over the injustice of our own suffering, how can we silently accompany those who do?

During Holy Week each year, a small group of new retreatants gather to write their own letters of lament, burned in the fire of our Easter Vigil. We stand in silence as the sun sets, and the paper curls, blackens, and lifts. The charred remnants of our hallowed wounds rise in smoke, rendered into prayers of hope.

Lament is the threshold we cross when our pretence falls away, kneeling in the dust to which one day we will return, begging for our cup to be taken from us, while knowing the hour is far too late, knowing we must endure the dark night to come.

But we cannot stay there.

We lay our vulnerability at the foot of the cross, waiting for the promised dawn and the hope of the empty tomb.

Beyond lament

I often wonder what happened to the grief of families forbidden the funeral rite or goodbye to precious loved ones. Allowed just five mourners in the early days of the pandemic, with others unable to visit care homes or hospital wards, as the people they cherished lived and died alone.

No human connection, no communal thanksgiving for life.

No farewell to pour balm into the agony of loss.

A woman hastened away from her mother’s coffin, indelible marks of grief etched deeply into her heart, the ghostly traces of human touch erased.

Lament doesn’t erase our pain. It changes our relationship to it. When we finally stop running, when we finally bring ourselves to turn towards the truth of our lives and weep, something tentatively stirs. Not immediately, or neatly, but slowly, imperceptibly.

We cannot avoid the tomb if we want to tend to our soul wounds. But perhaps sitting with our lament creates a channel for healing and renewal, beyond our exhausted desolation and the shadows that surround us.

And we discover that the tomb is always, finally, empty.