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Jan 16, 2025

The necessity of lament (and praise)

“Lament is the breaking of numbness by the admission of pain and loss.”
- Walter Brueggemann

“I basically realized it was a cult—so I’m leaving.”

Annie* and I were speaking because a concerned friend wanted her to find a healthier spiritual community: one where power wasn’t hoarded and courses weren’t sold for increasing amounts of dollars. Annie herself knew something was off, but so much of her experience had been life-giving. “I loved learning about the worldview; the fairy realm, the dragon realm–it was the most I’d learned in a short amount of time in forever!”

So as we looked toward a better path, we discussed why this group had been so meaningful. The answer? It had given Annie language to communicate the fullness of her life. This community had a shared vocabulary with which to explore, celebrate, and lament.

So Much Grief in One Body

I get it. I want to lament this week.

My friend and mentor Mary is dying. After living with pancreatic cancer for two years, she suffered a stroke and has been moved into hospice.

Another beloved mentor just received a frightening diagnosis. My sister’s long-term boyfriend ended their relationship out of nowhere. On Tuesday, Sean and I got a surprise significant tax bill. After six revisions, my book proposal is still not good enough to submit. And that’s just my own little world–not mentioning the inauguration and the fires and the killing.

FaceTimes and group chats can’t hold all the sadness, rage, and hopelessness. So how do I lament?

Ahlay Blakely is trying to answer that question: both with her in-person wailing circles and her concept album Wails (Songs for Grief); a ceremonial experience to “honor grief in a culture that is grief-illiterate.” If you can handle the woo, take some time and listen to the whole album.

In One Body, she sings,

I don’t know
If we were meant to carry
So much grief
In one body.”

That track, sung with two-hundred other voices, has been on repeat for me. And it gives me a little of the fluency that Annie had found, also. You see, finding language to lament is essential for the survival of our personhood.

At least, so argues Walter Brueggemann, whose scholarship of the Hebrew Bible I keep returning to. “Lament concerns the full assertion of self over against God.” Meaning, we must tell God or the universe or the trees or something that we don’t want any more of this shit. That it is wrong and that it has to stop.

I don’t want my friend to die.

“In a voice of lament…we dare to address God in insistent imperative.”

Make the pain and the sickness stop. I don’t want her to go.

Saying that out loud, with others, in words or prayer or song is essential for us to stay human. And that’s part of what spiritual communities have always been there for.

Daring Protest and Exuberant Praise

But lamenting isn’t all we need to hold onto our humanity. Brueggemann argues that we also need to praise. “Righteousness arises out of the health and liveliness of a full interaction” between “daring protest and exuberant praise.” It’s in that dialectic that the true nature of life is expressed.

And indeed, as Blakeley’s choir sings,

“I don’t know
If we were meant to carry
So much grief
In one body”

another layer of voices joins,

“Yet we are not alone,
We are not alone,
We are not alone.”

But are we any better at expressing true praise, these days? What cultural forms decenter ourselves and offer thanksgiving to God or the universe or the trees or something beyond us? Indeed, how often are we simply pulled out of ourselves into joyful abandon?

Conclusively, less often. Take partying–surely one of the few pathways toward another/An Other. According to The Atlantic, only 4.1% of Americans attended or hosted a social event on an average weekend or holiday in 2023. (19 in 20 did not!) The party goods store Party City is closing down. And maybe most depressingly, only 59% of respondents in a YouGov poll had attended a birthday party in the previous year, with only 28% saying that they would “probably” or “definitely” throw a party for their own next birthday!

The comments section from the article’s Instagram post illustrates the bewildering assumptions people have about what is necessary to throw a party, and when it might be ‘appropriate.’ Both reveal the nihilistic culture we are slipping into.

No lamenting? No praising? That ain’t living.

Tell the Truth

Lament and praise lance the bland beige of apathy. To live a spiritual life means learning how to speak and sing and dance the truth of grief and gratitude; rage and elation; protest and praise.

Brueggemann has written it, but it is what Mary taught me, too. We must tell the fullness of the truth to stay alive and in right relationship with God, however that word makes sense to us. Friendship cannot survive with only niceties. “People don’t divorce because they fall out of love,” I was once told, “they just stop sharing.” How, then, could our spiritual life remain vital without telling the truth of our joy and our despair?

Maybe it is time for all of us to host circles of friends around our kitchen tables where we simply ask one another,

  • What are you lamenting?
  • What are you praising?

Or as my friend Angie Arendt invites simply: share a high, a low, and why. It can start as simple as that!

Start at Home

I find myself increasingly wary of the big solutions and the certainty offered by some spiritual leaders—like those realms of dragons that Annie was learning about.

What I know I need is group of people who care enough to listen when I tell them the truth, whom I trust to tell me too, and who will sing with me those songs of praise and lament. May we all grow those groups together.

*not her real name

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