Lament is a form of worship that is very little understood both inside the church and outside it. It’s the use of art, music, poetry and speech to express pain.
To mourn. To communicate grief.
And it’s an art we’ve lost in the church.
The fact it’s little understood (and even less used in our worship in church) is really weird, actually, because if you look through books like the Psalms and the Prophets, a lot of which are a record of what Jewish worship looked like in the time of Israel, lament makes up about 30%. There’s so much pain and raw emotion in the Bible. It’s a very beautiful and powerful form of worship that expresses the sense that the world and situations in it aren’t right, that bring the pain and the hurt and frustration of life before the throne of God and just leave it there. Not trying to connect all the dots and make it neat and tidy, but just to express the pain and let all the untidiness speak for itself.
Why am I writing all this? Because I think lament is an art that really needs to be recaptured in the church both as joint and individual worship. Let me explain.
Sometimes in life, it seems so hard to simply stop and think and reflect. Especially in our lives, where everything is very on demand and instant and there is so much noise going on everywhere. Lament (and suffering more generally) disrupts. It breaks in. Taking time to examine life, to poke at the places that hurt when we discover them, to not just cover them up but take time to explore the hurt, work through the issues – it’s something very spiritual. Because it’s in the disruption that we grow.
Maybe a good allegory would be this: imagine you were going to the posh shopping mall in Edinburgh and you were walking through, surrounded by all sorts of exquisite clothes, dresses, jewelry. Everywhere you looked there were just gorgeous items where the light just seemed to reflect and refract in all sorts of mysterious ways. And then slap bang in the middle of the shop someone had parked an old rusty car. And this car had a few geese pecking around, and a couple of the windows were broken.
It would make you stop. Think.
It would play with what you expect.
It’s the same with the little things. The little hurts. The things we pass of as “oh it’s nothing”. Sometimes what’s required for us to grow is to take time to stop and listen to those things. To explore what’s underneath them. The hurts and the pains we thought we had dealt with or we never even knew we had. And then we can hand them over to God and invite him into the hurt and the pain and heal and transform it and be with us through it.
And it’s not a quick process. Sometimes healing takes years. It is this constant process of engaging in and recognising death and hurt to get to life. And sometimes all we can know is we’re slightly less broken than we were yesterday, or last week, or last year.
And that’s OK. Because God can deal with the tension and confusion and time.
Slowly, bit by bit, we’ll come out of our prison and learn to fly.
But it takes that constant effort of working with God to find the places that hurt and invite him into it.