LAMENT

4. Lament for racial divisions within the church and our communities combined with the active pursuit of a just reconciliation

(In continuation of 12 marks of the new monasticism series, I would like for us to turn our attention to the topic of lament for racial divisions.)

Lament is an old middle English word that comes from old French and Latin word as weeping and wailing. When I was 10 or 11 years old in Korea, both my great grandmother and grandmother passed away within a span of one month. My memory is elusive but what I remember is there were intermittent wailing for days with people coming in and out of the house constantly. Lamenting has been the ebb and flow of life of humanity for as long as humanity existed. Lamenting is so vital and significant that there are even professional lamenters in some societies.

I’d submit that a biblical meaning of lament involves two facets of movements: full awareness of utter helplessness and complete trust in God alone. One may not be weeping and wailing but the experiences of hitting the rock bottom with no rescue in sight and thus crying out for help are what lament is like.

According to Matthew, Jesus’ last words captures the very essence of lament, “And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” That is, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46, cf Psalm 22:1, ESV) The rest of Psalm 22:1 fills out with David crying out, “Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning? As the Psalms are replete with lament, consider David and other psalmists lament, “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?” (Psalm 13:1, ESV) “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord! O Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleas for mercy!” (Psalm 130:1-2, ESV) “Why” and “how long” are visceral and emotionally charged expressions. When we are in the middle of such a state, hope is a distant memory and a forgotten reality. With all things that are on the news and the social media and the things that are not, it feels like we are in the middle of an extended painful and distressing “how long” and “why” with no end in sight. Those that are lamenting are ones that have joined the long successive line of lamenters in the Bible. 

From the Psalms, there arises a sense of permission and even invitation to enter into lament for us all. Later, Jesus highlights lament as one of the beatitudes, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” (Matthew 5:4, ESV) No one can fake mourning, thus the verse is not saying “try to mourn” or mourn when you can, rather when you mourn, you will be comforted.

According to M. Elizabeth Lewis Hall, lament is a spiritual practice and discipline modeled for us by Jesus. She proposes that “lament is a spiritual discipline that assists the sufferer to reconstruct meaning after the disorienting effects of the suffering.” Lament functions as a one-way bridge from disorientation toward new orientation, thus it produces reorientation, providing a necessary movement from deep distress to God’s redemptive perspective. Lament is far from complaint against, not that complaint against is wrong. Lament, rather, is a living exercise of trust.

Lamenting for racial divisions is a specific invitation that is unique to our day. Racial division has existed for most of humanity after one people became many (The Tower of Babel incident), but it is also true that what we are facing is unique to our time. Before we lament for racial divisions within the church and our communities, I believe we need to lament racial divisions in humanity. No one is excluded from racism. I have been a racist whether through clever underhanded jokes I share or participate in or overt dislike of some people or groups of people. Racism flows out of the foundational function of collective ego, endlessly comparing and competing and placing who are different from us below us, further justifying our position. Thus, Jesus’ exhortation in the Sermon on the Mount about not judging or condemning others and seeing the log in our own eye before we see the speck in others (Matthew 7: 1-6, ESV) is timeless and timely. This exhortation obviously applies to person-to-person relationships. At the same time, I believe Jesus was more focused on group to group, community to community, and people to people relationships as Jesus was addressing the plural “you” of which singular “you” is a part. Our individuality is a subset of group or people we belong to. Thus, if we enlarge this teaching from group to group or people to people, then the applicability of this teaching explodes in all directions.

BLM (especially with fresh incidents and Chauvin’s trial and impending verdict) and Asian hate (which has gone greatly underreported) to name just a few are palpable symptoms of racial divisions in humanity in the US. The Atlanta shooting shook my wife and me, which led to questions about our identity and belonging. China also has had its own colorful history of overwhelming other peoples who are different and thus viewed as threats from those in main power. Even now, what is happening among the Uighers in western China is just one example. Even my home country, Korea, has had to face their own racism issues as migrant workers have flooded in from other mostly Asian countries. And the list goes on and on. . .

So what do we do? I believe an invitation is to lament. Walter Brueggemann in his book, The Prophetic Imagination, captures grief as a way to criticize the dominant and the royal consciousness of which racial divisions is one. Brueggemann writes, “empires live by numbness.” Later, he captures, “The language of grief is against the numbness.” This language whether through songs, poems, or silence (and other expressions) of grief is lament. Lament stands against numbness and the real criticism against the dominant consciousness begins in the capacity to grieve. He further flushes, “I believe that grief and mourning, that crying in pathos, is the ultimate form of criticism, for it announces the sure end of the whole royal arrangement.” Wow, that is worth reading one more time. . . Later, he sums up, “The riddle and insight of biblical faith is the awareness that only anguish leads to life, only grieving leads to joy, and only embraced endings permit new beginnings.” Brueggemann is careful in reminding us that grieving’s characteristic idioms are “anguish and not anger” and “hope and not optimism.”

Just as David and other biblical saints have experienced the depths of despair followed by God’s rescues and replaced with the hope in God as well as Jesus’ last cry of forsakenness of the cross which led to resurrection, we are invited to lament in this season and embrace God promises that we would experience joy and life. Furthermore, while we are invited to lament as individuals, we are also invited to join communities that lament together to stand as a humble force in criticizing the dominant consciousness of our day as well as in ushering in the upside Kingdom of God. Further still, we are invited to join a long line of ancient and universal communal movement of lamenters that exposes the egoic infatuation of comparison game and accepts and celebrates one another as God’s masterful creations.