Giving Voice to Suffering

Pain, suffering, sorrow, loss, anger, depression, isolation, the effects of trauma are conditions we would like to flee. Yet scriptural lament is divine license to bring these experiences before the Lord. The book of Lamentations is a response to the devastation of Jerusalem and the nation following the Babylonian invasion. The city is in rubble. Crops and communities were burned. People have been killed wholesale: by the sword (war), by starvation, by disease. The survivors have been raped, beaten, seen family members die horribly and senselessly, and are suffering ongoing effects of poverty, oppression, and trauma.

Do not for a second think these people are very different from us. Every congregation, every community, and sooner or later every life has its own devastation's. Check the rates of sexual violence, foreclosure, addiction, poverty, mental illness, or incarceration in your community. And can we not see what is happening for our brothers and sisters in places like Syria. We hear in Lamentations that “[ The city] weeps bitterly in the night, . . . / she has no one to comfort her.” These lamentations serve at least two pastoral purposes. For those who wish to deny or avoid this painful experience, the lament is a naked assertion of the reality of the sufferer. It afflicts the comfortable, and offers the same opportunity we find on the Samaritan road.

Can you pass by without being affected, without responding? Lamentation brings suffering into the light. Giving voice to suffering is a starting point for God’s work. Yet giving voice is only the starting point. Grief is not self-healing. When you are in the depths of this experience, it can be intrusive, all-consuming— there is no way out as the traumatic experience is replayed again and again. It is real and being experienced. The experience cannot be denied. The only way is work through the experience of grief, of loss. To work to find a way to live as full a life as possible as we are called to do by God and seen in the way Jesus has shown us.

We hear from Lamentations, “The thought of my affliction . . . / is wormwood and gall! / My soul continually thinks of it, / and is bowed down within me.” Lamentations also suggests it is the corresponding act of hearing the sufferer, and the sufferer knowing they have been heard, which is the pathway through this valley of sorrow. The passage further states, “But this I call to mind, / and therefore I have hope: / The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, / his mercies never come to an end; / they are new every morning; / great is your faithfulness.” 

While the grief represented here is, on one level, deeply personal, it reflects the shared national experience of the fall of Jerusalem and exile to Babylon in 586 BCE. It guides us to reflect on the corporate grief of congregations, communities, and nations. It also affirms the counter-cultural importance of lingering in lament in a world that equates grieving with losing.

The presence of so much lament throughout Scripture offers the assurance that speech to God full of anger, fear, sadness, and desperation is authentic and welcomed. The presence of this particular lament in Lamentations which is also found in the Psalms— shows us that we should not be too quick to deliver words of comfort, lest they ring hollow in the face of the deepest kinds of suffering. No we are to walk together in love, supporting one another in our burdens, being with each other in that great love shown to us in Jesus.