Finish Lent With Lament

Prepare, cook, clean up. 

One meal after the next. Sweep the floors. 

Let the dogs out. 

Let the dogs in. 

Let the dogs out again. 

Read assignments for church history class.

Get sleepy and bored.

Get coffee. 

Read more church history. 

Switch to the assignments for Introduction to Old Testament.

Read more assigned reading for OT. 

Read the book of Job because the professor assigned it.

Job. 

Can I take any more sadness and suffering?

I’m soldiering on, but I don’t want to.

I keep moving, even though I want to just sit and stare. 

I’m a woman who usually has a mouthful of words. I’m an optimist. I like to write words of  hope and blessing. I’ve haven’t been able to find those words lately.  I’ve been asking God about that. Why don’t I have anything to say?  I miss my readers; I want to write for them. Where are my words? 

And then this one word came to me:  Lament. 

This is what Job does. My Old Testament classmates and I have been discussing it this week online.  Job is sorry for the day he was born. He says so to God. He doesn’t mince words. He refuses to take blame that isn’t his and he refuses the ‘churchy’ answers his friends give him.  My friend, BK, calls this “slapping a Bible verse on it.”  I call it treating God like a vending machine.  If I do this, God’ll do that.   As someone in my class pointed out about Job, God did restore things to Job after all his sufferings, but the children he gave him were new children. He didn’t get back the ones he lost. This comment came from a man who’d lost a child.  That slowed me down in my reading and understanding of Job.  “Tidy theology” seems disrespectful to that kind of grief and loss.

There’s a world full of  sorrow, instability, and insecurity right now. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t find words. Maybe we all “just need to take a minute” as my friend Farrow likes to say.  Maybe we sit in silence; we lament. We acknowledge the magnitude of what we are witnessing and living through and losing. 

At the end of the book, when God finally speaks to Job, he strangely commends Job  and tells the friends to get Job to pray and offer sacrifices for them. God was angry at the friends for not speaking correctly about Him, as Job had done. 

What ‘correct thing’ did Job say, I wondered?  Or  was it what he didn’t say?  Job is fully human in this story. Lamenting the day you were born is about as depressing as it gets. Job refuses to give up his integrity. Or to put it another way- he just keeps being the human being that he is, saying what a suffering man honestly ought to say, even when his friends think he is not being religious enough.  In the end, God doesn’t really explain himself to Job, but he does take him on a verbal tour of his creation in which Job cannot miss his own creatureliness and the mysterious and awesome power of God.  That power is terrifying and beautiful at the same time. 

A priest friend of mine said recently,  “This is the Lentiest Lent we’ve  ever Lented.”  The lines outside my grocery story Friday suddenly brought the far away news on my phone screen into my neighborhood. We are all in this. Like Job, I’m just going to call it what it is, sad and scary. 

 Last fall I took a class on spiritual practices and one of those we studied was lament. I’d never heard of it as a practice for modern people, though I now know the Psalms are full of lament ( 70 % of them are lament). It’s an ancient practice we need to recover both individually and corporately.  I happened to be studying it the very week John McArthur made his nasty remarks about Beth Moore. I wrote my assigned lament that week for Beth Moore and my Christian sisters. Writing it and then having to read it to a group of my classmates helped dissipate the anger and sadness I felt. Lament as a practice helps us process grief. 

We need to name things: our grief, our sorrow, our institutional and personal sin. We cannot get "past" things without going through them.  The act of lamenting is healing.  It’s not a giving up, or wallowing in pity, or staying stuck. It’s a “get real process” of owning our own humanity. We can only be with God in the present moment.  Lament is a threshold one crosses into that moment. 

So let us lament -choosing the hardest, harshest Psalms that we can find and praying them, or writing and speaking our own. Tell the truth. Sit in silence.  Rehearse God’s deeds in the past. The lament psalms show us a pattern of how to do this.  Don’t cut yourself or anyone else off with a pat answer of what you’re “supposed” to think or feel.  Don’t be Job’s friends.  

It is Holy Week. The final week of Lent. We are moving toward an Easter Sunday that will look unlike anything we are accustomed to for that highest of Holy Days. We will celebrate, not sure how exactly, but we will.  Between now and then, let’s finish Lent with lament, meeting God in the present moment exactly as we are.