A recent sermon challenged me to engage in the spiritual practice of lament. We took time during the service to write out our lament to God. Shorty after this sermon, I came across an article that advocates the necessity of lament in the life of a believer and in the life of the church. I appreciated the authors definition of lament as “uncensored communion with God — where we learn to be honest, intimate and humble. Lamentation is both an acknowledgment that things are not as they should be and an anguished wail, beckoning the Lord to intervene with righteousness and justice.”
The formats used in the sermon and suggested by the article were new to me, but as a counselor, the idea of lament is a daily reality. I consider it a great privilege to enter into people’s stories and sit with them in their lament. Brene Brown talks about the church taking on the role of a midwife rather than an epidural. This is a fantastic picture for what counseling sometimes looks like. There is no magic pill that will make pain disappear, but there are people who will coach you through it, help you feel it, and give you tools to heal it. Our culture is skilled at distracting us from our pain. A thousand paths to denial and minimization promise ways to short cut the process to healing and acceptance. Unfortunately, pain is part of our reality and existence. I often use the words of Churchill in session, “The best way out is always through”. But, more important than making it through the pain, is learning how to lean into it, to engage it, and sometimes to live with it. Lament is the historical and time proven tool most often used by God’s people to share need, and plead for justice for the individual, community, and the world.
For counselors interested in reading more on the topic of lament and integrating the practice into your theory and technique, check out this article by Walter Brueggemann. Here is a portion where he relates the concept of lament to object relations theory.
We can draw a suggestive analogy from this understanding of the infant/mother relationship for our study of the lament. Where there is lament, the believer is able to take initiative with God and so develop over against God the ego strength that is necessary for responsible faith. But where the capacity to initiate lament is absent, one is left only with praise and doxology. God then is omnipotent, always to be praised. The believer is nothing, and can uncritically praise or accept guilt where life with God does not function properly. The outcome is a ‘False Self, bad faith which is based in fear and guilt and lived out as resentful or self-deceptive works of righteousness. The absence of lament makes a religion of coercive obedience