In the past few weeks, I have been thinking a lot about lament. I'm finding I don't speak that language very well.
My experience has been that we don't share our laments with just anyone. We typically don't throw our lament to the wind, that is too weak. (I know there are people who wear their lament as a show, a draw for attention. But, in those cases, I don't think lament is really the language being spoken.)
But, when it is an authentic language of lament, we ypically don't share them with everyone, in part because it is too transparent, too vulnerable, too personal. Lament exposes us.
And, I've not really thought about it in this way, but is there a greater indicator of trust and friendship than the sharing of our lament with another? Sharing our most vulnerable moment?
And if that is true, is there any greater loneliness or hurt than to hand someone your lament, only to have it handed back to you? To have no one willing to carry your lament? No one would share in our suffering?
I can't imagine a more isolated or painful moment - to suffer and look around, and find no one who cared enough to listen, or if they did, walked away unaffected.
Nor, can I think of many greater honors than to be entrusted with someone's sorrows.
I wonder if I love deep enough to be entrusted with someone's lament?
Rob Bell spoke on lament recently and posed the question this way, "What happens when a lament goes unheard? It turns to anger."
I wonder if that is this is the apologetic language of our age, the language of lament.
Review of "Who's Your Mike?" by Kurt Wilkin
1 year ago
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i didn't have opportunity to listen to the Bell sermon, but i was reading through the PDF slides they run and this one spoke to me, "In its complaint, anger, and grief, lamentation
ReplyDeleteprotests conditions that prevent human
thriving, and this resistance may finally
prepare the way for healing." (slide 14/17) I think this speaks the loudest to me, b/c in the last few years, I've found it helpful to understand following Jesus as the way to be remade how God intended us to be. Reconciliation to God, to the Other, and to Ourselves - to be fully human. If we are learning to become as God intended us to be, we are learning to live in reality. Lamentation seems to be that hard part of reality that we often attempt to avoid, or circumvent. We're all for celebration - the weddings, births, etc. - those transcendent moments of joy. I don't think we do as well with lamentation. I can view deep lamenting moments as somewhat transcendent, but in a different way. A way that tries to steal from God what is being done so that we can frame it in our own image of the world and make it bearable.
I'm thankful that this is being brought up. It seems like an integral part of the conversation about healing. An idea I'm only slightly familiar with from Velvet Elvis's section on the woman in Luke8.
I had one of those thoughts that you know sounds goofy, but it still seems clever. We talk about Leadership a lot in my degree program. I'm really tired of it. The other night, someone briefly mentioned Coaching, and then I was thinking about discipleship. Coaching & discipleship - words I understand more on an implicit level. I googled for the etymology of coach and pieced together some ideas about carriages/carts - things that carry people, and the evolution to someone who instructs or carries others through a subject.
ReplyDeleteSo what I have settled on is this corny lens for which we can understand discipleship or coaching: Coaching or co-aching. Aching with others and Carrying their burdens with them. In thinking about your post on lamentations, it seems like when we are teaching people about discipleship, an integral component could be this idea of coaching and carrying burdens with people. I know that the Co on coaching is not a prefix for aching, but it's a good mnemonic device for me to remember that aspect of discipleship.