Wait Without Hope

I've been reading NT Wright's Christian's At the Cross. And, this post might be better suited for Holy Week as the entire book is a retelling of Wright's messages from Holy Week 2007 with the parishioners of the Church of the Ascension in Easington Colliery, an abandoned mining town northeast of Manchester in the UK.

And though, I probably will reflect more on the book during Holy Week, I could not help but post on the section for Holy Saturday in the moment.

I have been struck in recent weeks by the idea of a language of lament, and posted about it previously.

In his reflections on Holy Saturday, Wright quotes from Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot, in which Eliot pushes us to think about hope and waiting:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing

As Wright then positions the poem on Holy Saturday and asks us to think through the lens of those trying to cope with all that has gone wrong, with the death and subsequent burial of Jesus.

And it is important that we think in terms of "all that has gone wrong", because I'm sure if we think "crucifixion" we cannot help, but reinterpret the moment through our our revisionist perspective and read a hope into the story that was not present for those who were waiting.

So, we retain the seed of the idea that something had gone terribly wrong.

And we rest in this moment. Something is terribly wrong.

I think Wright's meditation here is worth breathing in:

If you want God's hope instead of yours; if you want God's love instead of yours; if you want God's thoughts instead of yours - then you will need to go through a time of silence, of resting, of ignorance and dispossession.


Dispossession. Ignorance. Rest. Silence. To learn to hope with a hope that is not mine.

language of lament

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.