Putting on Lament

“Like one who takes away a garment on a cold day, or like vinegar poured on a wound, is one who sings to a heavy heart.”

Proverbs 25:20, NIV

I remember the heaviness of those early days of grief. When the loss of our newborn son was an open wound, fresh and tender, and I wondered if I’d ever make it through a day without weeping. I wore grief like a jacket, a necessary layer enwrapping my soul. At times, the jacket radiated with warmth and comfort, and I learned to feel at home in the extra weight. But at other times, it felt bulky, and yet unavoidable.

Interactions with others proved awkward. Some would try to take this jacket off for me. I knew they meant well, thinking I would be more comfortable if I would shed my extra layer. But my tender heart would freeze if I denied it such care. Others tried to ignore I was even wearing a jacket. They acted like everything was “normal,” perhaps thinking this would help me feel better; but in the end, it just fed their own comfort to avoid pain, so they could feel better.

In my journey with grief, it became evident how unfamiliar and uncomfortable our overly-optimistic American culture is with grief. We are a people of over-comers and beautiful endings. We struggle to sit in the unresolved.

Perhaps most surprising is how foreign the language of lament has become in our churches. We sing songs of triumph and overcoming, but have neglected the psalms of lament and grief. We have allowed a small space to grieve our “former lives” and the “sins of our past,” but beyond that, we are expected to live in the new life of blessing, somehow without sorrow. Even though we all wrestle daily with the How Long O Lord realities of a broken world: sickness, death, divorce, strained relationships, injustice, abuse, poverty, neglect, hunger, dissatisfaction, fear, anxiety, depression, loneliness, and isolation, to name a few.

As our nation faces another wave of reckoning with the realities of racial injustice, I wonder how much this narrative of neglecting lament contributes to how we see (or don’t see ) our Black brothers and sisters. If we can’t sit with grief, we will be unable to sit in the discomfort of our history. And it just might be easier to pretend it’s not there, take that jacket off for them and keep blaring our choruses to the heavy heart. Meanwhile, our brothers and sisters are weeping because we’ve just poured vinegar into their open wound.