There is a language of loss that we share as humans, though many of us
need help remembering how to speak it–and grace to offer others as they
learn to remember it too. Rediscovering the memory of sitting in a
bookstore on the anniversary of a death that seemed hard to believe, I
am struck with this thought. We need the language of lament. We need
permission to voice the broken hope within. We need to know lament is a
song we are allowed to sing and that we are not alone in singing it.
In the preface of Lament for a Son, author Nicholas
Wolterstorff relays a brief interchange with a friend who told him that
he had given copies of the book to all of his children. Confused,
Wolterstorff asked why he would want to give away a book of so much
despair and pain. “Because it is a love-song,” came the reply. Returning
to the preface, Wolterstorff writes, “Yes, it is a love-song. Every
human lament is a love-song.” And then he asks a question that begins
the outpouring that is the entire book: “Will love-songs one day no
longer be laments?” Gracious God, please, let it be.
A story recounted by a therapist raises a similar prayer for human
lament. A woman who had a history of abuse and a difficult past had been
coming for treatment and had been showing signs of healing. Yet one day
the woman came in and announced what she felt was another sign of her
brokenness that needed to be addressed. She described her recent
tendency to cry in the presence of her physician as he showed concern
for her as a person with significant health problems. She felt as
thought her tears must be an indication of something more that needed to
be examined.
The counselor immediately thought of the woman in the gospels who
responded to Jesus with weeping, even washing his feet with her tears
and drying them with her hair. Luke writes, “[A]s she stood behind him
at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears. Then she
wiped them with her hair, kissed them and poured perfume on them” (Luke
7:38). In this story, the woman’s tears were not simply an illustration
of her brokenness; they were an expression of life. She was marking in
gratitude the feet of the one who gave voice to the lament within her,
the value within her, the humanity she uniquely bore—in the context of a
love-song. The woman in counseling identified immediately with this
reaction to Christ, eventually learning to see her own tears as a shared
lament for a world marked by suffering and a sign of the God who knows
all too well its sting.
The lament within the gospel story inasmuch as the hope of the
gospel story is powerfully relevant to a weary and broken world. Aware
or unaware, we live before a God who gives us permission to utter the
words of loss and weariness and despair in the pits of our stomachs,
even as Christ himself weeps among us. In his humanity, we are given
both a mandate and a voice to decry cancerous narratives that suggest
there are some less created in God’s image than others. In his
invitation to take up our own crosses, we are given the way to denounce
the structures of sin that keep injustice and racism and despair at play
and the directive to stand with the abused and the persecuted. Yes, if
human lament is a long and labored love-song, Jesus is singing there in
the midst of it, perhaps at times using our own tears to call us closer
to his own broken body on the cross and the promise in his scars. This
song, too, shall one day be a lament no more.
Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.
