Lament Is Essential

Lament tells the truth about what is. It refuses to ignore pain and injustice. It won’t turn its face away from the realities of losing something or someone precious. It is an expression of love. Lament allows sorrow to be expressed, both to honor beloveds we’ve lost and to honor the gap left in our communities and our souls by their absence.

In the apparently ever-expanding Marvel universe, a quirky series called WandaVision was released in early 2021, which at first glance appears to be nothing more than a nostalgic dance through the history of sitcoms starring two superheroes. It turned out to be a thoughtful and timely means of addressing grief.

When Vision, attempting to comfort Wanda as she spoke of feeling overwhelmed by her brother’s death, asked, “What is grief, if not love persevering?” the moment went viral. Many called it the defining moment of the series.1 It’s no mystery why those words resonated profoundly: Wanda’s experience echoed what was happening in the world. Alisha Grauso wrote, “She has not been able to properly grieve for her compounding losses, instead forced to carry on in her duty to others, forced to carry on in her role . . . not given the chance to slow down and fully process all that she has needed to” mourn.2

Like Wanda, we have been grieving. You and those you love have lived through your own losses, large and small. Some of those must be healed over time. In the past several years, people I care for have experienced cancer and marriage challenges. Some have lived through the sudden death of children and marriage partners due to illness, accidents, and gun violence. Others have struggled with depression and addiction. My heart has been heavy for loved ones carrying extraordinary weights of loss and grief.

Some of you reading this have experienced the death of a loved one and are learning how to survive with the ache of their absence. Some of you are living on the other side of a heartbreaking divorce. Or you’re enduring the more hidden grief of infertility or miscarriage, or a painful season of parenting when the energy and means to love your child well has been hard to find. Some of you love someone who is struggling with addiction or mental illness. You have been betrayed in your work or hurt by a church community. Some of you are being invited to bring past abuse into healing light. Others are waking up to what is yours to do to address systemic racism or human trafficking or unhoused neighbors or the ways people are harming the earth; or you’re healing from the personal experience of one of those horrors. Some are living with the kind of heartache that is difficult even to whisper out loud.

I have no doubt that for some of you reading these words, if the last two paragraphs were a checklist, you would have marked it multiple times. You’re living with pain and loss that touches many areas of your world, making the hard but good work of lament all the more essential but also more difficult and complex. Some of you are accompanying others through grief as a pastor, counselor, spiritual director, or other type of helper, even as you carry your own grief. And I hope you know that if what you’re grieving isn’t reflected here, that doesn’t make it any less real and meaningful.

Lamenting What We’ve Lived Through Together

Beyond the undeniable weight of personal tragedies is what we’ve lived through together. The past years have been exhausting with crisis piling upon crisis. Our world has been decimated by a global pandemic for the first time in a century. News of a novel coronavirus began to emerge in December 2019, and only a month later the virus was declared a global health emergency.3 Weeks after I’d jotted down that one of my hopes for the year was to travel more, people were advised to shelter in place around the world.

We started social distancing and relearning how to wash our hands. But that wasn’t enough to slow the spread of the disease. By March, the World Health Organization designated the outbreak a global pandemic.4 Children started homeschooling and adults began working from home. And as we sheltered in place and prayed that we and those we love wouldn’t get sick, some of them did. Many lost friends or family, often without a chance to say goodbye. Funerals became small affairs, sometimes without being able to gather in person.5

A little over a year after the first whispers of a new illness originating in Wuhan, China, nearly 125 million people had gotten sick and 2,746,397 had died.6 Life expectancy in the United States had declined by a full year due to Covid-19, the largest drop since World War II.7 The losses were more extreme for people of color, with Black Americans’ life expectancy dropping by over two and half years and Hispanic Americans’ dropping by nearly two years. By March 2021, over 500,000 Americans had died from Covid-19, more than the number who died in World War I or II or in the Korean or Vietnam wars.8

And the tragically steady diet of disasters has been exacerbated by hate, violence, racism, fear, and division. Families and friendships have been disrupted by very different understandings of events, fueled by social media echo chambers and conspiracy theories. It all brings to mind Jesus’ chilling proclamation that “one’s foes will be members of one’s own household” (Matthew 10:36); he was echoing a passage in Micah 7 that describes widespread bribery, perversions of justice, and corruption.

Particularly for those in the United States, the #MeToo and #ChurchToo movements have served as an unmasking. And between March and June of 2020, for the first time in its history, more than half of the calls to the National Sexual Abuse Hotline were placed by minors as children were trapped at home with their abusers due to stay-at-home orders.9

We’ve also lived through what has been referred to as a racial reckoning in the United States and abroad.10 The brokenness and evil of racism that has harmed my marginalized brothers and sisters in overt and subtle ways is not new. But the Unite the Right Rally in 2017, in which white supremacists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, served as one flashpoint among several igniting an era of heightened awareness of racialized and police violence.11

In spring 2020, after an officer knelt on George Floyd’s neck for over eight minutes, his very public death along with that of several other unarmed men and women of color, particularly at the hands of police, began to capture attention and outrage in a new way. Protests erupted in Minneapolis and then around the United States and globally. Reports indicate that at least fifteen, and up to twenty-six, million people in the United States participated in demonstrations.12

And hate crimes against Asian Americans rose by nearly 150 percent during the pandemic.13 This was related in part to anti-Asian rhetoric associated with Covid-19. On March 16, 2021, a young white man killed eight people (six of whom were of Asian descent) at three different Atlanta massage parlors.14

Meanwhile, Syria has been at war for a decade, resulting in more than half of the country being displaced, widespread destruction, and countless lives lost.15 Rohingya Muslims were targeted for slaughter in Myanmar.16 The...