Thursday's Therapy - A Call to Lament - Part Four ~Angie and Tommy Prince with ~Nicholas Wolterstorff - How did the Need for the 'Cry of Lament' Get So Corrupted in the Church?

Thursday's Therapy

A Call to Lament

Part Four

~Angie and Tommy Prince

with ~Nicholas Wolterstorff

How Did the Need for the 'Cry of Lament' Get So Corrupted in the Church?

When you go to church, or you go around people engulfed in the church's doctrines, including, very likely, many in your family and community, you may have noticed that Christians are very thrown by your ongoing lament over your child. It's as if they are saying to us, "Yes children are one of God's greatest gifts to us, a very fount of love, and laughter, and creativity in our homes, and yes you grieve when they are gone, but why do you have to go on grieving them? When is it enough? Don't you think at some point you are making God look bad?"

It is shocking for us at some level that people can be so dense, so simplistic, and ultimately mean-spirited in begrudging us of all we have left of our child, which is to mourn them. Why---if they can't lovingly support us---why can they not at least respectfully leave us alone in our grief unharassed by their judgement? 

Nicholas Wolterstorff, Christian philosopher and grieving father, opens our eyes to how some of the errors in theology have slipped into our churches and swallowed up the love there to a large degree, the love that so many of us could respond to if it were directed our way, even if only in giving us the respect to grieve as we need to.

~~~

Wolterstorff describes the view of lament from Rabbi Kushner in his popular book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People:

"God couldn't do anything about our suffering even if God wanted to, says Kushner; so crying to God for deliverance makes no sense. God---so it is said---cannot intervene in the causal order. God set our entire cosmos going; and God is capable of undoing the whole thing. But God and the causal order are not of such a sort that God could intervene within the causal order."

~~~

{Angie's palpable response: How Dare you? Who are you to think you know my God so well that you have essentially rendered Him Impotent ~the Absolute, the GOD of the Universe, the Creator, the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End~ for you to say He Cannot do anything about our suffering even if He wanted to? That is not the God I serve that you are describing!

The God that I love and bow down to is the God who is intimately relating to me on a daily basis, loving me, holding me together, weeping with me, and is longing along with me for the culmination of all His endeavors to bring an end to Satan, Sin, and Death. He is not impotent. Because of sin, we live in a fallen world. He Has Done What Is Necessary To Redeem It ~ 

What do you think Christmas is all about, 

but sending His Son in love to show us God's true nature, and for 

His giving up His only Son to die on the cross to pay for our sins so that we can respond to His great love, and become His children, and 

ultimately, because of His resurrection from the dead, we may be saved from the second death so that once we die, we will be able to go to Heaven, and will live with Love for all eternity, with His Kingdom restored, His creation restored, our bodies restored, and 

Satan, Sin, and Death all destroyed forever, for all eternity? 

But of course, Rabbi Kushner, you do not know that aspect of God because you do not recognize what He Did do by sending us Jesus as you are not yet a completed Jew. I will pray for you that you may learn that beautiful truth that will make all the difference in your life now…and for all eternity.}

{Tommy's response: Rabbi Kushner, you are basically proclaiming that our Omnipotent God is impotent!}

~~~

Wolterstorff elucidates other examples of otherwise great theologians unwittingly introducing error into our already strained understanding of God amidst the terrible angst of lament:

Augustine

Augustine, for example, questioned the propriety of giving voice to suffering. In his Confessions he recollects the time before his conversion, when he wept without restraint over the death of his best friend, and the time, after his conversion, when, in spite of his attempts at restraint, he wept over the death of his mother. In both cases he says that he is telling us, his readers, about these episodes so as to confess his sin. His grief, he says, was the sign that he had been guilty of too much worldly affection. The things of this world are to be used, not enjoyed. We are to find our enjoyment in God and God alone---and in the prospect of ourselves and our friends and relatives dwelling forever in the presence of God. Grief, though not precisely sinful, is the mark, the sign, of a sinful orientation of life. In Augustinian piety, lament is displaced by confession of sin.

~~~

{Angie's response: Confession of Sin? Sin? You've got to be kidding me. We are made in God's image; God has emotions; we too will have the full gamut of emotions. God is not a passive God; neither are we. When a child is born, we rejoice! We are overjoyed! When a child is killed, we are devastated; we weep; we mourn; our lives are turned upside down and we feel it. In all of its devastating agony. There is Nothing to do with Sin when I grieve my precious child. By our lament we Are proclaiming our great Thanks to God for our child's life, for how precious they were / and are to us. Our God is a passionate God. We, His people, are also passionate people, made in His image. Even now, we are poured out as a drink offering to God and to one another to love each other through our grief. 

God understands that grief. He has felt it Himself. He too is a Child-Loss Father! He does not begrudge us our tender human emotions and call them a sin, so how dare you, brother Augustine, proclaim grief "a sinful orientation of life"? Jesus, God's own Son wept over His friend's death! Despite so many wonderful things that you contributed to our own understanding of God amidst your walk with God, dear brother Augustine, here we must proclaim you are in error: 

Your passion of love for your friend and for your dear precious mother who prayed you out of the hell-you-were-living straight into the-glorious-Kingdom-of-your-Father-God is to be commended and understood as glorifying to God, loving as He would love, not characterized as sinning against Him by your deep and abiding love for these beloved ones, nor by your grief over their ultimate loss!}

~~~

John Calvin

"Augustine saw the things of the world primarily as the works of God; he urges us to look away from them to their maker. They are to be regarded and received only for our continued existence and for our approach to God. Pervasive in (John) Calvin, by contrast, is the insistence "that we are to see the things of this world not only as the works of God  but also as the gifts of God, gifts not only for utility but for delight. 

"'This life, however crammed with infinite miseries it may be, is still rightly to be counted among those blessings of God which are not to be spurned. Therefore, if we recognize in it no divine benefit, we are already guilty of grave ingratitude toward God Himself.' …

"Calvin says… we must bear our grief and suffering with patience. What did Calvin mean by patience and why did he recommend it? The clue is contained in the following passage. This 'general axiom is to be maintained, that all the sufferings to which human life is subject and liable are necessary exercises by which God partly invites us to repentance, partly instructs us in humility, and partly renders us more cautious and attentive in guarding against the allurements of sin for the future.' God is the ultimate agent of our suffering and grief. It is for our good that God causes us to suffer; suffering in general, and grief in particular, are to be interpreted as manifestations of the goodness of God. The world is, as it were, a vast reformatory. That is why we are not to follow the 'new stoics,' trying to violate our nature by becoming numb….

"...The dominant note is that grief and suffering are manifestations of God's gracious attempt to reform us...

"The appropriate attitude then is patience, forbearance, even gratitude. 'But, if it be clear that our afflictions are for our benefit, why should we not undergo them with a thankful and quiet mind?' 

"...We are to interpret our sufferings as God's instrument for reforming our souls until they are fit with fellowship with God. Accordingly, we are to discipline ourselves to endure those sufferings with patience, even with gratitude.

"...Calvin's piety of suffering is now clear. We are indeed to voice our suffering, to speak it---thus, to name it and own it. But are we to cry out for deliverance? That's not clear; if something is for my good but unpleasant, do I ask to be delivered from it? What is abundantly clear is that one does not cry out Why? because we know why. Suffering is sent by God for our good. There is no mystery. God is neither absent nor or God's ways in these manners mysterious."

~~~

{Tommy: So, according to Calvin, I am better off that my daughter was killed. And I should be grateful that she was taken. And I am supposedly acquiring a huge dose of patience and a huge breastplate against sin because, after all, this suffering is God's idea of a good reform school to keep me from the allures of sin. So according to Calvin, I should be thankful that my life has not flourished nor will it since my child died. And I am to bear all this with patience and gratitude. But to do that, I would have to stifle the lament, and essentially numb myself to my otherwise obvious pain --- now it seems like he's not much different from Augustine and the other stoics who wanted to somehow disown their own touch with reality and therefore their own human feelings. 

Is that how I really view my loving Lord, or do I align more with a fellow grieving father, Nicholas Wolterstorff who proclaims:}

~~~~~

"So I join the psalmist in lament. I voice my suffering, naming it and owning it. I cry out. I cry out for deliverance: 'Deliver me, O God, from this suffering. Restore me, and make me whole.' I cry out for explanation, for I no more know in general why things have gone awry with respect to God's desire than did the psalmist. 'Why, O God, is this happening? Why is Your desire, that each and every one of us should flourish here on earth until full of years,  being frustrated? It makes no sense.' 

"To lament is to risk living with one's deepest questions unanswered."

"The cry occurs within the context of the yet of enduring faith and ongoing praise, for in raising Christ from the dead, we have God's word and deed that God will be victorious in the struggle against all that frustrates God's desire. Thus divine sovereignty is not sacrificed but reconceived. 

"If lament is indeed a legitimate component of the Christian life, then divine sovereignty is not to be understood as everything happening just as God wants it to happen---or happening in such a way that God regards what God does not like as an acceptable trade-off for the good thereby achieved.  

"Divine sovereignty consists in God's winning the battle against all that has gone awry with respect to God's will."

~Nicholas Wolterstorff

{Tommy and Angie: "And O, how we long for that Day!}

Thank you to Professor, and Grieving Father Nicholas Wolterstorff for all of his research and heart's cry over his son that we have been able to benefit from together. May we all seek, together, to grow in God's wisdom even as we may have to respectfully challenge some of our forefathers in the faith from time to time...

Research, from pages 84 - 92 of Hearing the Call: Liturgy, Justice, Church and the World 

(Collection, 2011 Nicholas Wolterstorff, published in 2011 by William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company)

Thursday's Therapy - A Call to Lament - Part Three ~Nicholas Wolterstorff ~Blessed Thanksgiving

Thursday's Therapy

A Call to Lament

Part Three

~Nicholas Wolterstorff

Have a Blessed Thanksgiving!

If God Is Good and Sovereign, Why Lament?

Praise and lament --- two components of the Christian life. There are more, of course, many more. Repentance, for example. But at least these two: praise and lament.

Or is that true? Are both of these really parts of the Christian life? No one doubts that praise of God is part of the Christian life. There may be times in our lives when we find it difficult to praise God, yet no believer doubts that praise is a component within the well-formed Christian life. But what about lament? 

No doubt most Christians, if asked, would say that lament is part of the well-formed Christian life. We all know that there are laments in the Psalms; we all sing them, or participate in their reading. So it would not feel right to say, flat out, that lament has no place in the Christian life. 

But it's open to question whether we all really believe it. The "victorious living" mentality currently sweeping through American Christianity has no place for lament. Likewise the megachurches have no place for it. Lament does not market well.

If one goes beyond the words and looks at contemporary American Christianity as it actually exists---looks at how it lives its life and expresses its faith---one comes to the conclusion that most of it does not believe that lament is part of the Christian life. This is in spite of what it may think is the catechetically correct answer to give if directly asked whether it is. 

What is lament?

We must start by considering what lament is. I shall take the biblical laments, particularly the laments of the psalms, as my paradigms. Psalm 22 is a particularly good example, since all the basic elements are there: some of the other lament psalms are truncated. 

The lament, at its heart, is giving voice to the suffering that accompanies deep loss, whatever that loss may be. Lament is not about suffering. Lament is not concerning suffering. Lament does not count the stages and try to identify the stage in which one finds oneself.  

Lament is the bringing to speech of suffering, the languaging of suffering, the voicing of suffering. Behind lament are tears over loss. Lament goes beyond the tears to voicing the suffering. To voice suffering, one must name it---identify it. 

Sometimes that is difficult, even impossible. The memories are repressed so that the suffering is screened from view. Or one is aware of it, in a way; but naming it, identifying it for what it is, would be too painful, too embarrassing. So, one resists. Then one cannot lament. One suffers without being able to lament. Lament is an achievement. 

One must not only name one's suffering if one is to voice it; one must also own it. Instead of disowning it one has to admit it as part of who one is---a part of one's narrative identity. If someone asks, "Tell me who you are," one says, maybe not immediately but eventually,

"I am someone who went through a painful divorce,"

"I am someone who suffered the loss of a child,"

"I am someone who was fired after twenty years of faithful work." 

To disown one's suffering is to try to delete it from one's narrative or prevent it from ever becoming a part---to try to forget it, put it behind one, get on with things. Lament, in requiring that one voice one's suffering, requires that one not only name it but own it. Owning one's suffering is often difficult: it is painful or embarrassing to incorporate one's suffering into one's life story. 

………Listen now to the psalmist:

………But I am a worm and no man;

………….scorned by men and despised by the people.

………All who see me mock at me, 

………….they make mouths at me, they wag their heads;

………He committed his cause to the Lord; let him deliver him,

………….let him rescue him, for he delights in him!"

(Psalm 22:6-8,  RSV)

………I am poured out like water, 

………….and all my bones are out of joint;

………my heart is like wax,

………….it is melted within my breast;

………my strength is dried up like a potsherd,

………….and my tongue cleaves to my jaw;

………….thou dost lay me in the dust of death.

………Yea, dogs are round about me;

………….a company of evil doers encircle me;

………….they have pierced my hands and feet---

………I can count all my bones---

………….they stare and gloat over me;

………they divide my garments among them,

………….and for my raiment they cast lots.

(Psalm 22:14-18 , RSV)

Lament is more, though, than the voicing of suffering. The mere voicing of one's suffering is complaint, not lament. Lament is a cry to God. This presupposes, of course, that lament is the action of a believer. 

This cry to God has two main components, interconnected, with sometimes the one more prominent, sometimes the other. First, lament is the cry to God for deliverance: "Deliver me O God, from this suffering." Listen again to the psalmist:

………But thou, O LORD, be not far off!

………….O my help, hasten to my aid!

………Deliver my soul from the sword,

………….my life from the power of the dog!

………Save me from the mouth of the lion.

(Psalm 22:19-21a, RSV)

Second, lament is the cry to God of "Why?" "Why, O God, is this happening? I don't understand it. Where are you, O God? I cannot discern your hand in this darkness." 

………My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

………….Why are you so far from helping me, from the words

………….of my groaning?

………O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer;

………….and by night, but find no rest.

(Psalm 22:1-2, NRSV)

………Rouse yourself! Why do you sleep, O LORD? 

………….Awake! Do not cast us off forever!

………Why do you hide your face?

………….Why do you forget our affliction and oppression?

………For we sink down to the dust;

………….our bodies cling to the ground.

………Rise up, come to our help.

………….Redeem us for the sake of your steadfast love.

(Psalm 44:23-26, NRSV)

Loss, deep loss, is the shattering of meaning. The shattering of meaning at one point in one's life has rippling consequences throughout one's life; one's life as a whole threatens to lose its sense.  

For the believer, the meaning of life is tied up with her experience and understanding of God. Now, suddenly, there is a rip in her whole fabric of meaning. So the believer cries to God---who else to cry to?---not only for deliverance from suffering but also deliverance from the threat of meaninglessness.  

"Why, O God? Why is this happening? What sense does this make? We thought you were good, powerful, and knowledgeable. We thought we understood your ways. But of this, we can make no sense. Why is this happening? Where are you, O God? Why are you absent?"

………In the full-fledged lament there is one more component: a yet. The yet is an expression of the endurance of faith, or somewhat more precisely, the yet is a praise-full accounting of God's actions in the past---an accounting, thus, of the grounds of faith. Yet I will praise You. Sometimes the yet is not only retrospective but prospective. Not only have I praised you for what have been  the signs of your goodness; I will again praise you again for the goodness you will again show. 

………Yet you are holy, 

………….enthroned on the praises of Israel.

………In you our ancestors trusted; 

………….they trusted, and you delivered them.

………To you they cried, and were saved;

………….in you they trusted, and were not put to shame.

………Yet it was you who took me from the womb;

………….you kept me safe on my mother's breast.

………On you was I cast from my birth,

………….and since my mother bore me you have been my God.

………Do not be far from me,

………….for trouble is near

………….and there is no one to help.

(Psalm 22:3-5, 9-11 NRSV)

Thursday's Therapy - A Call to Lament Part Two ~Angie and Tommy Prince, with ~Nicholas Wolterstorff

Thursday's Therapy

A Call to Lament

Part Two

~Angie and Tommy Prince

with ~Nicholas Wolterstorff

This week, we continue our "Call to Lament." Why is it we feel so uncomfortable sharing our depths of suffering in the worship communities we have all known? Why are tears so often suppressed? Why are our human tears stuffed down? Even God is a God who grieves! We can grieve His spirit even with our lack of authenticity! God made us in His own image, and that image includes emotions, from the heights of the emotions of praise to the depths of the emotions of lament. 

Wolterstorff, a philosopher and theologian, and himself a grieving father, understands our need for lament, even, and especially in, our worship communities. But he also observes the disturbing pattern of the church's drifting away from authenticity into a consumer-oriented environment that might be perceived as more "appealing" to the culture at large. Some of us might think that is a corrupting of the church's true purpose, which we believe is to draw our hearts closer to the heart of God. 

In our positivity, success-oriented culture, where is there room for grief? To deprive the church of its grief is to taint the glorious process of  opening the environment up for God's children to cry out their hurts to our Lord, and ultimately to feel God's genuine comfort amidst our depths of grief… 

Indeed, Wolterstorff proclaims that one of the facets of how we experience the manifestation of the Divine, or the epiphany of God's very character, is in our suffering… 

In Wolterstorff's own words, we read from his newest book, Hearing the Call, the following:

As we human beings trail through life we experience pain and suffering --- in part our own, in part that of others. Some of this pain and suffering is non-innocent suffering; it is punishment for, or the consequence of, moral evil. But not all of it is that. 

The suffering of the Israelites in the brickyards of Egypt was not the consequence of their sin, nor was the suffering of the Jews in the camps of Auschwitz.  

Some of the suffering of our world even resists our seeing it as the counterpart of anyone's sin --- the accidental death of a child, for example.

My question now is this: How does the believer experience such suffering?

We saw that the believer apprehends the goods of the world as a gift, the wondrousness of the world as a glorious work, and the moral evil of the world as disobedience. Is there any counterpart in the believer's experience of the suffering of the world? 

Is the suffering of the world also some sort of epiphany of God? Or is our experience of suffering just separate from our experience of God?

Some believers experience some of humanity's suffering, perhaps some experience all of it, as the anger of God. The Old Testament Book of Laments closes with this cry of total desolation before the Almighty:

Restore us to Thyself, O LORD, that we may be restored!

Renew our days as of old!

Or hast Thou utterly rejected us?

Art Thou exceedingly angry with us?

Other believers --- I think mainly those who have not themselves suffered much --- say that suffering is to be apprehended as one of the gifts of God. 

And yet others testify that what they experience in suffering is the absence of God, the abandonment of God. What the secularist sees just as unmerited suffering, they experience as God's mysterious and painful abandonment.

There is yet another possibility, a possibility rarely grasped in the Christian tradition and seldom grasped in the tradition of rabbinic Judaism, but present in the Bible. Nowhere has it been better expressed than in Isaiah 63, verse 9. Speaking of Israel and of God the writer says: 

"In all their affliction, He was afflicted."

In our afflictions, God is afflicted. Over our suffering, God suffers. Over our mourning, God mourns. Over our weeping, God weeps. I suggest that what the believer sees in beholding the suffering of the world --- the thought makes us tremble, I admit --- is no less than the suffering of God. 

What the believer sees when beholding the rabbi from Nazareth on the cross is not only human blood from sword and thorn and nail, but the tears of God over the wounds of the world.

So the suffering of the world is also an epiphany of God --- sometimes of the anger of God, sometimes of the gift of God, but always, I suggest, of the suffering of God. 

The God who has covenanted Himself to humanity suffers over our suffering. 

The suffering of the world is not to be experienced as just other than God but as the suffering of God. 

To this epiphany, how else can we respond than with lament and intercession, crying out 

"How long, O Lord, how long? 

Deliver Yourself, and us Your children."

As you and I leave our places of dispersion (our everyday world) and travel to our assemblies (our places of worship), we carry with us our experiences of the suffering of ourselves and of the world. 

But most of us do not experience God in this suffering. Most of us do not see it as an epiphany of God. 

And so, though we bring our experience of suffering to our assemblies, we do not know what to do with it there. Though praise and confession play large roles in our liturgies, lament plays only a minor role. We skip over those desperate psalms and songs of lament from ancient Israel. And our intercessions, which ought to be grounded in sorrow over the sorrow of the world, give voice at best to muffled cries of pain. The lament, "How long, O Lord?" is scarcely heard. Though we bring our tears of pain with us to our worship, we don't know how to cry them there.

Tears in the assembly are regarded as liturgical failure.

I suggest that a liturgy without tears is a failure. We must find a place for lament.

Of course, if the liturgy is to be authentic we must genuinely experience the world as gift and glorious work of God and feel the joy of gratitude; otherwise the songs of praise are mere sounds. We must genuinely experience the world as disobedient to God and feel the regret of repentance; otherwise the gestures of repentance are mere gestures. 

And we must genuinely experience the world as the suffering of God and feel the agony of lament; otherwise the words of intercession are mere words. Authentic experience and life in the world is a condition of authentic liturgy. If the condition is not satisfied, God finds our words, songs, and gestures deficient, sometimes even nauseous. 

The liturgy of the Christian church then, is for blowing the trumpets of joy over our experience of the world as gift and glorious work of God. It is for rubbing on the ashes of repentance over our experience of the world as disobedient to God. And the liturgy is for crying the tears of lament and intercession over our experience of the world as the suffering of God over the suffering of the world. We do each of these in its own place in the liturgy. In Holy Communion, mysteriously, we do them all together.

Praise, confession lament; adoration, repentance, intercession. In entering the assembly we do not obliterate the world from our mind but carry along with us our experience of the world as a three-fold epiphany of God and our response to that experience. In the liturgy, while "holding in remembrance" what we have experienced of God, we give voice to our response. For that we need trumpets, ashes, and tears --- al three.

~by Nicholas Wolterstorff, found in Hearing the Call: Liturgy, Justice, Church and the World 

(Collection, 2011 Nicholas Wolterstorff, published in 2011 by William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company)

~highlights, mine

Stay tuned for more Wolterstorff to come!