The Bible first shocked me in high school. Our pastor read from Psalm 137, and the last verse blew my mind—and not in a good way. It read, “Happy is the one who seizes [Babylonian] infants and dashes them against the rocks.”
I recoiled.
Our pastor explained that the Psalm was meant to horrify us. It demonstrated that there was no human emotion that God had not encountered before. But I wasn’t so sure because I loved the straight and narrow. I kept my emotions in tidy rows, ready for inspection. And I knew that saying you’d kill innocent babies just wasn’t nice.
Twenty years later, that Psalm soothes me because in the midst of deep sorrow, being able to say my own awful, horrible things to God saved my faith.
According to G. Brooke Lester, a lament poem is a genre of psalm where “a petitioner ades God directly on the occasion of some calamity.” I was surprised to learn they are the most numerous kind of Psalm in the Israelites’ songbook. That is a lot of songs about death, calamity, and horror.
In Spirituality of the Psalms, Walter Brueggemann points out the American church rarely sings laments. As a culture, we don’t know quite what to do with ugliness. But Biblically speaking, lament is a central way of ading God, even if we rarely do so in a corporate setting.
There’s good reason for laments’ importance. Laments also help us to question our formulaic assumptions about success. They name abuse and help us anticipate the ups and downs of our faith journey. Laments ultimately bring us closer to Jesus, who was, as Isaiah put it, acquainted with grief.
We live in a world filled with calamity. When sorrow comes upon us, the lament psalms can help us weather the storm…
I was at iBelieve this week, sharing what lament has taught me. Join me there?
When You Know You’re Not an Artist