Make Way For Lament

I wonder if God is lament.

I’m not sure I know how to lament.

In 2019 I was walking through a brown dust village in remote Malawi. Death is second nature in this place, a common occurrence and expected reality. Gathered on the mud made porch of a little shack were men, women and children. They sat on the brown dust earth and wept in communion with each other. Someone in the village had died. I was told that they would be there for many days, grieving the loss together, allowing themselves to feel it, really feel it.

My world is not structured to allow this kind of lament. There’s things to be done, places to be and Lord knows I don’t want to upset others with my grief. The first words out of our mouths, when tears well in public, is some sort of apology. We mumble through a sorry and conjure up a justification of weariness.

Well, of course we’re bloody weary! We’re grieving!

I know I’ve not yet had the chance to really feel the absence of my brother. I’ve just been adjusting to my own stage 4 diagnosis only four months after his death. It’s all been too much. But that image of communal weeping keeps coming to mind. The allowing of space and time for such a thing. I do feel a deep need for time and space right now - a lot of it! Maybe my body is telling me what I need before my mind catches up with its meaning.

Perhaps, if we don’t learn how to lament, we create in its place a deep cleft in the surface of our earth, a chasm that we cannot cross. The ground we once thought solid, the God we once knew cared, crumbles beneath the weight of our grief. The Creator we used to sit with tumbles down the ravine and we no longer have a place for the sacred things of life.

I wonder, if lament was allowed, if we let the pain of loss surround us in the brown dust earth, maybe we would see God differently in this space. Instead of an empty echo tumbling through darkness, maybe we would experience a divine intimacy, a closeness that could hold us in the loss.

I wonder if God is lament.