Lamenters Tongue
Imagine that you are sitting in church one Sunday and you hear someone praying in a small quiet voice. You strain your ears to hear the fervent and rapid words riding on a raspy exhalation. The words you hear shock you.
“God, you are a cold being. You don’t give a crap about me or my family. You have no concern for my suffering. You delight in the salt on my face. You are petty and you are without mercy. You have made it so that when people hear my name it fills them with scorn. You are a brute. You are cruel. And yet your love endures forever.”
You are shocked at what you hear. You wonder if the man is insane or merely an apostate. Surely such speech is blasphemy! How can someone declare the cruelty and love of God at the same time?!?!? Welcome to the world of the Psalms and Lamentations. Every idea in this imaginary prayer is contained in the Psalms and Lamentations and often with harsher language. How is it then that the Bible came to contain such language? Isn’t God offended by such “prayer”?
This semester I am in John Goldingay’s class on the Writings of the Hebrew Scriptures, which is incidentally my favorite class. Lately we have been discussing the Lament Psalms and Lamentations. We were encouraged for an assignment to write a Psalm of Lament. I didn’t take the assignment seriously, and just submitted the poem found elsewhere on the blog titled “A Poem/Prayer of Repentance.”
However, last night I attended a student-led worship service and in the midst of thought and reflection on the Psalms I tried on my lamenters tongue. At first I was timid, life is generally awesome out here. I started with frustrations about myself and the development of my life. It was not long before I discovered in myself an old wound I thought had long since healed. It seems instead that I just pretended it didn’t exist for so long that I almost forgot about. Yet, it has been there for some time. It lurks beneath the surface. It is an annoying scab which coos at the cool words of atheist intellectuals who mockingly decry God as a mean kid on an anthill and whispers in my ear ‘hypocrite’ when I speak of the goodness and love of God. Greater than my shock at discovering just how much that nearly decade-old wound hurt, was how incredible an experience it was to admit that wound to God.
Like a child feebly beating upon the chest of his father in rage, I let fly. I gave God both barrels and threw the gun at him too. I drained my heart of all venom and when it was over there was nothing left but the love for God which I had all along. I do not pretend that I am done with this wound, but now I have a weapon against. When your God can take a punch, then Doubt cannot have any hold over you. Furthermore, it isn’t as if God doesn’t know that in the deepest parts of myself I am angry at him over this wound. If anything Lament is nothing more than being honest to God. Should we fear that a steadfast God will become unreliable in light of that honesty. No, Doubt cannot bear to look in the face of such honesty, and so, last night I found myself drawn closer to God by calling him every name in the book.