Those Who Weep
To walk faithfully through this dark world, we need to grieve our losses, however tragic, however common. We need to weep with those who weep. Our task is to take up practices where we name, with utter honesty, the brokenness of the world and the promise of what’s to come.
The Psalms were the church’s first prayer book. For the earliest Christian fathers and mothers, prayer was the recitation of the Psalms, in the same way that today’s evangelical might assume that prayer is talking to God in our own words. In Robert Wilken’s discussion of early church fathers, he said,
Prayer comes first, because without regular and disciplined prayer there is no genuine spiritual life. And prayer for the monk means something very specific: reciting the strophes of the psalms. Left to our own thoughts and words prayer moves on the surface. The psalms loosened their tongues and gave them a language to read the book of the heart and to enter more deeply into conversation with God.
We are all so laden with semiconscious resentments and suspicions, discordant desires and half baked beliefs, that we need constant tutoring from the ancient church, our older brothers and sisters who can teach us to “read the book of the heart.”
By praying the Psalms year after year for millennia, in nearly every language and place on earth, the church learns to remain alive to every uncomfortable and complex human emotion. We learn to celebrate and we learn to lament. John Calvin called the Psalms “the anatomy of all the parts of the soul.” He says there is no human emotion that “anyone finds in himself whose image is not reflected in this mirror. All the griefs, sorrows, fears, misgivings, hopes, cares, anxieties, in short all the disquieting emotions with which the minds of men are wont to be agitated, the Holy Spirit hath here pictured exactly.”
“By praying the Psalms, the church learns to remain alive to every uncomfortable and complex human emotion.
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The Psalms are dramatic. And life—even ordinary life—is dramatic, drenched in meaning, full of glorious beauty and deep pain.
Philosopher D. C. Schindler called contemporary life a “flight from reality”—the attempt to buffer the self, through technology, ease, and distraction, from the sorrows and dilemmas of our lives. We are tempted by nearly every current of culture to form our lives so that there is no time for grief, but only the dim hum of consumption, dulling our agony—but, with it, our joy, wonder, and longing. The Psalms call us back into the dramatic depths of reality.
Over time, the practice of praying the Psalms teaches us both to weep and to laugh—and it teaches us what to weep and laugh about.
Theologian J. Todd Billings writes that Augustine saw the Psalms as “God’s way of reshaping our desires and perceptions so that [we] learn to lament in the right things and take joy in the right things.”
Our emotions are good; they are gifts from God that point us to truth. Our emotions can also be wayward and self-serving. Prayer invites us to bring our whole selves—in all our glorious complexity—to God, who knows us better than we ever will.
Historically, the church saw the Psalms as medicinal. They heal us. They teach us how to be fully human and fully alive. As a doctor prescribes amoxicillin for a sinus infection, the church fathers prescribed meditation on and repetition of specific psalms for specific spiritual ailments. Athanasius wrote that “whatever your particular need or trouble, from [the Psalms] you can select a form of words to fit it, so that you . . . learn the way to remedy your ill.”
“Historically, the church saw the Psalms as medicinal. They heal us. They teach us how to be fully human and fully alive. ”
Psalms of lament—both communal and individual—are the most common type of psalm in the Psalter. They voice disappointment, anger, sadness, pain, deep confusion, and loss. If our gathered worship expresses only unadulterated trust, confidence, victory, and renewal, we are learning to be less honest with God than the Scriptures themselves are. As the first prayer book, the Psalms provide the pattern of prayer for all prayer books since, and its prayers are as varied and multidimensional as our human experience.
Lament is an expression of sorrow. To learn to lament is to learn to weep. But it is more than that. In the lament psalms, the psalmist holds God to God’s own promises. Psalm 44, for example, begins in utter perplexity, reminding God how he has cared for his people in the past and asking him why he seems to no longer be of help:
Rouse yourself!
Do not reject us forever!
Why do you hide your face?
Why do you forget our affliction and oppression? (Psalm 44:23-24)
It is better to come to God with sharp words than to remain distant from him, never voicing our doubts and disappointments. Better to rage at the Creator than to smolder in polite devotion. God did not smite the psalmist. Through the Psalms, he dares us to speak to him bluntly.
Yet, to make things trickier, most of us not only live in a culture that has inoculated itself against lament, we also live in a culture where it’s easy to assume we know better than God. We are taught in subtle ways that our feelings and experiences are the center of reality. This is cultivated in us in big and small ways every day. An advertisement for jeans blares from my radio, proclaiming, “I speak my truth in my Calvins.” This constant messaging reduces us to mere agents of our own selfexpression and curated identities—what we think, what we feel, what we want, and what we buy. We begin to approach God only to judge him and his actions according to our own preferences and little-t truth. We wait for God to convince us that he’s a useful accessory in our own project of self-creation.
In this way, so very subtly, we approach God not in honest lament but as unhappy customers. God isn’t giving us what we want, he isn’t taking away the pain of this world, and frankly he’s so terribly slow. We are not pleased with the job God is doing, and the customer is always right.
These competing cultural impulses—to paper over pain through distraction or false piety on one hand, and to demand from God our own way and judge him by our own standards on the other—leave us in a bind. How do our honest doubts and grief not become a howling unbelief, a transactional sense that God owes us something, or a kind of consumeristic judgment of God’s performance, as if we’re giving the Creator of the cosmos a bad Yelp review?
But the psalms of lament do not simply vent our grievances against an underperforming God. Billings continues, “By the Spirit, we bring our anger, fear, and grief before God in order that we may be seen by God. And being seen by God leads to transformation.”
Lament is not only an act of self-expression or exorcising pain: it forms and heals us. The Psalms express every human emotion, but, taken up again and again, they never simply leave us as we are. They are strong medicine. They change us. The transformation they effect isn’t to turn our sadness into happiness; they don’t take grieving people and make them annoyingly peppy and optimistic. They never say “Chin up” or “It’s not so bad.” Nor do they tell us why we suffer.
Instead they fix our vision on God’s love for us, and teach us to locate our own pain and longing in God’s eternal drama. They form us into a people who can hold the depths of our sorrow with utter honesty even as we hold to the promises of God.
Taken from Prayer in the Night by Tish Harrison Warren. Copyright (c) 2021 by Tish Harrison Warren. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com.
Tish Harrison Warren is a priest in the Anglican Church in North America. Tish is the author of Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life, which was Christianity Today’s 2018 Book of the Year. Her articles and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Religion News Service, Christianity Today, Comment Magazine, The Point, and elsewhere. She is a founding member of The Pelican Project and a Senior Fellow with the Trinity Forum. She lives with her husband and three children in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.