frayed hems and fringes (on lament)
Lamentation: a passionate expression of grief or sorrow, weeping
Sorrow: a feeling of deep distress caused by loss, disappointment, or other misfortune suffered by oneself, or others
Hello, friends.
It’s been quite a long while since I’ve written. I decided to take a break from long form writing this summer to refill my creative and emotional cup, and spend time with my family, resting and enjoying each other. I’ve read many books, and have really gotten into podcasts, which is new for me! I visited friends in Chicago, and traveled to the Oregon coast, my favorite place on the planet.
And yet, while I am grateful for the pause, and happily back with you, I am still unexpectedly weary. My bones and my heart feel out of joint, and as I said to my friend this afternoon, I’m just really sad. It was a hard, heavy summer and it is creeping into autumn as well. Do you feel it, too? On the West Coast, we have been entrenched in smoke and wildfire for months, and in Idaho, we are being hit hard with COVID again, weary and bursting hospitals entering crisis care this morning. Nationally and globally, too, the pain is palpable, we are hurting, and for the first time in my life, I am unable to reframe all of this, overcome with an anger I don’t know where to place. Things seem to only be getting worse, the chasms in our communities wider and sharper, the aching deeper and harder to ignore.
And, rather than making room for the deep sadness of a lost world that has taken hold in our soul, whether on a large, global scale or our individual, persistent daily reminders of the brokenness around us, we tend to shove our sadness, that ache, deep inside. I know I have. And it has festered into a painful infection of the heart.
We’ve forgotten to make space to lament, and instead are being consumed by it’s transformation into hatred, a paralyzing fear of change, arrogance, pride, an assured-ness of our own rightness, without compassion or empathy.
Friends, how we need that space for lamenting, individually and as a community, now more than ever, as we sit in this long season of waiting for our present darkness to be made new. As author Tish Harrison Warren says, we must lament “the world of tears after the fall,” as a spiritual practice, just as we might practice silence and solitude, prayer, or worship. Tim Mackie of the Bible Project puts it this way:
“Lament and prayer and grief are a crucial part of the journey of faith for God’s people in a broken world.”
Throughout the Bible, we read prayers of lament. How long, O Lord? is a phrase that characterizes so much of the whole Biblical narrative, all of creation groaning with labor pains, our own present struggles absolutely included. But nowhere is this practice of lament, of expressing grief and sorrow, seen more than in the book of Lamentations, an anonymous poetry collection centering around the Israelite exile to Babylon and the fall of their city, Jerusalem. Tim Mackie says, these “lament poems restore a sacred dignity to human suffering… are a memorial to pain and destruction...a form of protest...a way to process emotion… and a place to voice confusion” to God.
I don’t know about you, but I need all of that more than ever. I need to step into the sadness and anger I’ve felt for the last year and a half and look it square in the eye. So, this last week, I decided to read through the little book of Lamentations, and respond to it with lament poems of my own.
The Lamentations are messy and honest, about grief and shame and sin and forgiveness and suffering and prayer and songs and paradox, and they do not wrap up in a neat little bow. Rather, they end with a question of whether or not God will actually restore the lives of God’s people:
“Restore us to yourself, Lord, that we may return;
renew our days as of old
unless you have utterly rejected us
and are angry with us beyond measure.”
“Suffering in silence is not a virtue,” Mackie says. The fifth poem of Lamentations encourages the people to “raise their voices in protest, to vent their feelings” to a God who they believe still cares for them, even when they honestly don’t know how, when, or if God will answer.
The reading has been a true balm to my heart, like resting beside the humans before us who have struggled through the same fears and pains as we are today. Like these ancient poems gave me permission to throw my hands up in protest and ask the questions that feel irreverent and are, therefore, the most honest ones of my heart. Permission to wrestle in the middle of the pain, to come to the end with an unanswered prayer, with frayed hems and fringes, with lament in this churning waiting.
“We are not women of waiting, except when we realize Jesus in us,”
my friend Jill said to me this morning. For as we burrow our way through the seemingly endless tunnels of lament, as we light our solitary candle in the night, we stumble upon Jesus there, awake with us in the early watches of the not-yet-morning, not offering answers, but weeping.
We bear the image of the One who laments. So too may we.
This coming week, I want to share my own lament poems with you, and encourage you to read the book of Lamentations alongside them. Each poem accompanies one chapter of the book, five in total. I will post one poem per day, starting Monday (September 20th). I want to open my heart to you and sit with you in the quiet, making time for you to create your own poems or expressions of lament. We are not meant to go alone. I hope that this can open space for the wild animal of your soul to cry out to the One who created it. The One who is unafraid of the questions that seem too honest to utter. The One who sits awake through the night watches. The One who laments with you.
If you want to have a conversation, need a listening ear, or want to share your own lament with someone else, find me here or send me a message on Instagram. You are not alone.
I want to leave you with a quote from Tish Harrison Warren that I’ve been reciting to myself like a prayer, as a blessing when things feel too dark to muddle through:
We don’t know what the next hour brings, but God can be trusted because we’ve glimpsed the end of the story. So now, in the present tense, with all it’s grief and frustrations, we can bear whatever comes to us, even if it lasts longer than we hoped.
I hope to see you Monday, sweet friends. You are so very loved.
-alyssa
P.S. If you want to receive the Lament Meditations next week straight to your email, subscribe to my email list here.
P.P.S. I highly recommend listening to Tim Mackie’s video on Lamentations, even if you decide to not read the whole book. It’s so moving, and, as always, very well done.
