One Last Lament and the Heart of God

I can't tell if January flew by or dragged on - somehow this year it did both, as only time during COVID can.  But here we are, on the last day of the month, and with just enough time for one final post on 'lament'.

I can think of no better or more beautiful piece to end on than this dance by Alex Wong and Allison Holker on the competition show So You Think You Can Dance, where in less than two minutes they express more about lament than I have in a month:

Sorrow can be oddly beautiful.  I've found that when we see an expression of sorrow from another person, it stirs a part of our hearts that belongs to God - the part of our being that was created to love and empathize, that part of our spirits which feels a compulsion in the presence of sorrow to bring comfort and encouragement.  That stirring is a beautiful, even holy, thing.  Even in situations where there is nothing we can tangibly do for the person in pain, the presence of that heart-stirring longing to love and care for a suffering human is a glimpse of God in us.  It's a moment of holiness.

Although I'm glad to exit lament in the coming months and look for other aspects of a life of faith in the arts around us, I'm also grateful for this past month to sit for a moment in those feelings of grief and sadness.  Ultimately, I'm grateful that this time leads me to compassion; to a heightened awareness that human emotion is universal, and God doesn't call us to shy away from it.

In the striking final seconds of the dance above, Alex reaches down to his distraught partner who's crumpled on the floor.  Even in his own grief, he pulls her up again, and the two of them march - resolutely, painfully, determinedly - into the future.  They are changed by their sorrow, but they are ever moving forward, together.  May that be a picture of our life of faith in the midst of broken world.  Resolute.  Changed.  Together.

"We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not despairing; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed ..." (2 Corinthians 4:8-9)

Hold On ...

"It hurts, Ame.  It hurts so much."  These are the last words I heard from my grandfather, who truth be told, I wasn't overly close with.  I loved him, and he loved me, no question, but we didn't have a relationship where we were particularly close.  I was in high school, and our whole extended family had gathered at his home as he was in the final stages of cancer.  I sat beside his bed when it was my turn to visit with him, and sang him a few songs.  Then he said those words, and I in my youth didn't know what to do or say, so I mumbled something vaguely loving, might have touched his hand in an attempt to comfort, and then found my way out of the room so I could be replaced by someone wiser.

Many of us have challenging relationships with death, and experiences which shape the level of fear and pain surrounding it for us.  That relationship is different for everyone, but one thing that's constant is that we who are living have all nonetheless interacted with death in some capacity.

There's a certain segment of people of faith who imply that if someone merely trusts in God, they no longer fear death.  Well, that's simply not true.  Perhaps that's the ideal, a mindset to work toward, but even the faithful of the Bible found death hard to reconcile.  Jesus himself had concerns about facing the experience of dying.  Recognizing that death is a painful and difficult part of human existence isn't contrary to trusting God at all.

In the days after my grandfather's death, as I replayed those words he'd said to me on repeat in my mind, the first lines of Sarah McLachlan's song "Hold On" caught me in a new way:

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"Hold on, hold on to yourself.  For this is gonna hurt like hell."

Sarah McLachlan said in an interview that she wrote this song after seeing a documentary about a woman whose husband contracted HIV.  "[I]t was a great and tragic love story. She took care of him up until he died and her passion, empathy and strength was inspirational."

God Remix has spent the month of January exploring lament, which in the Bible often takes a specific form.  First, a complaint describing suffering; then, a request for help; finally, a resolution of some sort, frequently a reminder of something to praise.  This form is a great example for our own laments - sitting in the pain, yes, but eventually moving to identifying what we want God to do in response, and reminding ourselves of something comforting to cling to in the meantime.  "Hold On" loosely follows a similar format.

Suffering:

"Hold on, hold on to yourself

For this is gonna hurt like hell

Hold on, hold on to yourself

You know that only time will tell

What is it in me that refuses to believe?

This isn't easier than the real thing"

Request:

"Oh God, if you're out there won't you hear me?

I know that we've never talked before

Oh God, the man I love is leaving

Won't you take him, when he comes to your door?"

Praise:

"Now you're sleeping peaceful, I lie awake and pray

That you'll be strong tomorrow and will see another day

And we will praise it

And love the light that brings a smile

Across your face"

The 'well-adjusted' faithful who worry that wrestling with death will pull people from God aren't entirely wrong - grief can indeed drive us further from faith.  But it can also draw us closer.  In my own grief, I put this song on repeat to replace the voices in my head.  I sat in the suffering.  I cried out pleas to a God I wasn't sure was listening.  And over time, the comfort of that sunlight at the end of the song snuck itself into my heart in spite of myself, and made a home next door to the doubt and uncertainty.  Real life faith has to deal with real life, and the inescapable reality is, sometimes it hurts like hell.

God in the Grief

Google defines "lament" as "a passionate expression of grief or sorrow".  What an evocative description of something so universally understood, both within and without a faith context.  Humanity certainly knows what it is to lament, and all the more after events like we've seen and experienced in the past year.

Not only is this "passionate expression of grief or sorrow" widely relatable, it's also a profoundly powerful thing to witness.  To be let into someone else's most vulnerable feelings of lament through artistic expression is an experience unlike any other.  It's one of the reasons why the Psalms of the Bible speak so strongly to many of us.

To me, there are few art forms which embody the spirit of lament so fully as Flamenco.  Flamenco is a genre of music, dance, and lyrics which originated from generations of oppression and poverty in the gypsy communities in southern Spain.  There are several different styles of Flamenco music, but one in particular is known for being deeply emotional and expressive - the "cante jondo" - and it exudes guttural grief and sorrow.  Even for those who don't understand the language, the pain of a cante jondo transcends words.  Manuel Agujetas* is a significant Flamenco artist known for his intense and deeply affected cante jondo singing:

The anguish is palpable, tangible, visceral.  It's a feeling not dissimilar to David's words in Psalm 6:

...my bones are in agony. My soul is in deep anguish ...

... I am worn out from my groaning.  All night long I flood my bed with weeping and drench my couch with tears.  My eyes grow weak with sorrow; they fail because of all my foes ...

As we listen to the emotive voices of cante jondo singers, it's hard to miss a sense of Romans 8:26 in the despairing vocal cries:

...the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know what to pray, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words ...

But here's where the art of Flamenco overlaps with biblical psalms in another unique way.  Authentic flamenco of all styles is often performed communally, with many people gathering to clap and stomp together, and call out in support of the main vocalist or dancer.  The clip below of famed Flamenco dancer Carmen Amaya* is a great example:

This is a striking illustration of the way biblical psalms, even laments, were shared collectively in community and worship.  In Leap Over a Wall, a fantastic book on David (who wrote many of the psalms), author Eugene Peterson says David had the people learn his lamentations and memorize them.  Ancient churches sang them communally together.  Peterson writes "What I do with my grief affects the way you handle your grief; together we form a community ..."  How many of us have seen the truth of that statement as we watch a loved one grieve and have our own relationship with grief affected as we come alongside them.

The expressions of a full range of psalm-style emotion in Flamenco, including grief in the cantes jondos, are shared collectively in community as well.  As one person sings or dances their joy, love, pleas, or pain, those around them cry out in solidarity, providing the rhythmic backbone for this intimate expression of humanity with percussive claps and stomps, interweaving with each other seamlessly.  Although it may feel familiar with emotions like joy or love to have others lend their voices to our celebrations, what an incredible picture this can also be in times of sadness - a community grieving together, lamenting together, and sharing each other's sufferings and sorrows.  May we all find a metaphorical Flamenco group where we can sing our rawest cante jondo with honesty, and hear a dozen echos of our most guttural cries.

*Though my examples bend toward older footage due to personal preference, there are plenty of modern Flamenco examples of each of these as well, a mere YouTube search away.

Lamenting the Moment

This past summer I had the chance to co-teach a short class on the Psalms, and my role in the class was primarily that of bringing examples of modern day artistic psalms to the group.  That's the interesting thing about psalms - they are all around us constantly, because the Psalms of the Bible are essentially just the cries of humanity in moments of joy, excitement, sorrow, pain, and conflict.  Life.  And isn't that what most art is - the cries of humanity in moments of joy, excitement, sorrow, pain, and conflict.

Whether religious or not, we all experience life, and we all experience the emotions inherent in it.  So the cries of the psalms are universal in a way, and have tended to speak to the hearts of a wide range of people throughout history.  I strongly believe that the psalms do not stop with those in the Bible.  The longing of people to express their emotions in a psalmic (I may have made that word up) way is something we see in all forms of art, but particularly in what we typically label 'secular'.  Quite often, modern day secular art is far more candid and uninhibited about the whole range of human emotion than 'Christian' art allows itself to be.

One type of biblical psalm is the "lament".  70% of the Psalms of the Bible are laments, and I dare say a good portion of art is as well.  Laments are raw, and vulnerable, and notable in their honesty about how painful life can be.  They describe personal brokenness in a gut-wrenching way, but also the sorrow of living in broken societies and systems.  They strive to give a voice to the powerless, and empathize with that pain.  They put words to the grief and suffering every human faces at some point.

This week in particular, my country has been in a state of lament.  We are feeling raw, and vulnerable, experiencing gut-wrenching personal brokenness over horrifying images of violent insurrection; sorrow over the broken systems and societal failings which have led us here.  In fact, many of us have been in a state of lament through much of the past year if we're honest, as our world has faced a deadly pandemic, new awareness of racial inequality, loss of connection with others, and so much more both personally and collectively.

It seems, then, appropriate to spend some time in artistic lament this month.  And today it feels right to start with Pablo Picasso, and his painting Guernica:

click to enlarge

Guernica is a compelling artwork on many levels.  Having seen it in person, it is a massive painting, and changes the atmosphere in the room.  Guernica is a scene of chaos and cruelty, depicting the horror of the Spanish Civil War and inspired by photos and eyewitness accounts of the bombing of the town of Guernica.  As many as 1,600 people were killed in this bombing, many of them women and children.  Only days later Picasso began his month-long work on this piece.  The painting is, without a doubt, a lament.

Now we could explore the symbolism and imagery of this painting for days and not exhaust all there is to say about it, so I won't do that here.  The groans of this lament are clear enough to see without explanation.  The mother in grief over her child ... the battered soldier in pieces in the foreground ... the man pleading with arms raised.  Guernica is a guttural cry of suffering and sorrow, horror and helplessness.

And yet.  I love "and yet"s.  There is surprising hope hidden in this psalm of lament, as is true of many of the biblical psalms of lament as well.  In the soldier's hand, alongside his sword, we can make out the faint image of a simple white flower - a symbol of peace.  The woman holding the oil lamp is commonly regarded as a symbol of the Spanish Republic, and in spite of the light bulb at the center of the painting, the lamp is actually the source of light in this scene.  An injured woman looks up at it in longing.  This light is a source of hope in a broken moment.

As I look at the images which have come across my screen this week, or this past year, I wonder where the white flowers and oil lamps are.  They must be there.  Maybe I need to look closer.  Or maybe I haven't finished sitting in the lament just yet.  There is no shame in being honest about the emotions of pain and turmoil we may feel right now, or at any time.  It's a part of life, it's a part of faith, and we can't ignore it anymore than the psalmists could.