Learn to Lament

No one taught her how to cry. It was her first act outside of the water world and in this world of air and hurt: a wet crumbled butterfly, she unfolded vernix covered arms, flailed with clenched fists, and howled. I scooped her up. Swaddled little daughter and whispered comfort into that curl of ear. For I cry too.

Crying comes naturally to sin-pocked humanity. For we breathe in pain and ache like oxygen. Some days sting mildly, onions burning eyes: overdue library books, burnt toast, slow traffic, piles of laundry, bills, obligations. Others sear deep, flame singeing: sizzling brand of diagnosis and illness, scorching relationships, the ashes of dreams that will never be. No one need teach us: we cry.

Many days, most, tears do not fall. Cheeks are dry, smiles determined. But inside, I think, tears trickle, coursing wet down our disappointment, pooling. I wouldn’t have thought that, even noticed. If it weren’t for listening to words. The heart’s tail betrays. Raining on the inside stirs up a heartbed, pain splattering, muddying the waters. Our string of words dip down through dirty heart waters, before streaming, splashing out. It’s not what goes into a man that makes him unclean, but what comes out. Complaining words leak tears, grumblings words weep sadness. No one teaches us. Our words cry.

And yet David says we must learn. David says as he laments that “it should be taught” (2. Samuel 1:18). No one teaches us to cry. But is it true? Must we learn how to lament? Taught to Biblically cry, to lament, to grieve the losses that lace through all of our lives. David says: Teach this lament. Learn to lament. Study the lament. Become trained at lament. What transforms our cries, our complaints, into lamentation? David does not write complaints, or grumbling cries. He writes lamentations. David writes poetry. Is this what we too are called to do with our pain? Is there a way to catch the tears, the aching pain, and let it sweeten into poetry?

It’s laughable, a farmer’s wife, and mother of six who educates at home full-time, thinking it possible. Possible to be a daily psalmist, an ordinary poet. Ripening pain, even the common, domestic kind, into poetry. But is this why God gave the Psalms? To teach our crying, sad, complaining words how to lament? To teach His people, people living in the pain of a fallen world, poetry.

In the space between breakfast and reading time, our young Levi teases his older brother, pulls his sister’s hair, trips the toddler. My tongue twitches, ready to fire with frustration. Listening to my words, hearing the tail of my heart, I know I am ready to learn to lament. Eugene Peterson writes, “Lament isn’t an animal wail, an inarticulate howl.” Lament is not the bite, the lash, of anger. That’s raw complaint. I repent.

“Lament notices and attends…details, images, relationships. Pain entered into, accepted, and owned can become poetry,” he writes.

Lamenters wake up. The ugliness of pain fails to numb or dull them. Lamenters rouse. And attend. Find the jewel that shimmers in the mire. Notice the texture of the burnt crust, the expressions of the sky laying low, heavy, full of feeling, over traffic. Notice the dark eyes of struggling child, look through to the person on the inside, the storm clouds that gather there. Lamenters savor in the swirl of sorrow: the detailed stitching of a quilt on a sickbed, the image of snarling teen as a babe sleeping close, the relationships that can never be torn or destroyed for love endures forever. Pain ripens into poetry.