Death and Lament
Part 4, Modern Lament and the Psalms
I've taken three posts to make the claim that our existential relationship with death has changed in the modern world, especially in America. In a culture now characterized by the denial and pornography of death, we experience death as random, extraordinary, and accidental, rather than as something predictable, ordinary, and expected. The stoical resignation of prior generations has been replaced with emotional shock. Everyone will die, yet we experience death as if it were like being struck by lightning.
The point of setting all this background is to arrive at this observation: there is a disjoint between how we conceive of lament versus how the Bible conceives of lament. The meaning of the word "lament" has become vague and slippery in modern usage, especially in progressive Christian circles. We use the word lament a lot, thinking we are making a clear connection with Scripture. Yet I have some questions about this. I think many progressive Christians and the Bible are using the same word--lament--but talking past each other.
In elite, educated, and progressive Christians spaces one of the most common things you hear is this: "We need more lament." This recommendation is right up there with: "We need more liturgy." And typically the two go hand in hand: "We need more lament in our liturgy."
I have participated in making this request, and I still agree with it. And yet, over the last few years in spending a lot of time in the psalms, I've started to notice that the lament in the psalms isn't the lament we are naming when we ask for more lament.
For example, here is something to ponder: No psalm occurs by a graveside.
I find it interesting, given the point of this series, that no psalm expresses the grief of personal bereavement. There are no psalms giving voice to the loss of a child, spouse, parent, or friend. When we hear the cry "How long, O Lord?" in the psalms, it's not about the sudden, unexpected death of a loved one. And yet, when we moderns ask for more lament, we are often thinking of the personal grief of bereavement. So there's a disjoint between our desire for more lament in our liturgy and the words of lament provided in the psalms. If anything, as I shared in the last post, the psalms point to emotional resignation rather than dismay in the face of death.
Consider, for example, Walter Brueggemann's famous taxonomy of the psalms--psalms of orientation, disorientation, and re-orientation. As Brueggemann describes, psalms of disorientation, what we call "lament psalms," express confusion and pain at the dissolution of a well-ordered moral universe. Psalms of disorientation and lament are less about personal grief and bereavement than about a world where the wicked are thriving and the righteous are being crushed. The moral coherence of the world is being thrown into chaos. Consider a classic "How long, O Lord?" lament psalm, Psalm 13:
How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
How long must I take counsel in my soul
and have sorrow in my heart all the day?
How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?
Consider and answer me, O Lord my God;
light up my eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death,
lest my enemy say, “I have prevailed over him,”
lest my foes rejoice because I am shaken.
But I have trusted in your steadfast love;
my heart shall rejoice in your salvation.
I will sing to the Lord,
because he has dealt bountifully with me.
Psalm 13 is prototypical of lament in the psalms. Again, the lament isn't that of a person standing beside a graveside asking, "Why did my loved one die?" The concern is, rather, "Why is my enemy triumphing over me?" or "Why are the wicked triumphing over the innocent?" This, I would argue, is the heart of biblical lament: Not death, but injustice.
It may be granted that, textually speaking, my point is valid. If you do a qualitative assessment of the content of the lament psalms, the cry of the psalmist is almost wholly directed at the moral incoherence of the world--enemies attacking the psalmist, wicked people thriving, evil nations destroying God's chosen people. No psalm, by contrast, expresses personal grief about the death of a loved one. Okay, fine, point made. But what's my agenda in drawing attention to this fact? I'll offer some thoughts in the next and final post.
I'm enjoying this series overall. Here are a couple of push-backs on this post in particular.
1. The Psalms generally avoid highly specific situations, they seem to deal much more with broader categories. This does seem to lend them to greater 'adaptability' to individual circumstances.
2. Your points about death and society more broadly are well made across the four-parts so far, but I think we want to hold some theological tensions. That is, death might be common to human existence in our world, but it's also a profoundly 'wrong' thing in the world, and so seeing individual death as disorienting precisely because every death shouts at us that the order of the universe is broken and death _should not be_, ought (in my view) be part of what lament at death is about. In that sense, there is a merger between lament at injustice and lament at death.
3. Arguably the book of lamentations is a lament at, among other things, deaths on a very large scale.
Since a lot of the Psalms were written by King David and are concerning the Israel as a nation, it is natural to see lament framed as injustice directed towards Israel from its enemies or expressing destress at the decline of holiness within the nation. The New Testament doesn't have Psalms however we see Jesus reaching out and responding to the injustice of sickness and death itself, which haunts all of us.
“Lord, if only you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask.”
Jesus walked among the commoners, people who may had have a basic education or none at. If Martha and Mary were poets, they would know how to turn that phrase into prose and it would be the beginning of a beautiful Psalm. Since they were never trained in that literacy skill, we just have their direct words instead. :)