In 1986 Walter Brueggemann published his seminal essay, ‘The Costly Loss of Lament’. It is one of the most important attempts to bring biblical studies and pastoral care into the service of those whose lives have fallen in on them and who have lost the capacity to make sense of it all anymore. Swinton makes good use of Brueggemann’s work, and significantly builds beyond it.
The previous post on Raging with Compassion ( See March 24) dealt with Swinton’s experience of contemporary upbeat church worship failing to take radical suffering and loss with liturgical seriousness. The large central chapter of his book, pages 90-129 provide a rich, informed pastoral response under the title, ‘Why me Lord? Why Me?’ Having explored the nature of suffering as an experience that often defies rational articulation, Swinton reflected on the cross and the silence of Jesus. (March 24 again).
The next step Swinton takes, and invites us to follow, is recovering the practice of lament. The non-reference in church the following day to the Omagh bombing, distressed him but he suggests it was ‘psychic numbing and stunned silence…people lacked the confidence to ask legitimate questions of God…’ As in many places in this book, Swinton’s next move is dictated by his conviction that the key human response to evil and suffering lies in a creative dialectic between reticent silence and appropriate language. Out of the silence of suffering comes the cry of protest, and the lanaguage that is immediately appropriate is the language of lament. Referring to Jesus’ silence, and his cry of dereliction on the cross (taken from a Psalm of lament), Swinton senses there the clue to how human beings can be helped to respond to our own experiences of brokenness and despair.
‘…by rediscovering the "forgotten" language and practice of lament we can develop a mode of resistance that can help us overcome the hopelessness and voicelessness that result from evil and suffering
What follows is an account of biblical lament – honest expression of rage, the language of victim not culprit, questions taken into the heart of God, language of outrage against the status quo,- and thus not the language of escapist theologies of denial, but of trust despite apparent contradiction. It is the cry of the human voice against dehumanising experience, and its function is the rehabilitation of the sufferer. Disordered life is reframed; disorientation moves to re-orientation; alienation begins the long search for reconciliation. Because lament points to a crisis of understanding more than a crisis of faith; it is prayer addressed to God. Lament is then an act of faith and the remainder of the chapter explores what that might mean for the individual and the community, as through compassionate accompaniment and liturgical honesty, God and the experience of the sufferer are held together in raging compassion and trustful lament.
Building on the important work of Brueggemann and contemporary Psalm studies, Swinton provides in this chapter a key resource for pastoral theology – and a crucial corrective to the triumphalist fideism that signals a loss of nerve that can’t cope with pain. In liturgy, at worship, within the community of faith, radical suffering and the evil that often causes it, are to be confronted, acknowledged and given language in prayers of lament. Only so are human beings who suffer taken with sufficient theological and pastoral seriousness.
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