Prayer: Lament
As we journey in prayer this week we come to the prayer of lament. Lament first of all is not to wallow in one's own mire or self-pity. It is a language of passion, an expression of profound grief for the lost or the brokenness of those we bring to the Father. It is a cry of the heart for all that is wrong in our world.
Lament is a way of processing the world's pain and verbalising it before the Father and was widely used in Old Testement times to express this brokenness to God. The cry of "How Long" echoes across the generations between them and us today.
Theologian Walter Bruggerman says that:
"……it is a curious fact that the church has continued to sing songs of orientation (praise) in a world increasingly experienced as disorientated…."
Praise can become our "go to" for sung worship, a comfort zone. But what about those times of life when depression, grief, illness or loss hits. It is important to find an outlet for our emotion before God, to be real and honest with our Father in the good times and the bad. Obviously personal lament of sin or situation is best kept for private prayer or with a prayer partner, but there is a place for corporate lament in the church today: for the situations in the world, for our communities and for those who are lost. To lament is to speak out the sadness, confusion and painful reality to the one who can do something about it. Often our culture holds us back from specific honesty; but Kingdom trumps culture every time, the British stiff-upper-lip mentality we so often come up against cannot stand in opposition to transparency before our Father.
I have had to learn how to lament and I'm nowhere near as open and honest with God as I would like to be or indeed need to be. As we journey through Lent perhaps we can learn anew the lost language of lament and allow it to transform how we pray for those in need around us.
Sally Williams
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