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Recently I came across a talk by scripture scholar Walter Brueggemann on the theme of “Faith in a Time of Disorientation”. In his talk Bruggemann explores how the Psalms bring to expression the experience of disorientation. They acknowledge what is wrong but refuse to settle for things as they are and so are a source of hope. They are often a strange mix of complaint and praise. An example is Psalm 22 which begins with a direct challenge to God - “My God, My God why have you abandoned me” (v1) and moves on to praise “I shall proclaim your name to my clan, praise you in the full assembly” (v 22). Linking the two elements is a repeated call for help “Do not stand aside Yahweh O My strength come quickly to my help” (v 19).
The talk reminded me of a paper written by Sr. Edel Bannon at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley California in 1989. Reflecting on her ministry in Northern Ireland during the Troubles she looks at how the liturgical life of both Catholics and Protestants went on more or less as normal against the background of brutal violence. She wondered why the reality of what was happening in North Ireland left liturgy mostly untouched except for prayers of intercession for peace, which she suggests were not an adequate response to the grief and hurt people were experiencing. Brueggemann suggests that it is only when we give expression to raw feelings and acknowledged them before God is we can shift from complaint to praise.
Brueggemann suggests that “the lament psalms offer an important resource for Christian faith and ministry even though they have been largely purged from the life of the church and its liturgical use”. Bannon looked at the lectionary and discovered that our Catholic liturgy rarely includes any of the 16 communal lament psalms and the ones that are included are stripped on their lament content. These psalms could give us a readymade language of grief, a symbolic poetic language that give expression to raw feelings of anger, alienation and anguish but equally a strong faith. This omission of these psalms from our liturgy she suggests is a real deprivation for Christians who struggle with a sense of God’s seeming absence from our lives and our world.
On February 3 our Columban students in Manila lead us in a prayer service for the people of Myanmar. The lament psalms were not used as such, but the service reflected the pattern of these psalms. The suffering of the people was acknowledged especially in the testimony of two people who live and work in Myanmar – one a Good Shepherd sister from Myanmar and the other a Columban Lay Missionary from the Philippines. The grim reality was most visible in a short video that showed an attack on a village and images of people running for their lives as bombs destroyed buildings around them. So, in grief and anguish we cried out to God to end the suffering of the people and restore peace. In expressing our pain, we renewed our faith and hope that change is possible as God hears the cry of the poor.
Lament is a very honest form of prayer and perhaps we are uncomfortable with the raw language of some of the psalms. We may also have been told that we should not complain to God, but the psalms tell us otherwise. We need rediscover how the lament psalms might provide us with a pattern and form of prayer that can help us breakthrough the numbness that grief can produce so that we can re orient ourselves anew and imagine a better future.
Fr Pat O'Shea lives and works in Aotearoa/New Zealand
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