Love gives voice to the unspeakable

Practice lament

There are moments that the words don't reach / There is suffering too terrible to name…—“It’s Quiet Uptown”

Once, ritual lament would have been chanted; women would have been paid to beat their breasts and howl for you all night, when all is silent. Where can we find such customs now? So many have long since disappeared or been disowned. That’s what you had to come for: to retrieve the lament that we omitted.

—Rilke, “Requiem for a Friend”

Thank you for being so patient in this delayed update for my Lenten Saturday series, Love & Unlove in Lent. You can read previous entries here: Week 1 | Week 2

In keeping company with the suffering Christ, we can give and receive love that bears up under anything and everything that comes. We are given everything we need in Christ to love this way; his loving presence within us stirs agape for God and our neighbors. And embodying Christ’s love takes practice. Lent trains us in the disciplines of agape, especially in keeping company with Jesus in his suffering.

Suffering tends to scare people. It is heavy and awkward. Suffering requires the kind of love that can bear up under anything and everything that comes. Last week, I told you about a saying Brian and I often need to recall: “Proclamation outside of loving is like having a conversation with someone using a megaphone.”¹ Or, as the Apostle Paul wrote, without agape, our good intentions to let hurting people know we care end up sounding like ‘clanging cymbals.’ I have been on the receiving end of those kinds of sentiments, and if you have suffered at all, I bet you have, too. In the presence of suffering, we communicate love best through the words and actions of lament.

Jesus, who had every right to proclaim the inevitability of a hope that triumphs over suffering, instead embodied lament—in the tears he wept at his friend's grave, in the sweat and blood of his groaning prayer in the Garden, and in the broken utterances he exhaled from the cross. Embodied lament spoke loudest in Jesus's silence in the tomb.

Lament is the language of a love that 'loves forth' love.² Lament greets suffering and offers to help bear its weight for as long as it takes. Paradoxically, lament is a response to Jesus’s invitation to come to him for rest. Through lament, we not only learn to speak a new love language but also learn to hear God's voice more clearly. We begin to listen to the Spirit of Jesus as He comforts and counsels us with words of healing, wholeness, and enlivening conviction. We learn to listen and understand our belovedness; with that understanding, we perceive the belovedness of those who suffer around us. This process of understanding and perceiving is transformative, shaping us into the image of Christ and expanding our capacity for love.