In Lament with the World
For this time of Lent, we are inviting our ICN community to embrace a time of grief and glory. Each week, we are offering reflections and practices on grief, glory, and their integration, as a way of evolving our participation in this season.
We’ll focus on one beatitude and one word as pathways of mystical practice—now with a more global focus. We encourage you to hold and engage with them throughout the week ahead.
We hold in the divine womb our personal struggles and fears alongside our dreams and unique soul calling. We hold our collective pain and loss alongside our communal nurturing and creativity. And we hold our global crises and suffering alongside our deep courage and ultimate faith. We invite you into this collective womb space/time of painful lament and generative possibility.
May we walk with grace together in this season of grief and glory, through the Mystery and portal of death and resurrection.
Lament
Our word and primary invitation for this week is lament.
Before going any further, I want to acknowledge the difficulty of this focus. Deep grief and lament are most often not processes we want to engage in, know how to move with well, or are ready for in our lives. Modern, Western culture has few rituals and collective processes to aid us, and the most common postures toward grief are withdrawal, avoidance, and denial. Most of us have almost no context for practicing lament.
Lament cannot be compelled. We cannot force ourselves into this process if we are not ready, if the time is still unripe. I encourage you to be wise and discerning about your inner resources and relational support. If you don’t feel ready to move into this process of lament, please feel free to stop here. You can always return in the future if you might feel drawn, in the blessedly ripe and right time.
Whether we are experiencing personal grief or not, we all carry and hold in some way the pain of global distress, crises, and suffering. We have feelings of powerlessness, anger, fear, and sadness. They may be close to the surface or deep within. We carry on with life, for we can only consciously be with this sorrow so much.
The spiritual practice of lament gives us a way to welcome the pain and grief intentionally to express it, rather than trying to keep it contained within. This form of mourning gives us space to let the grief flow however it needs to—as a rushing torrent or a trickling rivulet.
If you are ready and feel able to move in this way, pause and speak the word lament aloud several times. As you hear your own voice, where do you feel drawn to in your body? Where do you feel the word touch within you?
Can we welcome the grief that is within us?
Blessed Are Those Who Mourn
Throughout this season, we are using Jesus’ teachings, often referred to as “The Beatitudes,” as pathways to help us walk with grief and glory. We offer various translations of the same beatitude, which illuminate the rich textures of meaning that are contained in the original Aramaic language Jesus would have spoken originally.
A Practice of Blessing
We invite you to receive these various translations as a meditative practice. Let your whole body receive them, slowly, absorbing them deeply. This might include thoughts about the words or phrases heard in a new way, but as those come, integrate them in your whole being, into the deeper spaces of your soul and embodied receiving.
This practice can also be done with a partner, reading aloud to each other. One person can read all of them, pausing between each for at least 30 seconds, and then the other does the same. Or you can each say the phrase aloud to one another, pausing to receive before going on to the next.
Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.
(KJV)
Happy are those who mourn; they will be called to God’s side.
Fortunate are those who lament; they will hear my (God’s) voice.
(Greek Literal)
Ripe are those who feel at loose ends, coming apart at the seams; they shall be knit back together within.
Blessed are those in turmoil and confusion; they shall be united inside.
Healthy are those weak and overextended for their purpose; they shall feel their inner flow of strength return.
Healed are those who weep for their frustrated desire; they shall see the face of fulfillment in a new form.
Tuned to the Source are those feeling deeply confused by life; they shall be returned from their wandering.
(Aramaic)
Greek literal translations by Dave Brisbin
Aramaic translations by Neil Douglas-Klotz
Coming Apart at the Seams
There is little we need to “think about” when it comes to mourning. We just need to give ourselves to it rather than filtering through our minds. We can trust in faith that we’ll be ok, even if we haven’t figured anything out or don’t understand how the process will unfold.
Jesus’ words in this beatitude help us point the way with simplicity. “Blessed are those who mourn.” It is good and right to mourn, even though it does not feel good.
To move into this invitation, we have to give ourselves permission and release to let it come as it will. We let go of rationality and thinking about it correctly—things we express in lament and mourning don’t have to be “right” or true. We can blame God and rage at the world. We can wallow in pity and bitterness. There are many Psalms of lament that show these attitudes on full display.
In other words, we don’t need to try to stay all buttoned up if we are coming apart at the seams inside.
We can give ourselves to the throws of disorientation, letting go of the grip of decorum, expectation, restraint, or whatever we hold that has tethered us.
In doing so, we have faith that a deeper uniting will come forth, we will find our way home from our wandering, inner flow and strength will return, fulfillment will find new form. We will be knit back together within.
Image by Dalmo Mendonça
In another sense, welcoming the parts within us that we ignore, isolate, or deny is untangling the buried knot that keeps us bound internally.
As Jesus said, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you” (Gospel of Thomas Saying 70).
Our personal, collective, and global pain and suffering slowly debilitates us if we cannot welcome it in some way.
Lament affirms that it all belongs. It is all a part of the deeper, cosmic belonging of life.
We can include all those who are bound and all those who are wandering in the great family of God. The refugees and the lost. The prisoners and the bedridden. The confused and the frustrated. Those who are overextended and in turmoil.
They all have their place in the circle. They all have a seat at the table in the feast of life.
This is for those people in the world, and it also applies to the parts within ourselves who are present inside us. The wandering parts of ourselves, welcome at the table to eat together—in both chaos and reconciliation.
From this inner belonging and peacemaking reconciliation, we liberate that deep life energy of harmonic resonance and generative vitality. The Sophia healing of deep, merciful/wombful communion. To liberate and restore where we have been bound or scattered within, so that we might be charged with the inner free flow of life from the divine wellspring.
But before we can get there, we have to move deeply into the knot, into the mess, into the pain and suffering.
Lament Psalm Thirty-One
By Ann Weems
How long will you watch, O God,
As your people live huddled in death?
The whole world is dressed in tears,
And I have joined
the procession of the bereaved
Who walk daily in the death places.
We drown in the sea.
We bleed on the battlefield.
We lie stricken on sickbeds.
We are judged in the courtrooms.
We are victims of crime.
We are homeless and hungry.
Is this not enough?
We are tormented by mental illness.
We are abandoned by loved ones.
We wait in unemployment lines.
We grow up on the streets.
We live with disabilities.
We are injured in accidents.
We are plagued by family problems.
We fight drug and alcohol abuse.
Have you not heard enough, O God?
We sit in police stations.
We watch our loved ones endure pain.
We are falsely accused.
We encounter prejudice and hate.
We are humiliated and abused.
We contend with unbearable stress and anxiety.
We weep by the grave.
We are your people, O Creator God!
We are the work of your hands.
Is there no more grace from your troubled ones?
Will we continue our unholy procession
Around the pit of living death?
There is no sun, no moon, no star.
We cannot see our way.
Have pity on your world, O God,
Have pity on your weeping world!
We remember all the times
you lavished your grace
Upon our heads and into our hearts.
You gave us the gift of light,
And we walked with our heads up
in the procession of life.
Restore us, O God,
to your sanctuary.
Look upon us
and let your heart be moved
To break the bonds of the bereaved.
In this hope is our joy.
In that day we will run
To join the procession of life
and we will sing hymns of praise
Forever and ever
and ever
and ever!
Whole-Body Mystical Lament
“Maybe these sweeping feelings are aiding that longing to fall into other sites of power, to get lost properly. Maybe there's an unheard-of celebration in the soil, and maybe the only way to these subterranean festivities is with a choreography of loss, a cartography of tears - the kind that blinds us from seeing too clearly.”
- Bayo Akomolafe
Whole-Body Mystical Awakening is generally a practice to awaken to and be present in our embodied awareness and knowing. We most often bring these ways of awareness to our conscious mind—but in lament, we are not concerned with knowing anything. We are simply moving in and with the pain and suffering that is present within, around, and through us.
We don’t need to make sense of anything. We don’t need to filter or rationalize. We can simply be in the “lower” body energies and weep with the earth, cry out from our bellies, and ache from our hearts. We can let the deep questions that arise come forth if they must. And we can allow the stark clarity of darkness to flood our inner sight.
While lament can be an individual practice, it is never private. We are always communing deeply with the pain of others and the pain of the world, even in our personal pain and grief.
We may feel our grief and expressions of lament are unwelcome in “public.” Believing these are states of being for private spaces. In ICN, we are consciously shining a light on this shadow. As Paul Smith encouraged us to do, we are welcoming the sharing of our griefs and sorrows. Our WeSpace groups are an intimate, supportive space for us to do so—or other small group settings we may be a part of. On a larger collective level, we seek to make space for more communal processes of lament and grief, like our Sunday Gathering this week.
We welcome lament and being with our pain—knowing that our pain does not take us away from goodness and joy. Our grief comes hand in hand with glory.
May we welcome one another in the wombful mercy of gracious and glorious embrace.
May we lament in the world womb with sorrow and with hope.
May we step into our vulnerability with the pain in ourselves and others, being both mourners and comforters.
May we rest in the invitation if the time is unripe, not trying to compel ourselves with guilt, obligation, or any external force.
May we welcome the parts of ourselves that are strewn apart, that are scattered and blowing in the wind, waiting and hoping for the time of mending.
May we mourn together.
May our mourning open and release the energy in us to act in the world from a deeper harmony.
And may we be comforted.
from Psalms of Lament
by Ann Weems
How can I join their singing, O God,
If you do not come to me?
How can I shout “gloria”
if you will not advent here?
O God of mercy, I am on my knees!
I beg you to bring peace
out of this chaos.
Come from your heaven
and scoop the little ones
into your arms
and hold them
against the terrors of this world.
In the godforsaken, obscene quicksand of life,
There is a deafening alleluia
Rising from the souls
Of those who weep
And of those who weep with those who weep.
If you watch, you will see
The hand of God
Putting the stars back in their skies
One by one.
Glory to you, O God,
who advents even into the life
of one who weeps the day away.
Glory to you in the highest,
for you are not ashamed
to walk with me in darkness.
You have heard my cry
and turned to me,
And I have seen a great light.
Practicing Lament
Rather than questions for reflection this week, we are invited into an inner process of being present to lament with the world, with one another, and with ourselves.
As one process, you might consider engaging with a series of guided Lectio Divina meditations with several Psalms of lament:
Psalm 58
Psalm 79
Psalm 83
You are also invited to two communal gatherings of lament and grief.
The first is our Sunday Gathering tomorrow, March 17th, which will be a direct engagement with lament in our Whole-Body Mystical Communion practice, following the path of the beatitude together. You can find joining information here.
The second is a prayer gathering focused specifically on grief and lament for and with the world. We’ll be sharing in an embodied mystical process of lament and prayer, drawing upon a method from The Work That Reconnects.