The Power of the Lament

The power of the lament is to speak those words that your culture, your family system, your environment would naturally suppress, repress, and shove to the edges... We must reclaim how to grieve, the power of the lament, because if we don't, whatever that pain is, it will go somewhere and it will express itself somehow… Your ability to listen to the pain of another and to be able to sit with the incoherent ramblings of another is directly proportional to how thoroughly you have faced your own pain… Your ability to join them in that and to simply listen…is directly proportional to how well you have dealt with your own pain… Until we as a country listen to some of the most painful elements of the founding of our country…until we face that pain and what our father’s father’s mother’s mother’s father’s father’s were a part of, no wonder we have a hard time listening to what I would argue is just a modern lament with really, really loud bass.
- Rob Bell, Learning to Lament in a Culture of Denial March 1, 2009

(To obtain this particular message, visit Mars Hill's website and go to teachings)

So, what does this mean for someone like me? I lived in "lament" for years, and everyone kept telling me that I needed to learn to let it go. But, in those years of recovery and grief, I felt that I had a clearer idea of what it means to cling to Jesus. Now, as I find myself becoming unhealthily reclusive, I've become a pro at repressing my own pain, because even in the midst of "the lament" I never got through the grief; instead I seemed to dwell in it. There has to be a resolution to lamenting the past and the trauma. So why have I never reached it?