Lament is a final frontier of growth and healing

It’s only when you’re in a dire situation that you cannot change that you realise the gift of lament. That is, to accept in practice what is unacceptable.  It leaves you in a place of torment or anguish or depression... or of just simply sitting in it, with it, allowing the situation to be as painful as it is.

I would say that sitting in the presence of lament in such a way is the practice of patient maturity, considering that such a practice is nothing about the end point, it’s all simply about the practice of it.  It’s not about achieving anything, except that is the achievement of sitting peaceably in dread and sorrow — which just seems wrong when our western eyes read that.

Many years ago, when we were losing Nathanael, people would often say, “All we can do is pray.”  We would say, “That’s the best thing you can do.”  Prayer seems useless until it’s the only thing left.  Then we pray because it’s all we can do other than sit and wait and endure the pain of the moment.

There are many who possibly won’t have any idea about these concepts.  A living hell has never descended against them.  Or they denied the reality and ran.  They remain unenlightened.  There’s no need to convince those who cannot be convinced.

Instead, we work with the impossibility of the moment.  Instead, we spend time in silent retreat with those who understand.  Instead, we give up on words and questions and statements of conjuring.  We come to understand the sanctity in moments beyond human reconciling.  When we face these moments, we quickly recognise there are mysteries we will NEVER understand.

And that is okay.  Okay, because it must be.  There is no other choice.  Until we’ve been to a place like this, we really haven’t grown up.  Until we’ve been to a harsh reality that cannot be changed, we have no concept for how to move forward.  It’s a problem all must face and come to accept if we’re to truly mature.

It’s only when we have no concept for moving forward that we recognise that there ARE places in life that have no answers.  We can get angry or deny these realities as much as we want, it’s not going to change things.

We are invited into a better answer 
when there is no answer.
That answer is lament.

Sitting in the lament of the heartbreaking situation we cannot change, we understand, finally, that lamentation is nothing about performance or achievement or anything that we can add to it.  It is simply something one does and it’s an inherently humbling place.  We come to the end of ourselves.  What begins from there is God.

But what is good about not being able to change the heartbreaking situation is we finally come to a place where we have no control, and the only way forward is to accept that.

One of the biggest challenges to our personhood in all our lives is our insistence on controlling situations.  But when we come to this place, where lament is the only answer, the ONLY thing we can do, we approach the situation where we’re invited to understand a deeper knowledge about the fabric of life we otherwise did not yet know.

We finally understand the goal of humility 
is to bear the capacity of humbling gracefully.

There is something good about all this, and that is how we gather the eternal competence of maturing through bearing heartrending situations we cannot change and therefore can only accept in the moment.  See how it’s NOTHING about our performance or how good we are at it?

When we stay in a season of lament, when we are able to sit in it without insisting our circumstance be changed, we practice a maturity that can only be practised and never attained as a possession.  It is both the hardest and easiest thing to do.

Only when we have practiced this ancient contemplation of lamenting and have consistently experienced the ability to surrender our control does God show us what maturity looks like.  Until such a time, we cannot see it, and it is not a reality we can claim that we’ve attained.

Lament is a final frontier of growth and healing.