Writing our Lament - by Liz Carter

Writing can be full of fun, hope, spark and mischief.

But it can also declare the very depths of the human condition.

I was reading an article written by a person who didn't feel church was for them because the songs didn't seem to reflect the wide realities of life, capturing only the hopeful and joyous sides of faith without admitting to the hurting. I know what they mean, and yet I've been heartened in the last few years to note many worship songwriters producing songs which share raw pain as well as turning to hope. And that's been reflected in the Christian writing community, as well - with many writers feeling able to pour out their rage, their sadness - their lament, at last, instead of donning masks and sticking to a saccharine kind of pretence about life with Jesus being all joy and no depths.

But writing lament is difficult. It rips pieces from us as we plunder the depths of our own pain and sorrow, and leaves us exhausted, spent. It's a vulnerable place to be. I've seen some amazing pieces in the last couple of weeks, with both Mental Health Awareness Week and Baby Loss Awareness Week prompting some honest and wrenching pieces of poetry and prose. And here in the Association of Christian Writers, so many authors are sharing rich and searingly candid pieces, like this one that Georgie Tennant shared a couple of weeks back, which was honest and deeply beautiful, about the anniversary of the loss of her dear sister. 

Writing lament is incredibly important, because people relate so much more to authenticity, and as well as that, there is healing to be found in the writing. I love that the Bible gives us permission to scream out our lament (see Psalm 77 for a great example of this), while always pointing forward to hope within that lament - not by denying we should stay in it a while, but by gentle reminders of God's story in our lives.

This was brought home to me last week when asked to write prayers for a particularly difficult funeral. My heart broke as I wrote them, and as I read them out, and the power of words once again struck me - the power to express the deepest parts of us, to rise up from those depths and spill out our pain, our sorrow, our longing and our profound despair. That's why we as writers have great power and great responsibility as well, to communicate those things which people so need to be expressed, yet so often feel unable to.

I'm so glad that in our churches we are finally finding places for lament again. It is as if it got a little lost for a while, in our determination to communicate the good things about our faith. But my experience is that it's in the declarations of the hardest things where people find the authenticity they are looking for, and within that, the sparks of hope they so need.

Do you find writing lament difficult? What is your experience of sharing your own depths?

I will leave you with a poem I wrote a year or so ago, when my own physical pain had simply become too much.

A Poem From Depths

 

Crashing into me

crushing the bones of me

fire snakes through my body

unrelenting and

unyielding.

Where are you, Lord?

Have you deserted me for ever?

Why so downcast, O my soul?

I have nothing left.

Into the depths of deep,

the cavernous abyss of incessant and inexorable

disease

Where are you, my Lord?

Have you deserted me forever?

Yet in the deepest depths is the deepest depth

the mystery of who you are

waiting for me

knowing me.

You are here

inhabiting my agony and spreading your arms ever wider

than I could ever envisage

The deepest depth in the deepest depths

shards of light puncture my darkness

A million suns blaze through the murk

and you are here.

You left glory and sunk into depths

my depths

Deep calls unto deep.

Why so downcast, O my soul?

Yet

I will praise.

Liz Carter 2018

Liz Carter is an author and blogger who writes about the painful times of life, and how we can find God in the mess and the hurting. Her first book, Catching Contentment (IVP) was published last year. She can be found at Great Adventure.