Lament Forgive - ebook

ABOUT THE BOOK

Forgive and divorce are both translated into English from the same Greek word in the New Testament. When marriage is talked about as tying the knot, divorce becomes the process of untying that knot.

Could forgiveness be better illustrated through the separation and liberation that occurs when a knot is untangled?

Can lamenting help us name the layers of disloyalty, betrayal, or abuse that hold us captive?

Viewed in this fresh way, Steve Hall shows how God wants to partner with us to heal our painful memories of mistreatment through a cycle of lamenting and forgiving.PREFACE

Memories of Broken Wings

Out of Egypt they came.

Thousands upon thousands of men, women, and children scurrying away from the nation who had enslaved them. Propelled by an agonising mixture of hope and fear they didn't know which direction to look. Chasing them in an angry cloud of horse and chariot and spear was the army of their Egyptian slave masters. To their left and right giant walls of water ushered them across the sea along an avenue of dry ground. Ahead of them a tantalising glimpse of freedom beckoned.

The longest night of their lives didn’t seem like night-time. In the sky above them glowed a pillar of fire that cast both light and warmth upon them. A pillar of thick cloud moved behind this fire, blocking its light from the Egyptian horde who struggled over the uneven sea floor in darkness.

At dawn the last Israelite stepped onto the sand that represented dry land. Moses stretched out his arm across the sea with only moments to spare. With a mighty roar the walls of water collapsed in an avalanche upon the pursuing army. Not one of them survived.

Shouts of joy filled the early morning air. Music and dancing, songs and laughter, erupted all over the beach in praise of God. They were free!

God had rescued them from Egypt, however, the toll of a lifetime spent as slaves remained clear to see. Whip marks decorated their undernourished bodies, stooped postures showed decades of harsh labour, and down-turned eyes revealed habits of self-preservation.

A missing generation of boys and an absent elderly presence left a visible scar of a different kind.

Other wounds caused by their prolonged captivity lay hidden beneath the surface. We glimpse these only within the silences of the story. When a new Pharaoh enslaved the Israelites with abusive slave masters, no mention is made of them asking God for help. The Egyptians used them ruthlessly and made their lives bitter with harsh labour, yet no prayers for rescue are recorded. Their baby boys are drowned in the Nile and even then—even then—they don’t cry out to God.

In situations of captivity or slavery, a constant cycle of violence and reward turns the captor into the ongoing source of life for the captive. Therefore, only when the Pharaoh dies are we told the Israelites cry out to God for deliverance.

Talk about issues.

The Israelites stand on the beach liberated, yet in desperate need of further liberation.

A little later in their story God says to them:

“You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt, and how I carried you on eagle’s wings and brought you to myself. Now if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession. Although the whole earth is mine, you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”

—Exodus 19:4-6

Really?

A treasured possession? Their time in slavery offered them compelling evidence of their supposed lack of value.

A kingdom of priests? The struggle to invite God into their own lives makes them a surprising choice to minister his presence to others.

A holy nation? The shame of captivity would leave them believing they were unworthy of belonging to a nation set apart to be holy.

God appears to choose the most traumatised people he can to call his own. He then asks them to share his love and presence with the rest of the world.

A world that included their Egyptian persecutors.

It’s an impossible task, unless God can heal the visible and invisible scars left by their experiences of Egypt. Only with such healing can they become people who are confident in their own value, live apart from shame, and can receive love and give it away to others. Maybe God chose these people to show that no matter how others mistreat us, their sin does not have to be the final word in our lives.

We all have our own Egypts, don’t we?

Places of disloyalty where someone has ignored their bond of commitment to us and treated us as a stranger.

Or places of betrayal where someone treated us as an enemy by harming us or allowing us to come to harm for their own gain.

Or places of abuse where someone has treated us as an object, number, or animal rather than as a person.

We may or may not label our own experiences of being sinned against as strongly as disloyalty, betrayal, or abuse. But whenever an individual, group, nation, corporation, or system relates to us as a stranger, enemy, or object we glimpse Egypt. The influence of this mistreatment lingers on by haunting our memories, forging our identities, and driving the ways we relate to others.

Peter recalled God’s promise from Exodus when he wrote:

"You are a chosen people, a royal priesthood (a kingdom of priests), a holy nation (a holy nation), God’s special belonging (treasured possession), that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness (Egypt) into his wonderful light."

—1 Peter 2:9 with bracketed links to Exodus 19:4-6

In God’s eyes, we are these things already, yet we relate better to the future tense of God’s promise found in Exodus—you will be. This is because suffering causes God’s parental love and our identity as his beloved child, to stay as academic knowledge or mere sentimentality rather than a day-to-day experienced reality. A new story is available to us, but for now we are stuck in a story where someone else's sin defines who we are and how we live.

We are saved but need further saving.

We are like a bird who fell out of the sky after being attacked by a flying predator. This assault left our wings damaged and our perception of the sky’s inherent safety shattered. Unable to fly with the pain of broken wings, we learned how to survive life on the ground. Over time our wings healed, but time has not healed all the damage caused. Unsure how to restore our identity, remove our shame, and end the painful memories—yet certain we do not want to be victimised again—we numb our desire to fly.

The real tragedy is not that we now walk everywhere, it is that we have convinced ourselves staying on the ground is better than flying.

At times of complete desperation or in unguarded moments of reflection, we come to realise how fully our past controls our present. After we acknowledge how we cannot keep walking everywhere, a quiet whisper reminds us we are designed to soar on wings like eagles. We look skywards and feel the yearning to fly once more.

God began healing the Israelites by revealing to them their true identity and he begins there with us too.

We are chosen.

We are treasured.

We are priests.

We are holy.

We are grounded birds being called to fly again.

Only a revelation of who we are meant to be holds the power to inspire us to find the courage and determination to face our darkest memories and deepest shame. We will need to hold this identity close—even if we don’t believe it yet—because when we last faced our hurt we became overwhelmed and numbed our desire for flight. For this time to end in healing, we will need to reclaim knowledge our western culture has lost.

Let us rediscover how to lament and forgive.CHAPTER 1

Refusing Denial

Nestled after Jeremiah and before Ezekiel is a tiny book of poetry that is easily lost between the huge books either side of it. Just five poems long, the book of Lamentations captures the senseless tragedy and horror of seeing a city destroyed by war.

The city is Jerusalem, and the year is 586 BC. After a year-and-a-half long siege, the army of the Babylonian Empire broke through Jerusalem's gates in a mighty flood of sword and fire. This once glorious city now lies in ruins. Her walls have been torn down, the temple destroyed, and every building set alight. Smoke rises from the ashes like a funeral pyre, burnt bodies litter the streets, and packs of jackals prowl the squares. The majority of Jerusalem’s inhabitants have been killed or dragged off by the invaders to become slaves. A severe famine leaves survivors wasting away from hunger and wishing they had died by Babylonian sword.

Lamentations is a bleak account. As you bravely—or dutifully—trudge through these five poems, your spirit longs for a glimpse of hope, a word of prophecy, or a small word of comfort from God. But it never comes. God remains silent. Instead, a handful of overlapping voices draw you in to the shocking aftermath of their individual or corporate experiences of Jerusalem's destruction. Verse after verse overflows with their raw pain, uncontrolled sorrow, and sheer unadulterated desperation.

By the end of Lamentations, part of you is glad it is such a short book while the other part of you is left disturbed by God’s continued distance. The book ends with the following lines:

Why do you always forget us?

Why do you forsake us so long?

Restore to us yourself, LORD, that we may return;

renew our days as of old

unless you have utterly rejected us

and are angry with us beyond measure.

—Lamentations 5:20-22

Imagine a Broadway show where you know who the lead actor is, but his character is neither seen nor heard for the entire duration of the play. The set has been designed to look like the front fascia of this character’s house. As the story progresses, you are given the impression he is home by the way lights inside the house turn on and off at random intervals. The rest of the cast congregate outside in the street. They are dressed in dirty and bloodied rags, with many appearing injured. All of them are starving. Some violent disaster has befallen them before the play began and together they mourn the loss of family, friends, and homes.

The cast obviously feel an attachment to the main character and believe this to be a reciprocal bond, for they spend the next three hours banging on his front door and windows. They speak about him, rage at him, repent to him, praise him, and cry out for his comfort, yet he never opens his door or even looks out a window. He chooses not to join their conversation, answer their accusations, or offer any form of comfort. They are met only with silence and absence.

The play ends with the cast questioning whether they have been abandoned by this lead character and assuming he must be immeasurably angry with them. The curtain falls, but as we walk out of the theatre, we swear we can still hear weeping coming from behind the curtain.

In such a disconcerting story, it's easy to see why we make the following chorus of praise—with its expressions of hope—the traditional focal point of Lamentations:

Yet this I call to mind

and therefore I have hope:

Because of the Lord's great love we are not consumed,

for his compassions never fail.

They are new every morning;

great is your faithfulness.

I say to myself, "The LORD is my portion;

therefore I will wait for him."

—Lamentations 3:21-24

However, when we put praise at the heart of Lamentations, we can end up telling each other to respond to trauma with proclamations of hope, rejoicing, or thanksgiving. These are not always healthy responses to encourage. Not only do they suggest that God is uninterested in how we are feeling, they can also belittle our hurt or cause us to disown it. This traditional reading of Lamentations reinforces a stereotype of God many people on the margins already hold. It also supports our western culture's tendency to deny pain expression.

Our discomfort with agony may well have biased this reading of Lamentations.

All but eight verses in this third and central poem—what we label chapter 3—are written from the perspective of a male character. For the twenty verses leading up to his sudden outburst of praise, this man has been detailing the all-encompassing nature of his pain. He shares how his heart is a target for arrows and his body feels mauled by a lion. He describes being weighed down by chains, trampled in the dust, and stuffed with bitter herbs. His suffering engulfs him. Everywhere he looks he sees darkness as if he’s dwelling with the dead rather than with the living. He complains how his prayers for help are being blocked from reaching God’s ears.

When we read through the man’s poetic protests, they may not feel exaggerated but strike a chord within us. We recognise his agony if we too have known similar experiences where we have had our hearts broken and our spirits pierced. We know well the despair that overcomes us during the dark nights of the soul when we feel alone and our prayers for relief or change stay unanswered.

The man’s praise comes out-of-the-blue, but not because he has suddenly remembered God in the midst of his suffering. He has been talking about God all along, making it clear how he sees God as the one responsible:

I am one who has seen affliction

by the rod of the Lord’s wrath.

He has driven…

He has turned…

He has made…

He has broken…

He has besieged…

He has walled…

He has weighed…

He shuts out…

He has barred…

He dragged…

He mangled…

He pierced…

He has filled…

He has trampled…

—Excerpts from Lamentations 3:1-16

After blaming God for sixteen verses, the man spirals further into despair. Gone are the expectations he held for his future. No longer can he imagine life without suffering. The fabric of his world has torn apart, leaving only the bitter memories of his traumatic experience looping in his mind. He shares how his soul struggles under the weight of this constant remembering.

I have been deprived of peace;

I have forgotten what prosperity is.

So I say, "My splendor is gone

and all that I had hoped from the LORD.

I remember my affliction and my wandering,

the bitterness and the gall.

I well remember them,

and my soul is downcast within me.

—Lamentations 3:17-20

It is at this moment of despondency that the man unexpectedly shifts to hope and recalls to mind the beautiful chorus of praise I quoted earlier. If the poem ended here, its emphasis would be different, but we're only a third through.

The next three verses all start with the word good in the poem's original Hebrew. Good is God... Good is it to wait... Good is it to bear God's punishment... This repetition makes his statements less than convincing. It's as if he is trying to persuade himself these things are true.

The LORD is good to those whose hope is in him,

to the one who seeks him;

it is good to wait quietly

for the salvation of the LORD.

It is good for people to bear the yoke

while they are young.

Let them sit alone is silence,

for the LORD has laid it on them.

—Lamentations 3:25-28

The hope he expressed moments before is undone and he slips back into blaming God. He is unconvinced by his own statements. And so he should be. It's never good to experience the yoke of your city's destruction nor the death or enslavement of your people, regardless of how young or old you are. We know he disagrees with where his praise has led him because he doesn't stay quiet nor sit alone in silence accepting his suffering. Instead, he continues protesting the injustice he is undergoing:

Who can speak and have it happen

if the Lord has not decreed it?

Is it not from the mouth of the Most High

that both calamities and good things come?

Why should the living complain

when punished for their sins?

—Lamentations 3:37-39

The Babylonians have caused his suffering, however, the man’s understanding of the world doesn’t allow him to interpret Jerusalem’s destruction in this way. He believes bad things only happen if you’ve sinned against the divine. If you get a bumper crop at harvest time, the gods have blessed you, but if your crop gets ruined by drought they are displeased with you. If your nation wins a war, the gods fought with you, but if your nation loses then the gods are angry. The three rhetorical questions above give us a front row seat to this worldview.

Rarely are we as honest with ourselves as this man is about the depth of his hurt, yet even he hasn’t been honest enough, for no tears have fallen. He has narrated his suffering but has done so with carefully managed emotions to keep the pain itself at bay. Neither praise nor blame nor theological debate has led him to an outpouring of his anguish.

What leads him to express his grief is his community’s unexpected response to his three rhetorical questions. The survivors taking refuge in Jerusalem's broken shell, share how God has slain them without pity and blocked their prayers from reaching his ears.

Let us examine our ways and test them,

and let us return to the LORD.

Let us lift up our hearts and our hands

to God in heaven, and say:

“We have sinned and rebelled

and you have not forgiven.

You have covered yourself with anger and pursued us;

you have slain without pity.

You have covered yourself with a cloud

so that no prayer can get through.

You have made us scum and refuse

among the nations.

All our enemies have opened their mouths

wide against us.

We have suffered terror and pitfalls,

ruin and destruction.”

—Lamentations 3:40-47

Hearing his people narrate their own suffering blindsides this man. He wasn’t prepared to handle seeing their ruin and destruction. In the verses following this expression of national pain, he shares how grief overcomes him. The hurt he has locked deep inside is suddenly released in a flood of tears.

Streams of tears flow from my eyes

because my people are destroyed.

My eyes will flow unceasingly,

without relief,

until the LORD looks down

from heaven and sees.

What I see brings grief to my soul

because of all the women of my city.

—Lamentations 3:48-51

Is he crying for them or for himself? He is probably crying more for himself, but it doesn’t matter. The pain of his nation is the catalyst he needed to express his own grief. In our own culture, we see a similar release of grief happen when a much-loved celebrity dies. The number of tears we shed for a person we didn’t know, seems unfavourably vast when we may not have even cried at a relative’s funeral. Nevertheless, the sense of shared grief at a national level gives us each permission to grieve for our own losses, where perhaps we could not do so before.

The man’s uncontrolled weeping causes him to remember a time God had drawn near to him in the depth of the pit when he thought all was lost. This time a genuine experience is recalled rather than a memorised praise song, and he catches a true glimpse of hope in a God who hears and intervenes and saves. Then, for the first time in this poem, he directs a heartfelt cry towards God: “Uphold my cause!”

I called on your name, LORD,

from the depths of the pit.

You heard my plea: “Do not close your ears

to my cry for relief.”

You came near when I called you,

and you said, “Do not fear.”

You, Lord took up my case;

you redeemed my life.

LORD, you have seen the wrong done to me.

Uphold my cause!

—Lamentations 3:55-59

If we make Lamentations' purpose about encouraging us to respond to suffering by praising God, we will miss the essential journey of emotional honesty this book invites us to undertake. Lamenting is not about singing a praise song in a minor key but about expressing the truth of our wounding. Kathleen M. O'Connor, in her book on Lamentations, puts it this way: "Laments are prayers that erupt from wounds, burst out of unbearable pain, and bring it to language."

The man's praise may express genuine hope, but equally it could be something he uses to distract himself from his suffering or coerce God back on to his side. Within the context of the surrounding poem I feel it is more likely to be one of the latter. I interpret it this way as his praise brings him neither peace nor a new perspective on his situation. Instead, praise appears to join blame and theological deliberation as another outworking of his emotional dishonesty. Praising God is a good thing to do, but if it glosses over our pain, stifles our grief, or delays us putting words to tragedy then even praise can obstruct God's desire to see us healed.

Denial is the name we give to our refusal to acknowledge or recognise pain. It can be a helpful temporary reaction to trauma, for it allows us to get to a safe place before we process the shock of what has just happened. All too often, however, we make this short-term response the long-term framework by which we live. Not only do we dislike the powerlessness of weeping, we embrace a lifestyle of denial due to how our memories conspire against us. It’s like an anchor was dropped into the sea of memory at every moment in our past where we were treated as a stranger, an enemy, or an object. We try to move on with our lives, but we are held back and forced to think upon tragic experiences we’d rather forget.

Two types of memory can unexpectedly assault us. Intrusive memories are the most common and despite their vividness leave us aware we are experiencing a recollection of the past while flashbacks cause us to believe our trauma is still occurring. Any link to the original event can trigger either type of remembering and cause unwanted emotional, physical, or sensory reactions.

Why can’t we drive by that place without our heart aching?

Why can’t we talk about that thing without wanting to cry?

Why does that conversation keep replaying in our heads?

Why does recalling that event still make us angry?

Why do we find ourselves unable to wish that person well?

Why is it we cannot bear to say their name?

There’s a timelessness attached to our memories. We can pour out our pain like a jug of water, only to return weeks, months, or years later to find the jug full again. Decades can pass and the event hurts as much now as it did then, dulled only by our self-protective strategies rather than the onset of time. If anything, time proves a terrible healer.

Holding in our tears or failing to express our hurt does not make for a healthy lifestyle. But when our pain refuses to let go of us, regardless of how many tears we cry, we believe denial is the best way to prevent our painful memories from coming to mind.

There’s a story in John’s gospel about a nameless Samaritan woman who travels to her town’s well to draw water at midday. Carrying a heavy jar of water home during the hottest part of the day in an arid land is not usual behaviour. You only do this in an emergency or if you want to guarantee not meeting anyone else along the way. It sounds extreme to go to such lengths to evade others, but midday is a great time to avoid people’s comments, stares, and pity.

Avoidance takes many forms. Some of us turn to new shoes, novels, or Ben and Jerry. Some of us lose ourselves in parenting, church ministries, or running. Others of us turn to alcohol, sex, or work. We all seek to make ourselves busy enough or distracted enough to keep certain memories at bay. The strategies we use to self-protect can often lead us to outwork genuine needs in unhealthy ways. Even good things like drawing water from a well, can become distorted when we depend on them to help us put off dealing with our past.

The Samaritan woman doesn't expect to find Jesus waiting for her. In her culture, men didn’t visit wells and long-standing racial tensions meant that Jewish people never visited Samaritan ones. The good news is that if Jesus was hanging out at wells at midday then, he’ll be hanging around our shopping malls, running routes, and offices now. He is still looking to transform our lives by meeting us in the places we go to avoid our pain.

Jesus , “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.”

—John 4:13-15

After she asks Jesus for this water, he starts a new conversation about her husband. Nowhere does he acknowledge her acceptance of his offer or give her anything resembling living water. At first glance this appears odd unless we consider the rest of his interaction with her is how Jesus gives and she receives what he has offered.

He told her, “Go, call your husband and come back.”

“I have no husband,” she replied.

Jesus said to her, “You are right when you say you have no husband. The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true.”

—John 4:16-18

The joy of Jesus’ offer of living water is that there are no prerequisites for accepting it. Whatever your avoidance tactic, whatever you have experienced, however close or otherwise you feel to God, all you need to do is ask Jesus for this water. When we do this, Jesus will highlight our area of greatest pain. Whatever anguish is bubbling up in our hearts needs displacing by an overflow of his love for us before we can discover healing.

This woman’s greatest pain relates to her history of five marriages. Whether her hurt came from being widowed or divorced, the story does not tell us, but the result is similar. By frequenting a well at midday, she is rejecting others before they can get a chance to reject her. She keeps her distance, so she doesn't need to grieve again the loss of anyone close to her. Her self-imposed isolation demonstrates her resolve to protect her heart from further agony. Forcing herself to endure the gruelling heat may even be an act of self-contempt where she is punishing herself for some of her marriages failing.

By choosing a lifestyle of denial we try to disown our stories, but they don’t go away. Instead, these stories come to own us. This Samaritan woman has been repeatedly divorced or widowed, therefore, a story of people leaving her frames how she now lives. By the time Jesus meets her, her life has become defined by how she has suffered in her past.

When we seek to deny how we’ve been hurt, we too will find that our pain will begin to decide the way we live in a variety of ways.

The better we get at suppressing our painful emotions, the more we will shutdown our ability to express positive emotions. We can’t have it both ways. Healthy emotions are meant to be expressed, so we cannot deny a select few without also restricting the spontaneous expression of all the others. A lifestyle of denial will always limit our capacity for joy.

The defences we erect to keep our pain from being expressed also keep love out. Self-protective strategies filter everything through fear and insecurity, so we end up receiving only a small part of the love others wish to communicate to us. A lifestyle of denial robs us of knowing how much we are loved by both God and the people we care about.

Making self-protection our priority also means that while we may love others fiercely, we may not always love them well. Loving well involves emotional honesty and an openness to being vulnerable. When our defensive ways of relating cause us to be reclusive or overbearing, pacifying or manipulative, appeasing or aggressive, anxious or demanding, others do not receive our love. A lifestyle of denial ends up forging our personality and controlling the quality of connection we can have with others.

From our outward appearance, we look to be competent and in control—we have after all worked very hard to present this image—however, the internal reality can regularly be one where we are barely coping with life. This feeling of constant exhaustion or survival comes from our struggle to be fully present. Our attention gets hijacked by intrusive memories as well as by the effort required to keep our pain in and our fragile masks constantly in place. A lifestyle of denial will consistently drain our enthusiasm for life.

“Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshipped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place we must worship is in Jerusalem.”

—John 4:19-20

Jesus wants to talk about what's going on internally. She responds by using worship and theological debate to sidestep doing so. Just like the man in Lamentations did. We too use similar tactics to avoid being emotionally honest. We have all become overly accomplished at using silence, humour, religion, or adeptly changing the subject to avoid talking about how we've been hurt.

The lament encourages us to announce the truth. It is a cry of honesty that arises out of our wounds and says no more. No more will we let someone else's mistreatment of us decide the fullness of our lives. No longer will we ignore our anguish or pretend we're okay. This time is going to be different. This time we are owning our pain by facing it head on and refusing denial. Through bitter tears and convulsing sobs, we will express how deeply we have been hurt. We will then tell our stories of how we were wronged. We will proclaim how unfair it was, how unjust it was, how undeserved it was, and demand that God stands in our corner and declares the same.

It is this powerful dynamic of protest and story-telling, alongside the ebb and flow of our weeping, that differentiates lamenting from grieving. It is this dual nature of the lament that makes it an ideal response to suffering and a perfect precursor to forgiving.

To those of us living in denial, the book of Lamentations is uncomfortable. It challenges us to get in touch with pain that we’ve spent countless energy hiding from or ignoring.

To those of us embracing our pain already, Lamentations reassures us we are not alone. We see our lives mirrored in the tears and complaints of the characters we meet and find the courage to keep refusing the hopelessness of denial.

The story at the well concludes with the woman leaving her water jar and heading back to her town. There she proceeds to tell everyone about Jesus. She has yet to deal with her past, but after a single encounter with Jesus she gives up her isolation to reconnect with her community. In the third poem of Lamentations, the man’s self-protective defences failed him in response to the lament of his community. The tears he had held back fell only in the presence of others who were willing to express their own suffering.

It’s no coincidence that both stories contain an emphasis upon community. Our own healing journeys will require the input of others too.