Featured Image Credit: Kathe Kollwitz, “The Widow,” print, 1921
On Sunday, we continued to write laments in the style of the ancient Israelites. As I said in the last post, the genre of Biblical lament has five basic parts: invocation; honest complaint; expressions of confidence; petition; and praise. In today’s post, I’ll talk about honest complaint and invite you to add to your own laments, if you’re writing along with us.
The Opening Question
The opening question I set for our consideration of honest complaint was:
What grieves you most about the world at the present moment? What are you mourning over?
This led to a very heartfelt discussion. Some of us talked about climate change, about the spread of autocracy, about children killed in various unending international conflicts. Some spoke of personal challenges— illness, loss, broken relationships. The question helped us ground our complaints in the actual tragedies of our lives and our world.
Take some time to answer it for yourself before you read more of this post.
A Teaching About Honest Complaint
A complaint holds within it a plea and petition for help. It asks for a change from the One who is able to bring about change. We would not be complaining if we didn’t think that things could be different.
An honest complaint is clear-sighted about our current situation. It describes that situation well and is rooted in the present moment. Understanding the reasons why we are suffering is less important than simply naming our suffering. Lindsay Wilson writes that “our deepest need is not to understand why our suffering or loss has occurred, but to know if God cares and can be trusted.”
An honest complaint
- expresses our current circumstances;
- clarifies our settled convictions;
- avoids glib propositions about what must be true;
- asks bold questions;
- levels bold accusations;
- expresses the pain of loss in grief and tears;
- treats nothing as if it’s out of bounds.
This description of honest complaint seems fairly straightforward, but in practice our complaints get tangled up and loaded with hard questions. In the moment of our distress, it is sometimes hard to have a clear understanding of our current circumstances. Something in a treasured relationship might be wrong. Are we responsible for the wrongness, or is the other person? Or is it a condition that we have created together, offending and letting each other down in little ways that eventually erode our trust? It is also hard to state our settled convictions, as this might feel like an intellectual exercise when we are deeply rooted in our emotions and don’t have the distance that clear thought often requires. Our pain is exasperated by a feeling that our certainties are under attack, and so we might try to defend our core beliefs even while we are experiencing their limitations. We don’t always feel that we can be bold or even aggressive with God, even if we know, intellectually, that God can take it. Will God find our complaints too burdensome and abandon us? Will God say that we’re being unfair, and reject us? Tears are often inarticulate, a storm of agony that has no other expression. And if our worlds are shaken, we might prefer the security of clear borders and boundaries, even when we are finding those boundaries restrictive and detrimental to our growth as persons.
Examples of Honest Complaint
Here are some examples of Biblical complaint. Some of them continuations of texts that we considered last week.
“Oh my God, I cry in the daytime, but you do not answer; by night as well, but I find no rest.” -Psalm 22
“How long shall I have perplexity in my mind, and grief in my heart, day after day? How long shall my enemy triumph over me?” – Psalm 13
“God lies in wait for me like a bear or like a lion prowling after its prey, forcing me into the briars, throwing me to the ground and leaving me in anguish.” -Lamentations 3:10-11
“Sighing is my only food, and groaning pours out of me like water. For what I feared most has come upon me, and what I dreaded has happened to me. I have no peace; I have no quiet; I have no rest – only turmoil.” -Job 3:24-26
Psalm 22 complains of God’s silence. Because God doesn’t answer, the psalmist can’t rest. This is the complaint of the sleepless night, of tossing and turning upon the bed, of a mind that is feverish with agony and self-doubt. The psalmist speaks in the voice of wounded love, and that voice sounds in a void. Where is God? Where has reassurance gone? St. John of the Cross spoke of the pervasive sense of divine absence as “the dark night of the soul.” Such times can be experienced as a kind of numbness, the depression that makes you want to turn your face to the wall. But they can also be quite active, as we cry and scream over God’s absence, and accuse God of abandoning us.
Psalm 13 complains of perplexity and grief. There is a triumphant enemy, and the psalmist isn’t afraid to name that enemy. As we talked about this psalm, we were honest about the struggles that Christians have with the idea of enemies. How does having enemies fit into our pursuit of Christian love? Yet we noted that Jesus tells us to love our enemies, not to pretend that we don’t have them. The psalmist is very honest about the fact that there is an enemy, and that enemy is actively working for the psalmist’s destruction. All sorts of people in the world have the experience of being undermined and attacked by enemies, and in our context as Americans we see this play out in the lives of queer people, people of color, and women, whose enemies are activated by homophobia, racism, and misogyny. If we can’t honestly name these things, we can’t act against them. We are called to act out of love but not hatred, but one can practice an oppositional love.
Lamentations aligns God with predatory animals, and for people who lived very close to the land, such animals could easily be thought of as enemies. What does it mean to claim that God is sometimes an enemy? This is a bold accusation. In misery and agony, the author of Lamentations calls God a predator and protests against the experience of being hunted. We could dismiss this with pietistic platitudes and say that the parts of us that have to die might indeed protest against their own destruction, but it is probably better to leave it as a bold complaint. Why explain it away? Why not accept the validity of the anguish that leads the author to name God as predatory?
Job’s complaint is that his righteousness didn’t protect him from calamity. We can caution people against catastrophizing, but sometimes the situation is just as bad as they fear that it will be. We all have protections that we’ve put in place to keep disaster from our door. When those protections fail, all we have is complaint or acceptance, and acceptance is very hard to get to if we refuse to ever indulge in honest complaint.
Writing Honest Complaints
To help us shape our honest complaints, I broke the process of complaining into three parts. I gave these prompts:
- Express Your Current Circumstances
- Express Your Settled Convictions (The world must be this way…life must be this way…the future must be this way…)
- Ask Bold Questions and Level Bold Accusations
We all found this fairly easy to enter into intellectually, although it left us feeling quite tender and exposed. We’re committed to protecting each other’s confidentiality, so I provide only my own lament as an example.
Last week I invoked God with these words:
“You whom I forget when I read the news, use photographs as reminders, headlines as heralds, break open my indifference.”
This week I added my complaint, breaking it down into the three parts that I outlined above:
Current Circumstances – “I hear of the deaths of children, and my misery makes me want to turn away, to bury my distress in comforts and distractions.”
Settled Convictions – “The world should have moments of rest, and release me from the pain of caring, and of failing to care. Your Sabbath should spread among us, and heal us with rest.”
Bold Questions and Accusations – “Why allow us to hear of atrocities when there is so little that we can do about them? You won’t allow us a moment of peaceful ignorance. You bring the clamor to my ears.”
It felt a little odd to complain about how I felt burdened by the death of children. But I wrote it anyway, since complaining rarely makes us look good. In writing it, I realized how selfish and foolish I sounded, but I accept that this is part of the honesty I’m seeking. When I’m complaining, I might sound like a toddler throwing toys. That is, really, the point. There can be something irrational and ridiculous about complaint. When we complain, we have permission to say things that we wouldn’t say if we were feeling mentally and emotionally healthy. We might express some unarticulated and barely recognized conviction, but in expressing it, we disrupt it. I might occasionally believe that I should have an easy and enjoyable path through life, as if such a thing is an enshrined right. Saying it out loud makes me see how ridiculous such an attitude is, and helps me shake it lose, unsettling its status as a secret conviction.
Some More Examples
Last week, I offered the invocations from two poems that I wrote when teaching myself the form of lament. I’ll add to them every week, as further examples of how laments develop. Here are the two poems, with their invocations and their honest complaints.
from a poem entitled “Lamentation, The Masked Men”
Doxed Divinity,
naked-faced agitator caught in a camera’s eye,
strip away the bully’s costume,
pull the mask down from his face,
send him reeling back in nakedness,
bring him to his knees.
We voted for our destruction,
gave away our liberties because of the price of eggs.
Now doors crack inwards, windows shatter,
the frigid day stalks in, the masked face of winter
squints through beady eyes.
Children weep as gloved hands grasp and hold their heads.
There is no tenderness.
Schools empty, children starve,
and pompous, apostate senators
clasp their hands upon their bellies and regard
our destruction as Your best wish.
Why don’t you haunt their nights and make them weep,
and make the cold stretch across their naked skin?
Why don’t you batter and berate them?
from a poem entitled “Lamentation, Pharaoh’s Silos”
Grain of spirit milled for bread,
fill the children who hide inside,
sharpen their minds,
give freedom to their play,
remind them, through your buried taste,
that they will emerge into daylight,
that the world is always being remade.
This is the season of starvation,
the old season that our ancestors feared,
lean with empty cupboards, sacks emptied of grain.
Joseph built great silos and put them in Pharaoh’s hand.
Pharaoh still controls them, and there’s famine in the land.
The grocery stores are open,
the shelves are laden and the coolers softly glow.
But a glacier spans the city,
and the children live beyond it,
starving on ice flows.
Why aren’t you sunlight, hot and fierce?
Why don’t you drown the pharaohs and lead us into wilderness?
KPB Stevens 