Continuing our project of writing laments using the ancient literary forms found in the Hebrew Scriptures, we turn to the naming of covenant. It is probably good to reiterate that the form of ancient lament has five parts: invocation; honest complaint; expressions of confidence; petition; and praise. Today we investigate the third part, which actually does more than express confidence – it names covenant.
Expressions of Confidence
This past Sunday, I opened our discussion with this prompt:
Tell a story about an event in your life that led to you becoming more fully yourself.
It proved to be a very emotional prompt, as people often become more whole by challenging brokenness. Maybe they’re finding ways to face their own internal brokenness. Maybe they’re confronting someone else’s brokenness, and find that the cost of that confrontation is a more clear-eyed view of themselves. When in the midst of the struggle to become more fully alive, we can find these confrontations and burst of self-knowledge very destabilizing. Yet these are the very moments that I think of as “covenant-producing.” It is in these moments where old ways of being are overturned that we must make vital agreements with new ways of acting and looking at the world.
A Teaching about the Naming of Covenant and Expressions of Confidence
One of my source text’s for understanding the destabilizing and restorative effects of covenant-making is Walter Brueggemann’s The Covenanted Self. Here, in brief, are some of Brueggemann’s main ideas about covenant:
- Brueggemann asserts that “the human self is not an independent, autonomous agent but is always and necessarily preceded by a Thou, one radically other than us, who evokes, summons, authorizes, and ‘faiths’ us into existence as persons.”
- Our relationship with this Thou, who we call God, is strangely intimate and equal. God, who is so much more than we can imagine, enters into a mutual relationship with us through covenant.
- But God is not equal to us. We are always aware that God is greater than us, and so we find this covenantal relationship strange and destabilizing.
- Covenant makes us change by undermining our understanding of who we are and calling us to become someone else. To some extent this is always true when we enter into relationship. To be a parent, a friend, a lover, or to step into any new role in work or in life, requires us to change. The change required within a covenant with God is even greater, and more destabilizing.
- But at the heart of that change is the sure knowledge that God loves us, and will also change in response to the demands of love. God’s love is stable, and that is enough. The demands of love require expression, and the moments of covenant that we name are moments when we accepted and acted on those demands.
I have been writing, in this series, about how God, as presented in scripture, does change and makes change happen. This can be a profoundly challenging idea. So much of our sense of security rests on an idea of divine stability. For Brueggemann, and for me, that stability is found in the constant nature of God’s love. Such love changes its tactics as it responds to the world’s needs. But the love itself doesn’t change. As we remember moments of covenant in our lives, we find that they are always moments when we felt God’s love.
Examples of Expressions of Confidence
The examples I drew from scripture are not as fraught or complicated as they were in the previous weeks of this study. They are meant to show the nod towards covenant in the texts that we’ve been examining. As you’ll see below, they don’t really articulate the shape of those covenants. They simply assert that covenant is still there, that God has not abandoned us. That’s why they might properly be called “expressions of confidence” rather than “expressions of covenant.” But such confidence is based on covenant – we are confident that God is staying true to the relationship. Here are the examples, but I won’t comment on them much, since much of what I have left to say about covenant is best said in terms of our own writing.
- “God has not despised – not disdained – the suffering of those in pain! God didn’t hide, but answered them when they cried for help!” -Psalm 22
- “I trust in your love; my heart rejoices in the deliverance you bring.” – Psalm 13
- “God’s favor is not exhausted, nor has God’s compassion failed. They rise up anew each morning, so great is God’s faithfulness.” -Lamentations 3:22-23
Naming and Describing Moments of Covenant
We set out to name and describe moments of covenant following these rubrics:
- First, read through what you’ve already written, and ground yourself in the feelings and images. Then…
- Write about a moment of change and covenant when you learned something that effects this present moment. (Where were you? What was the weather like, what did you hear, what did you see, what did your surroundings smell like, what tastes lingered in your mouth, how did your body feel? Who was with you? What were you doing?)
- Write about God’s participation in that moment. (Why did this moment come to mind when you were asked to write about covenant?)
- Write about the meaning you have made from your experience of that moment. (What did you learn about God? About love? About yourself? About the world? Who did you talk to about the event, and how did they reflect upon your experience?)
I found myself writing about a very recent event, an Iftar dinner that one of the local mosques invited me and my wife to. Until this point I had been shaping my own lament around the grief I feel over the spread of war in the Middle East and the out-sized part that my own country has been playing in the violence. I felt exhausted with caring, but compelled to care, useless in my anger, but raging. I yearned for sabbath, for a break from all of the destruction and misery, but expressed my doubts that I, or the world, would get to enjoy such a sabbath. Pausing to name the Iftar dinner as a moment of covenant helped to reestablish my confidence in God’s abiding care for the world. Here’s what I wrote:
We ate in an abandoned factory
that the mosque had bought to serve the city.
After the talks our hosts went to pray,
but invited us to the serving line,
where we piled our plates.
We ate dates, and salad, and falafel, and beans.
We talked of old friends, and when our hosts rejoined us,
of our traditions, wishing each other holy fasts, full of intention.
Even in the midst of war, of despair, we broke bread together.
I wanted to fill this description with detail, as any creative writing teacher will tell you that specificity is the heart of narrative. Detail does more than make a good story, though. It grounds us in reality. To speak of covenant can be abstract. To speak of salad and beans is to remember that covenant exists in the fulness of our lives, that it is tangible, something that we smell and taste.
Some More Examples
As I’ve written these posts, I’ve been sharing two laments that I wrote before I began teaching about lamentation. I’ll continue those laments here.
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?
You, who, when the flood had ended,
sent a beam of sunlight
onto the post of a broken fence,
after everyone had fled,
and the long, sallow girl
who spoke in gangly sentences
played a song of hopefulness.
The stuffing had come out of the houses
and lay, gray on dirty streets,
and the ship that broke the levy
balanced on the neighborhood’s jagged edge.
But still, the light on the post, and the song,
and we agreed with each other
that even destruction welcomes the sun.
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?
Once, in the desert, we built a house.
The sun made a cooking stone of the concrete slab,
and we built quickly, making shade,
and the family that would live there
lifted sheetrock with us, then retreated, in the heat,
to their shack of cardboard walls.
Power lines were slack in a street of dust,
and when our saws stopped working
children lifted cables, looking for the break,
ignoring the electricity that would kill them at a touch.
Sweat, a stinging in the eyes,
and the scratch of insulation
to keep the cold of the desert night outside.
And then, with dirty hands, we ate together in the dust,
bean burritos, and the taste of the hands that made them,
and of contentment, and our acceptance of Your love.
KPB Stevens 