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.

This Lent we are writing laments, as many of us feel that the entire world is lamenting, crying out to God in pain, uncertainty, and suffering. We are studying lament as a Biblical genre, and shaping our own lamenting to fit that genre. Trying to write in a poetic form that emerged in a very different culture, among people who saw the world in a very different way, is quite challenging. Yet it is a beautiful challenge, testing the bounds of what we think we know and believe, making us pause to consider other possibilities and ways of knowing and acting.

The Genre

Lindsay Wilson breaks the structure of Biblical lament into five parts: invocation; honest complaint; expressions of confidence; petition; and praise. As we write our laments, we spend a week on each of these five parts, and I will be writing a post about each of these parts throughout this season. Although we might need a schema of clearly delineated parts to approach the totality of a lament, the ideas and considerations that inform each of these parts overlap into all of the others, and so one cannot speak of invocation, for instance, without touching on ideas that I will expand on more fully when we come to speak of petition.

The Opening Question

As we meet each week to write laments together, we center ourselves in the room and grow in intimacy by responding, verbally, to a prompt. As leader of the group, I get to set the prompts, always aware that whatever I suggest will only gesture at what we’re going to talk about in depth, and that there are probably better ways to set the prompt that I haven’t thought of. I offer these prompts to you here, so that, in answering them, you might examine your own experience and bring your full self into the writing of your own lament.
The question that I posed for the first week, when we considered invocations, is:
What is the prevailing metaphor that you use for God? When you speak to God, what language to you use to describe God?

A Teaching about Invocation

After we’ve all had a chance to answer the question, and, hopefully, after you have paused to answer it while reading this, I offer a teaching on the focus of the day. I invite scholars, mystics, and theologians into our circle of conversation, so that we might benefit from their wisdom.
In The Theology of the Old Testament, Walter Brueggemann says the following about the structure of Biblical invocations and the spirituality that informs them:

• Invocation presumes that God can, and does, act in history. Theodicy is the attempt to understand why evil exists if the God of love is active in our lives. J.T. Butler wrote that “‘Theodicy’ is what relatively healthy people think about in the face of suffering. Lament is what sufferers must do – it is the voice of theodicy in life.”
• An invocation is a full sentence, centered around an active verb that “bespeaks an action that is transformative, intrusive, or inverting.” This verb creates a new situation or a changed circumstance.
• God is the subject of the active verb, the one who acts “in decisive and transformative ways.”
• The active verb has a direct object, which is changed or transformed.
• The “sentence” of lament can be diagrammed like this:
• Description of God → transformative action → person/thing/condition that will be or is being transformed
• This simple sentence structure encompasses all of reality. God acts to change and transform settled structures. God holds the initiative. The object (us, the world we inhabit) is not autonomous. God’s actions bind divinity to the things of this earth.

I must admit that I have long resisted this understanding of God’s action, mostly out of a desire to avoid blaming God when things go wrong. If God gave us freewill, than God necessarily withdrew from controlling our actions. We are free to act evilly. God’s omnipotence exists in the fact that God could turn off the cosmos at any moment. But as long as life is allowed to persist, God is limited by the divine choice to give us, and everything, free will. I am probably influenced by Simone Weil when I think this. Weil wrote that “on God’s part, creation is not an act of self-expansion but of restraint and renunciation.” In her understanding, God had to step back and cede space for creation if anything at all was to exist. As Mac Loftin puts it, “Weil sees that the existence of finite creation requires the lessening of God’s infinitude.”

But this isn’t Biblical theodicy. Brueggemann rightly points out that the Bible speaks of a present, active God. A challenging thought for people like me, who are allergic to ideas of shallow providence and anyone saying that God works in mysterious ways while following a divine plan for all creation that we cannot know or glimpse. I struggle with this idea, as it’s usually a platitude that allows us to dismiss suffering or diminish its impact. But I can’t deny that it’s at least part of the Biblical witness.

To write an invocation that is predicated on God, the subject, acting on some object in the world is, for me, fraught with danger. But maybe that’s the point. In writing such invocations, I am trying to pray in a way that stretches my understanding and makes me uncomfortable. Both of which are good inward feelings to carry into the writing of a lament.

Invocations in the Midst of Lament

There are many, many examples in the Bible of people invoking God at the beginning of a lament. Here are a few:

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” -Psalm 22

“How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?” – Psalm 13

“O God, you rule forever; Your judgment seat lasts till the end of time. Why have you utterly forgotten us, and abandoned us these many days?” -Lamentations 5:19-20

Psalm 22 names God as an intimate of the speaker (“my God”), chooses forsaken as its active verb, and the speaker as its subject. When we met as a group to write our laments, we spent some time discussing whether God’s act of withdrawing from us (forsaking us) is in keeping with our usual understanding of a loving God. I tried to draw on other examples of loving withdrawal. A parent dropping their kid off at college. A friend watching someone they love make a horrible mistake and knowing that their intervention might not be welcome in the moment, although they’re willing to be there to help pick up the pieces. These examples are in keeping with Simone Weil’s thoughts about God. God has to step back from the world to practice creative love. Weil writes that God “stays far away from us, because if He approached He would cause us to disappear.” Parents often have this sense. Their children need room to try to new things, try out being new personalities. If they’re not given space, they’ll make it by pushing their parents away. Yet at least a few of our group members thought that this was too easy of an analogy. Psalm 22 is what Christ says while on the cross. He is not like a kid starting college. He is crying out in agonized suffering, and it is hard not to hear him insist that if God were present the pain would be bearable. The psalm says that God forsakes us not just in the moments when we need our freedom, but in the moments when we want divine comfort. What are we to do with that?

Psalm 13 is even worse, for here God forgets. As if we are mere incidents in a busy divine life, not even worth noting down in a journal. My understanding of God includes an idea of eternity as being different from the temporal life that we experience. Eternity sits outside of time, and every moment is observed and remembered in God’s eternal mind. Every hair on our head, every wing of a dove, is known. Even if God is necessarily absent so that we can exist, that doesn’t mean that we’re forgotten. Yet the psalmist insists on divine forgetting, even if that forgetting is only temporary and we have hope of a future remembering. The psalmist describes a temporal God, but I choose to believe that the psalmist is not making a profound theological statement about God’s capacity to remember, but is instead expressing the feeling of being forgotten. Like a person who is being written to every day, but doesn’t know it because the letters keep getting lost in the mail.

Lamentations asserts somethings about God right at the beginning. God is not absent, but actively ruling and judging. Yet the author is experiencing a period of abandonment. As if God’s docket is full, and the author’s case keeps getting pushed back. Again the active verbs are “forgotten” and “abandonment,” which implies that all of this negligence is intentional on God’s part.

Before we started writing, we considered these things. The invocations in these laments refer to God’s active inaction, more than to God’s robust movement in the world. Biblical laments seem to be worried that we’ve gotten our facts wrong. That the things we think we know about God are in fact untrue. They start by breaking down comfortable and established categories.

The Ignatian term for this worry, and the cry of pain it engenders, is “desolation.” In times of desolation all of our descriptions and categories fall apart. We come face to face with the limitations of our knowing. The pain of this experience might lead us, eventually, into “indifference,” Ignatius’s term for what a Buddhist might call non-attachment. Once you’ve come to hold your understanding of God loosely, it becomes easier to hold loosely to your understanding of everything else. We learn to hold our desires and needs lightly. It’s a natural and healthy spiritual process, but wow, is it hard. Biblical laments bring us, immediately, into such desolating struggles.

Writing Our Own Invocations

To help us write our own invocations, I broke the process down in a way that proved to be a little confusing. Here’s what I asked people to do:

1. Describe God (God of the…God who does…God who is…God who isn’t…God who can be found in…God who can’t be found in…)
2. Describe or comment on God’s transformative action (You have done this…you haven’t done this…you are doing this…you are distant…you are close…you are inactive in this way…you are present in this way…)
3. Name the person/thing/condition that will be or is being transformed (This/these people…an emotion…a place…an assumption about life…a relationship…a form of community…a hope or desire)

The confusion came from people’s desire to strictly obey the grammatical rules. They found, when trying to describe God’s transformative action, that they needed an object in order to do so. Then they felt guilty about working ahead. Is it okay for an invocation to have two objects, or even two subjects? Here, for example, is one of the invocations I wrote as we sat together:

You whom I forget when I read the news, use photographs as reminders, headlines as heralds, break open my indifference.

I describe God in terms of my forgetting, and in that first clause God is the subject, my own forgetting is the active verb, and the news is the object. So I’ve already made a complex sentence just in my first movement towards invocation. I should pause here to admit that I’m bad at grammar, and those who are good at grammar are slapping their foreheads in frustration at my fumbling my way through grammatical rules. But you get my point. My second clause of this invocation is no better. The active verb is “use” but then I mention photographs and headlines as the object of such using. When I get to the third clause I introduce another active verb (break open) and another object – my indifference, the true object of the sentence. People struggled with the fact that I introduced invocation as a strict grammar, but then suggested that they might express themselves best by getting loosey-goosey with the rules.

One could, of course, write very simply sentences. It really doesn’t matter. Words are meant to express the heart’s deepest longings and despair. Even the structure of these invocations can be held lightly.

Some More Examples

I have, of course, been writing laments in preparation for teaching about them, so I’ll end this post by sharing two.

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.

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.

Next week we will move to the next part of a lamentation, the complaint itself. I will, each week, add to these two poems, so that you can see my full lamentations develop. Hopefully you, too, will build your lamentations week to week. Please add them to the comments of this post, if you wish to share them.

A friend asked me for my definition of hope, and I found myself talking about covenant. Hope is the love of neighbor and the world that keeps you going, despite all of the reasons for despair. During an interfaith panel that I sat on a student asked how the panelists different traditions maintained hope in the midst of political conflict, war, and climate change. I found myself talking about the eschaton. I said that Christians make a huge claim when we say that we know the end of the story. We believe that Christ will come again in great glory to judge the living and the dead. We believe that the story of humanity on this earth has a meaning that will be revealed at Christ’s coming. I also said that while I yearn to learn that meaning, I am afraid of the end of the world, and am in no hurry to get to the eschaton. I live in the tension of loving the world and grounding my hope in that love, while at the same time being reconciled to the notion that many things are beyond my control, and that the love of God will be made most plain at the end of all that we know.

Merton’s poem speaks directly to this tension. At the beginning of the poem, a psalm leads him into a revery of love:

New eyes awaken.
I send Love’s name into the world with wings
And songs grow up around me like a jungle.
Choirs of all creatures sing the tunes
Your Spirit played in Eden.

But it is a brief revery. Soon, in his imagination, the universe dies of excellence. All of that beauty, all of the singing of zebras and antelopes and birds of paradise lead these creatures, and Merton, into communion with God. As if, for him, it is the very love of the world that leads us beyond it.

The stanzas that follow describe the eschaton:

Sun, moon and stars
Fall from their heavenly towers.
Joys walk no longer down the blue world’s shore.

Though fires loiter, lights still fly on the air of the gulf,
All fear another wind, another thunder:
Then one more voice
Snuffs all their flares in one gust.

This is not a reassuring vision of the parousia. Not a painting of a renaissance Christ descending on a cloud. The destruction is real, the abandonment of joy is real, the fear is real, and the end is real. But the poet makes a claim for continued existence:

And I go forth with no more wine and no more stars
And no more buds and no more Eden
And no more animals and no more sea:

While God sings by himself in acres of night
And walls fall down, that guarded Paradise.

That “I” is important. Wine-less, starless, exiled from growing things and gardens, from animals and oceans, the person persists. If it is an “I”, a person, who falls into a trance at the beginning of the poem, it is that same person who enters paradise through fallen walls. The person who loves is the person who will be judged worthy of eternity.

Is that the way out of the tension that I feel? To go further into love of neighbor, of family, of the world as a whole, and trust that such love will be what remains of me at the ending? Is hope the covenant that draws us into heaven? Merton attests that it is. I try to love that vision enough that I can believe it, and set my fear aside.

Here is the poem in its entirety:

A Psalm

by Thomas Merton

When psalms surprise me with their music
And antiphons turn to rum
The Spirit sings: the bottom drops out of my soul.

And from the center of my cellar, Love, louder than thunder
Opens a heaven of naked air.

New eyes awaken.
I send Love's name into the world with wings
And songs grow up around me like a jungle.
Choirs of all creatures sing the tunes
Your Spirit played in Eden.
Zebras and antelopes and birds of paradise
Shine on the face of the abyss
And I am drunk with the great wilderness
Of the sixth day in Genesis.

But sound is never half so fair
As when that music turns to air
And the universe dies of excellence.

Sun, moon and stars
Fall from their heavenly towers.
Joys walk no longer down the blue world's shore.

Though fires loiter, lights still fly on the air of the gulf,
All fear another wind, another thunder:
Then one more voice
Snuffs all their flares in one gust.

And I go forth with no more wine and no more stars
And no more buds and no more Eden
And no more animals and no more sea:

While God sings by himself in acres of night
And walls fall down, that guarded Paradise.