David: This visit, we will talk about what, to me anyway, has up until now been a rather obscure word. I don’t recall using it, although I had an idea of what it meant.

Karen: In Scripture, this word, or variation of it, comes up just under 40 times. It only appears in the Old Testament and three-quarters of the references are in the prophetical books. And what we are talking about today is lament, or to lament.

Intro: Welcome to the Before We Go Podcast featuring Dr. David Mains and his wife, noted author Karen Mains. Here’s David at Karen Mains.

David: To me, Karen, I pictured lament as excessive sorrow. The picture that is in my mind is of someone wearing sackcloth and then putting ashes on their head, even hiring people to mourn, professional mourners, you know, in their wail as they move along.

Karen: Yeah, and I’m kind of thinking, David, that many of our listeners have had some experience with lament. And so I’m trying to remember them as we talk about this, that some of them may be in a period of lament, or lamentations right at this moment. The dictionary defines lament this way, to feel or express deep sorrow for, to mourn or grieve, an outward expression of sorrow. That’s pretty much what you said.

David: Yeah, it’s interesting to me. Here’s the prophet Jeremiah. You said mostly in the prophetical books you see this word. Come this chapter 7, verses 28 and 29. This is the nation that has not obeyed the Lord its God or responded to correction. Truth has perished, it has vanished from their lips, cut off your hair and throw it away. That’s another picture, you know, shave your head. Take up a lament on the barren heights, for the Lord has rejected and abandoned this generation that is under his wrath.

Karen: I just had a little picture of cutting off your hair. Our son, Jeremy, was dying of lymphoma, his head was shaved. And his brother-in-law has an act of identification, shaved his head. I can’t thought about that at all. I suppose that was sort of an early lament, as far as what Jeremy was going through.

David: Here in the book of 2 Samuel begins with David lamenting. Because of the death of King Saul in battle and three of Saul’s sons die with him, that includes Jonathan, who is a very loved friend of David. So 2 Samuel begins the first chapter with David writing a lament. Read it.

Karen: This is verse 17. David took up this lament concerning Saul and his son Jonathan, and ordered that the men of Judah be taught this lament of the boy. I think that’s sort of a title.

David: He’s writing a song.

Karen: He’s memorializing this in some way so it can be memorized and repeated.

David: Teach it and as you sing it, you’ll understand his terrible sorrow.

Karen: So, let’s read a part of that lament. Your glory, O Israel, lies slain on your heights. How the mighty have fallen. Tell not on gap, proclaim it not in the streets of Ashkelon. Lest the daughters of the Philistines be glad, lest the daughters of the uncircumcised rejoice. O daughters of Israel, weep for Saul, who clothed you in scarlet and finery, who adorned your garments with ornaments of gold. How the mighty have fallen in battle. Jonathan lies slain on your heights. I grieve for you, Jonathan, my brother. You were very dear to me. Your love for me was wonderful, more wonderful than that of women. How the mighty have fallen. The weapons of war have perished. Now that’s a lament.

David: Yeah, it’s interesting because Saul was a pain in the neck to David.

Karen: He tried to kill him. He was chasing him down to kill. What was it about David that respected the man somehow or his leadership, the fact he’d been anointed?

David: Well, David was the only one who knew this anointing of God. And the first of the kings of Israel, David felt identity with him. I tried to, again, define, because in the books I looked at, I couldn’t find what I was looking for. So this is made up, okay?

Karen: So you’re not a professional grief counselor. No. Nor are you a psychologist.

David: This is only so that I can better. ..

Karen: This is your individual list. You’re thinking it through a list.

David: Get my mind around it. That’s right. I said, let me see if I can get four levels here. One would be to express concern regarding a matter. And then the second thing would be to go beyond that just in your mind to the place where you’re troubled by it. What’s going on? And then I think tears. Once you move to tears, and it could be just tears starting, but then it could be actually times of crying. Then it comes to a place where in lament you feel it deep in your bones.

Karen: So I think what you’re describing is sort of a moving from intellectual ascent or understanding into a visceral, a visceral feeling. I mean, it’s one you won’t use the phrase, feel it in my gut. That’s a visceral feeling. So it’s more than just an intellectual knowing, but you have really reached a point where it’s flooding your physical being.

David: Not always, but just like that. Somehow it just. .. All of a sudden you caught it again. It surprises you how strongly you feel.

Karen: Yeah, and I think people can identify with that. We’ve all had circumstances where something moved from intellectual ascent. We had a reality hit us that took us much, much deeper into the knowing of it.

David: Next thing I did, I said, I’m going to write down some of the problems that we have here in our land.

Karen: Okay. The obvious ones probably.

David: Partly where I’m going to go with this is to say, what level do I feel? Is this just mental? Or am I troubled? Or do I actually shed tears or a tear? Or am I feeling it deep in my bones? So I’m going to read through these. And as I do, I’ll tell you what I did. I chose two that came to the top of the surface for me. I was going to write 12. I ended up with more than 12. I didn’t want to try to count them.

But as I read through the list, I want you to say which of the two that are really strong. 200, 000 plus COVID deaths. Okay. I’m giving you enough time, but don’t dwell on them too long. Pretty good list. While fires in the West, the political divide in the country.

Karen: Oh, I think, and also can I add something to what I think you mean, but not just the political divide. We’ve always had that, but the discourse is so personal and ugly that I think that.

David: Yeah. It’s almost like divided camps that have a hard time talking about. Systemic racism. That’s a huge problem with many ramifications. Okay. The clergy failings of various kinds. You know what I’m talking about?

Karen: Oh yeah. The grievous.

David: Obviously abortion is going to be on that list. Gun violence. Here’s one I didn’t really know how to write it down, but misinformation. Trying to figure out what is really the truth.

Karen: How do we tell what is the truth?

David: That’s a problem. Poverty. That’s a massive, massive problem throughout our country. Broken marriages.

Karen: I haven’t even talked about that anymore, the amount of divorces.

David: Climate change. Suicides. Excessive militarism. If you were back in Germany in the 40s and so you understood what that was about. Drug addiction. I didn’t mention drug addiction and alcoholism. Anyway, so I’ve got this big list. Were you able to say, you know, that one popped for me. I feel strongly about that. It’s not supposed to choose two. You want to go first? You want to go second?

Karen: Well, let me go first. I think the climate change, which includes the ecological degradation of our earth, is a really important one to me. I’m a gardener. I mean, I spend hours out in the garden. One of the ways I praise God, my heart is in continual exaltation when I’m digging at the dirt and watching his creation come forth in our little backyard. And let me take that one of suicides, but shift it just a tad, because what you didn’t include here is the epidemic of loneliness. I mean, we are in epidemic proportions as far as loneliness. People who feel lonely, people who say they have no one they talk with. I think it’s 23% signated.

David: It’s almost a quarter of the country. Yeah, almost a quarter of the country. They have no one to talk to. So that leads to the high levels of suicide, not being heard, not being understood. And I’m really interested in that one.

David: Okay, you had no more. That’s all. There’s a crossover on some of the time.

Karen: Yeah, some of these affect one another. Yeah. If we talk about it enough, I can do better lists, but this was what I came up with.

Karen: Yeah, I think you did a pretty good list too.

David: Systemic racism, that’s one that is, I feel it deep, deep in my bones. Those 11 years in the inner city early on as a young man and learned so much, that’s a huge part of me. It just, even starting out to talk about it, almost brings me to tears.

Karen: So, what are we asking our listeners to do?

David: Well, I get to do a second one here. I’m feeling also the divide.

Karen: Okay, the discourse in the divide. The polarization that’s going on.

David: Yeah, the divide. The polarization, yeah, that’s the thing. And I know that this has been true in previous generations back. Slavery was one of these issues that divided the country and eventually war, obviously. But I think it grieves me that it’s so divided. You know, I don’t know whether that will end after the election. I just don’t know. Those are the two, if you say, where are my strongest feelings anyway? These are massive, massive issues. So what I’m trying to say, again, here’s where I’m headed. This is a sentence that gets it where I’m going. And of all the things that I have done in preparation, this is the worst sentence I’ve come up with, because it doesn’t cover what I’m trying to say.

Karen: We have to improve it as we’re speaking.

David: Well, the time has come for the American church to discover the biblical practice of lamenting. That’s what I’m saying. I’ll read it again. And even as I do, I’m going to begin to correct what I’m saying, because this is not a universal. A lot of churches are very good at this. The time has come for the American church to discover the biblical practice of lamenting or grieving over these massive issues.

And I want to say real fast before you say something. When I say the American church, there are parts of the American church that do very well with this. For example, I would say the black church. The black church has been very good all along at lamenting. And by lamenting, expressing deep sorrow, I think of the black church, if you go years back, the spirituals. There’s immense emotion, and sometimes I feel like a motherless child, a long way from home. And the people singing that. It was a lament, just as much as putting ashes on your head or wearing sackcloth. Maybe not as much as visually, but they couldn’t do that. This was a big thing. I also feel there are churches which have taken on issues like this. One of them would be the abortion issue.

Karen: Yeah, the pro-life movement.

David: They have been absolutely incredible and taken abuse for it, but good for them. That’s part of where the church has to go. In my mind it has to be more related to these immense problems. Musically, the church in my background has done a very good job with worship songs. But that’s not quite in this category. I’m talking about lament. It’s a different thing. When you talk about a worship song, that’s not a lament.

Karen: I think that a lot of the expression that could become lament, as I’m thinking about it now, is facing our sins. There is a lot of preaching that occurs to overcoming sins and looking truthfully at yourself and confessing your sins. But lament goes beyond that, doesn’t it? It goes a step beyond that. It takes it into more of a formalized kind of arena. And I think that what we don’t hear in our churches is this very topic. I can’t remember ever hearing a sermon on lament or lamenting.

There might have been some, but not to such an extent that it became part of the practice of the church. Let’s talk about the racism thing a little bit more, only because you and I really delved into that. We worked with issues of race and racism.

David: Before you do that, let me just say this. I still have deep feelings about it, but I’m also to the place where I started. say the churches progressed a whole lot since when we were young and went into the inner city and there are people who are far more qualified to talk and to do the lamenting and leading in that than we are. You know, we’re older people now, the world’s come a long way, so anyway.

Karen: Well, let me use it as an example. Let’s say we choose two examples. One of them is the racism, partly because we worked with that so much. Two summers ago, 2018, I had an eating dysphagia that developed and starting in February where I had a hernia repair operation to somewhere in August when I was hospitalized, I lost 43 pounds. And so I used that summer to really delve into what racism was, what the meaning of systemic racism was. And I pulled this morning the books that I read over that summer, most of them over that summer, they’re 22 books. So that’s an example. All on that one topic. On that one topic of how when we choose one of these topics, we have to become masters of that topic so we really know what we’re talking about and what we are lamenting.

And of course, you can’t do that kind of reading without doing personal self-evaluation and examination. How am I racist? In my attitudes, where is there hidden racism in me? Many of these books that I have of all the 22 of them were written by very fine black authors and one of them, Ibram X. Kendi, has a book called How to Be an Anti-Racist and that’s the goal to get to a point where you’re not just sorrowful about racism that exists in our society, but you become someone who works to reform it or to change it. As an example of what we need to do when we choose two of these topics, we have to first of all become very informed about the topics that we’ve chosen.

David: Yeah, all those books, I’m looking at some of the titles I’ve read a lot of those. They were life changing books for me.

Karen: The pro-lifers have done this beautifully. They are an example of a group that’s taken on one of these topics and have developed it, they’ve developed common community, they have strategized their work process and they’re working on educational levels and activism levels and then presenting their case on the government levels in the legislature of states. So that’s a real model.

David: I think they worked on the lamenting too.

Karen: And worked on the lamenting as well for any of these topics that we might choose. Now one of the things that happened that summer was that the Equal Justice Initiative, which was formed by Brian Stevenson. Brian Stevenson was a black lawyer who came from northern states.

David: So there’s a movie. Yeah, a popular movie about that.

Karen: Traveled to the south and began to realize that black people, mostly men, were being unjustly indicted and jailed for crimes they had not committed and had no proper representation. They were often poor and couldn’t pay for lawyers or they had pro bono lawyers assigned to them by the courts whose caseloads were huge. So Brian began to take that on. You’re right, he wrote a book called Just Mercy and then that was made into a very powerful film. But out of that whole experience, then the Equal Justice Initiative was formed. I’m reading from their page on the web. And they’re committed to ending mass incarceration and excessive punishment in the United States to challenging racial and economic injustice and to protecting basic human rights for the most vulnerable people in American society.

David: Well, you’re basically talking about our travel from uninformed…

Karen: To being highly informed.

David: To the place where I would say we feel it in our bones. In fact, I would say he was the one who was responsible for setting up what we call the L’Eglise Memorial.

Karen: And that was the Equal Justice Initiative. His people, his group did that. Now at the end of my summer of dysphagia, that had gone up and been built and opened. I think in the April of 2018. And that was the summer where I was sick and home and had five doctors in the hospitalization and multiple stomach explorations to see what was going wrong, which I finally found out what was wrong. At the end of that, I really had wanted to go and visit this memorial in Montgomery. And so we did drive down. It was a pilgrimage. I cannot describe what it was like to visit that. It’s a pavilion, a large pavilion with these large blocks. Do you think they were marble blocks?

David: No, they’re steel.

Karen: Steel blocks hanging to represent the 4, 600 lynchings that took place in the United States of America. I mean, the reading on the history of lynchings.

David: All of these columns have a state and a county. And then the person’s name was lynched. And some of them have multiple names that are there. You walk around. I’m from Illinois. There was no Illinois. You know, so there were lynchings in Illinois.

Karen: Then on the walls, there were smaller plaques that just pick some of the people who were lynched and tell a brief history or story, their names and their story.

David: Give an example.

Karen: Well, one I remember was, I can’t remember her name. She was a black woman. She was lynched when she was eight months pregnant because she protested the lynching of her husband.

David: And those lynchings were horrid.

Karen: And when you, it was a community celebration very often, take your kids and hold them up and watch the process, the dangling bodies. When you go there, there’s a sign that says, this is holy ground.

David: It’s a sacred place.

Karen: Don’t smoke. Don’t speak loudly, please.

David: Don’t laugh.

Karen: But you feel it. There are few places I felt awe like that. Maybe some great cathedrals.

David: Let me just add, you feel it deep in your bones.

Karen: You feel it deep in your bones. It is a place where you want to just stretch out and say, oh, God, forgive, forgive, forgive. We confess, forgive. We’re giving this illustration just to say this was what it takes to move from concern about two of the things you have chosen on this list to a point where it is deep in your bones. You’re going to have to educate yourself. You’re going to have to expose yourself. Like one of my choices would be the climate change as far as how it affects the ecology of our future generations and I’m terribly concerned about it. And I’m watching some of the legislation that was set up to protect our ecology being set aside. Right. And I understand the need for some people feel for deregulation. But if we don’t regulate, we’re going to have disaster upon disaster upon disaster ecologically.

David: So, we don’t think anybody could take on all the lists plus other things I’ve forgotten about. Yeah. In fact, even if it’s just a surface lamenting, you know, that’s not what we’re asking, but we are asking what?

Karen: Well, we’re asking for them to choose to and to go deeply into the point where they feel it is said in their bones.

David: It’s not for you to choose for someone else.

Karen: No. Another important point. We feel strongly about this. You must not discredit someone else’s passion because they feel strongly about it and you don’t feel strongly about it. Or maybe you feel that it even shouldn’t be a cause. That is not your business. Your business is to say to those people, well, educate me. Tell me why you’ve reached this position. What do I need to know that I don’t understand? This is what I feel about it. Where am I thinking wrong? Now, what kind of humility and beauty is that? And we feel that particularly needs to be applied in a land where there is such bitter discourse and Christians need to lead the way on this. We don’t need to politicize this process. We need to say that we are people of love, people of kindness. And one of the ways we can heal the discourse is to be these gentle listeners who really want to learn.

David: Especially when you see tears. When you see tears.

Karen: Or anger. Anger is often the other side of tears.

David: That’s possible. Usually if I see tears, I want to go over and put my arm around. Not to discredit that. That’s part of the whole lamenting. The wailing. There’s also the part that is cerebral. Maybe like David, you say, I want to write a prayer or a song or a poem or I feel compelled to write a book. Or I want to write a script for a drama. Or I just somehow I don’t have any choice. This is deep, deep within me. This is going to have to find some kind of expression. And I think it’s very important Karen to say, even as we’ve been implying, I felt disjointed when we started this and I still feel a little bit disjointed. But lament is one of those things we’re going to have to learn more about. Because there are deep feelings people have. When you begin to allow that to be expressed, it’s going to be awkward. I’ve never seen anybody wear that cloth before. To me it looks odd, you know. That had to have been the expression. I mean, some of those prophets that went around naked.

Karen: Yeah, right.

David: So that was really, really something.

Karen: So we’re asking our listeners to listen to this carefully to say, where is it that I am lamenting anything? I feel concerned. I feel angry.

David: Don’t be embarrassed by your tears. Let the information grow inside of you. Become well informed, not just surface informed.

Karen: Until you reach that point of visceral feeling about something.

David: And then let the church be the place where we say, this is so much in me, I can’t keep it in anymore. Just be patient with me.

Karen: One of the things I learned early about standing against evil is if you do it as a solo person alone, you’re going to get squashed.

David: Yeah, you will, that’s true.

Karen: Evil is very powerful. And so what we want to do when we have a passion and feel something deeply in our bones, we’re lamenting the problem, is we need to find people who will become part of our common cause. Other people who feel the same passion over the thing that concerns and distresses us. And then join with them in exploration, in articulating your concern and your pain. And then work together as activists in whatever way God leads you, so that you have more than just one person standing out there alone, but a moving target, let’s say. But you have a concerted effort. And that to me is a great lesson I learned in activism.

There’s another lesson I’m just thinking of right now. I was on the international board and we were working with issues that were very troubling internationally, poverty and you can name it. And her mantra was this, the greater the cause, the quieter the shout. The greater the cause, the quieter the shout. Because when we shout at people and yell at them, we turn off their listening process. But if we can articulate our great cause in a quiet, gentle explanation, we’re much more likely to get a hearing or some people attempting to understand where we are coming from. So lessons learned along the way.

David: And as a part of the church, realize the church is going to make mistakes. Sometimes it’ll get too loud, sometimes it’ll get too angry, you know what I’m saying. But we’re struggling together and we’re trying to see that more perfect world come.

Karen: So perhaps we need to write our own laments out like David did. How the body have fallen in battle. Jonathan lies slain on your hides, you can feel him weeping. I agree for you, Jonathan, my brother, you were very dear to me. Your love for me was wonderful. More wonderful than that of women. How the mighty have fallen. The weapons of war have perished.

Outgo: You’ve been listening to the Before We Go podcast. And if you would like to write to us, please send us an email at the following address. hosts@beforewego.show. That’s all lower case letters. hosts@beforewego.show. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please remember to rate, review and share on whatever platform you listen. This podcast is copyright 2020 by Mainstay Ministries, Post Office Box 30, Wheaton, Illinois 60187.