Learning to Lament: Christ Church, Red Wing
Learning to Lament: Christ Church, Red Wing
On Sunday Jen Asp and I attended Christ Church, Red Wing to experience their lament liturgy. It was powerful! Its origin goes back to the listening work Rector Aaron Twait and Deacon Vicki Lambert have been doing not only in the church, but also throughout Red Wing. Over the winter months they heard a lot of personal grief as well as grief about what was going on in our country and our world.
That led them to focus their Lenten evening prayer services on the spiritual practice of lament. Turnout for those services was higher than usual, and participants –including people from the wider community – found the services meaningful. “We learned two things from the feedback participants and non-participants gave us,” Aaron said. “First – we realized that we needed to find opportunities to include lament in our Sunday worship. People were hungry for an opportunity to engage with the divine around their deepest fears and hurts. And second, when people said ‘I don’t know what lament is’, we realized we needed to do some teaching around this practice.”
Aaron waited until July when the Lectionary featured a lament psalm. He used it as a way to teach the congregation about the ancient Jewish practice of lament. They learned that more than 50% of the psalms in the Psalter are lament psalms. And there is a formula to the lament psalms: tell God about your suffering, challenges, and disappointments (God can handle your honesty); petition God for what you want; and remind yourself about God’s past faithfulness and trust that God hears you.
The lament liturgy we experienced came out of a long process of listening as well as small experiments and learnings. It fit nicely into the Eucharistic liturgy. In lieu of a sermon, the Creed, and the prayers there was a psalm of lament, a litany of complaint, and then a time for each of us to share our lament with God after Aaron explained what we were doing, and why. Everyone had five minutes (with music being played in the background) to respond to the following four statements:
God, I don't understand...
God, please fix...
God, I will trust you with my future events even if...
God, I will praise you even when...
Aaron and Vicki then collected the pieces of paper we’d written on face down, and burned them. As the laments burned, Aaron said a prayer wrapping up this part of the liturgy. It ended, “Lord, as we burn these laments, we release these pains to you. Let the ashes be a symbol of our grief transformed and given over to your care. You are our rock, our refuge, and our strength; and we trust in your steadfast love and faithfulness. We pray all of this in your holy name. Amen.”