Expressing Pain in the Psalms and Book of Ruth

My Lament: My Gift to God

Ministerial context:

As an immigrant woman of Color, I can say in no uncertain terms that I understand what is meant by the term historical trauma. But historical trauma is not something unique to only people of color, immigrants, or minorities. In fact, it is a condition of the entire human experience. Even we Christians understand or should understand what is meant by this term. It is a term that defines our sorrow, our suffering, our collective grief. Yet sometimes the church seems not to see this suffering; it seeks only to affirm a joyous jubilation. It does not like to admit of pain. Yet we know from the Psalms that the Divine Heart sees our suffering and acknowledges it. The Word of God has recorded it in Scripture, as if to remind us that we are not to ignore this suffering—for it is in suffering that we can turn more fully to God. It is through lament that we renew our call to the Divine Heart with so much fervor.

I currently serve at Community United Methodist Church, a congregation whose membership is predominantly White, set in a community of more than 40% mixed people of Color. Prior to coming to this congregation less than one year ago, I served for one year in a similar setting at Epworth United Methodist Church. Before going to Epworth, I served for seven years at Village United Methodist Church in a congregation that was completely made up of people of Color from the Caribbean Diaspora. Both Village UMC and Epworth UMC were located in the South East District of the Florida Annual Conference. The South East District is a considerably diverse district. Village UMC was discontinued as a congregation the year after I was appointed to Epworth.

I now live in a predominantly White community where the neighbors are not friendly and have only expressed curiosity about whether my family plans to stay in the area. All of these congregations have had a significant decrease in membership and resources over a number of years prior to my appointment. All of them fear not being able to continue as congregations. None of them is willing to embrace a shift in thinking or existing. All of them have people who carry deep wells of pain and many instances of transmitting the pain because there is no infrastructure to transform it.

What’s needed in these congregations is an infrastructure of lament. They have no way of processing their trauma in a holy and religious way. They seem to be cut off from the very Word of God that permits them to express their pain.

Why this topic?

The issue of creating space for lament as a part of worship is significant because everyone grieves, everyone has anxiety, everyone says like the Psalmist, in Psalm 42: “Judge me, O God, and distinguish my cause from the nation that is not holy: deliver me from the unjust and deceitful man. For thou, O God, art my strength: why hast thou cast me off? And why do I go sorrowful whilst the enemy afflicteth me? Send forth they light and Thy truth: they have led me, and brought me unto Thy holy hill, and into Thy tabernacles.” Traditional worship has always made use of the Psalms and of this lamentation in particular.

I have been in and around the church my entire life and have seen the effects that ignoring this part of our human expressions has on the human life and psyche. But rather than allowing persons who experience trauma in their lives to process and express their pain, the church community has used guilt, clichés, and a dogmatic approach to worship to construct a wall between people and their pain. I have found this to be true especially of people of Color. But we all know that it is true for all humankind. All of us have pain. All of us have sorrow.

Why I chose this topic?

Of all the other challenges that I could have chosen to address, this was the most personal to me. I chose this topic because addressing and providing practical solutions to how we process pain is one I myself have been in urgent need of. After the death of my son, I felt pain as unbearable as any a human can be asked to endure. And yet what did I receive from my church? To me the congregation I served seemed only to resent me and my pain, as though it were an affront to their joy. Yet God teaches us that pain is real—and that it needs to be expressed. The Psalms are full of expressions of pain. The Book of Job is all about pain. Even Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane endured the most harrowing pain at the start of His great Passion. We do not overlook it in Scripture, but for some reason we seem to overlook it and regard it with scorn in our everyday lives where everyone expresses their superficial happiness—until the pain comes. And it comes for everyone.

Explanation of project and research process:

I do not mean to be ironic when I say this, but my first foray into my research on pain was—indeed—most painful. I say this because initializing this research required me to revisit some traumatic experiences in my own life, and stare red-eyed at one that is still fresh and bleeding. Beginning with my grandmother’s pain at the death of two of her children, the death of my mother at aged 43, I worked my way outwards. I drew deeply from these experiences and from some of my experiences as a pastor walking alongside people in their bleakest moments. I dove headlong into pain and grief.

I developed questions that I believed would help draw people into an examination of how we process pain in the church. I focused in particular on the church’s longstanding and archaic practices of discouraging people from talking about their sorrows, instead recommending that people only put on a brave face to appear unfazed by the harsh realities of their lives. What I saw was that this approach of the church did not align with Scripture or with the love and pain that the Psalmist expressed—which we know is, too, the Word of God.

This focus began with a reading from the margins of Psalm 137 and the Book of Ruth. I did a series of public discourses on these readings via Facebook live presentations. As a result of these conversations, more people began to share their experiences and the gap that they feel exists in the church’s worship life around the subject of grief, trauma and lament. I chose certain passages from Psalm 137 and Ruth because they exemplified for the purpose of the project the ways in which the church has been blinded to the existence of people’s pain, due to a one-sided reading of the Scriptures that run from the beginning to the rejoicing end without treatment of the painful pieces in between. Both sets of Scripture contain examples of hardships and provide much opportunity for us to connect our pain with that felt by God and His saints.

I discovered that I was not the only one who felt the burden of incomplete or superficially-constructed worship expressions; many others, I found, are craving a space within the church to bring their whole selves—pain and all. Through exploration, introspection, and reading of the scriptures and scholarly works, I learned some hard truths about my own heritage as a person of Color regarding grief. I learned through my own experiences how to better be with those who are reeling from the effects of grief and trauma. I discovered gems of how to craft language that challenges established assumptions—and, more importantly, how to gift this language to the hurting. Moreover, reading Psalm 137 and the Book of Ruth through the experiences of the Caribbean Diaspora was an eye-opening experience even for me who usually employ a hermeneutics of suspicion as a theological tool. Through this work, I came into close proximity to other women of faith who share a similar pain and whose stories run parallel to mine around the church’s lack of infrastructure to create room for the acknowledgement of trauma, to create space for lamentation.