Poems and Psalms 2. Lament and Afterwards

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Readings, Psalm 6 and Matthew 9:18-26
Image, The Old Guitarist, Pablo Picasso, 1903
 
The psalms have ordered, guided, and resourced Jewish and Christian worship for millennia. And there are many types of psalms. Psalms of thanksgiving, psalms of praise, royal psalms, wisdom or teaching psalms, imprecatory psalms, and psalms of lament. Given this, the question is often posed: does and if not why doesn’t TiS, or a similar modern worship hymnbook or song list of contemporary Christian songs contain such range?
 
While we can find reasons for not-replicating some kinds of psalms, it is hard to explain the absence of lament. For we have not run short of sorrows, the tears have yet to be dried from our eyes, why should we have given up so readily, collective lament through music?
 
There are between 60-65 psalms of lament, both individual and collective. Which makes it the largest category, covering over a third of the collection. And it’s not even like it takes a while for the psalter to warm up, there are two laments in the first ten psalms – one of which, Psalm 6 – we heard today.

And I love this psalm, in particular, because of how grounded the lament feels. There's that passage in the middle, 
​ I am weary with my moaning;
   every night I flood my bed with tears;
   I drench my couch with my weeping.
Which feel like lines you'd still hear on the radio today. There's nothing peculiarly biblical about that feeling, about flooding your bed with tears, that belongs to us all.

But I want to focus first on this section:

Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am languishing;
   O Lord, heal me, for my bones are shaking with terror.
My soul also is struck with terror,
   while you, O Lord—how long?
 
Throwing oneself at the feet of God with this mix of woes, plea, and accusation is characteristic of the lament.. Plea: O Lord be gracious to me… Woes: my bones are shaking my soul is struck… Accusation: O Lord – how long? -- I particularly love the way that "how long" just bursts in, as if the psalmist were planning a longer, ore eloquent line, but the well burst and all they could do was blurt out their plea.  ​

 
There is also, in this lament, another characteristic quality: reasoning (almost sounds like we’re going through the 7 stages of grief here). The reasoning in this psalm is a somewhat funny one, though it pops up across the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament.
 
Turn, O Lord, save my life;
   deliver me for the sake of your steadfast love.
For in death there is no remembrance of you;
   in Sheol who can give you praise?
 
Essentially the argument is: God, it makes sense for you to save me – no really, it is a good deal for you – because if I die I won’t be able to remember you, or give you praise… so in order to keep up your number of worshippers it behoves you to save my life.
 
We don’t sing many laments in church these days, indeed, many of us have maybe wondered if it is even right and proper to pray such laments in privacy. I wonder if you may have felt the need in prayer to somewhat buffer or soften your laments and complaints in the fear of seeming ungrateful before God, or out of a sense of propriety and even concern that if I’m too angry at God, God might get angry back.
 
The psalms show no such concern. And though most of the laments do have a movement toward trust and even sometimes hope in a great reversal of present misfortunes, this does not stop them naming – often with equal parts detail and vehemence – their sorrows; even going so far as to name their source in God’s seeming neglect. But the two impulses are connected: it is that very full-throated, non-self-conscious lament (even anger) that makes possible the movement to praise and hope.
 
And yet, while we may not sing them too often in our contemporary churches and may not even pray them too regularly in our personal piety, laments can still be found. And I have one today, as we continue our poems and psalms series, which I hope will draw out further the power of lament in a life of meaning, value, and hope.
 
James Schuyler was a Twentieth Century American poet who lived a difficult life. He was hospitalised several times across his life following mental breakdowns, often needing to rely on the generosity of friends, colleagues, and grants to cover his medical and living expenses. He once remarked to a friend, that “life had been after him with a sledgehammer.” He had, safe to say, much to lament. But Schuyler also had tremendous capacity in his works to open himself to the beauty around him. No one wrote about flowers like him, and many of his poems concern looking out a window, taking in the world, and laying it down in words. This poem, Afterward (is much as before), is part of his 1980 Pulitzer Prize winning collection The Morning of the Poem, and demonstrates both Schuyler’s capacity to lament, and look out beyond tragedy.
 
            Here we read the poem, which can be found on p238 of the Collected Poems.
 
There’s two sections I want to draw our attention to. First, it is these 19 lines, where Schuyler lists his various trials and travails with such simplicity that we can both miss and be overwhelmed by them.
 
The past ten months
were something else:
pneumonia, diabetes, a
fire in bed (extase, cauchemar,
sommeil dans un nid de flames),[1]
months getting skin
grafts for third-degree
burns (for laughs, try
sleeping in an airplane
splint) and getting
poisoned by the side
effects of a potent
tranquilizer: it took
two more months to
learn to walk again
and when I came out
feeling great wham
a nervous breakdown: four
weeks in another hospital
 
It is a kind of honest, frank cataloguing that we have all probably engaged in (either for ourselves or loved ones) at some time. Those seasons where one illness, inconvenience, calamity, or crisis, follows another. Those hard times we hope to be able to look back on and laugh at the absurdity – but while in it, find unrelenting, completely devastating, and sadly, for far too many, all consuming.
 
It is the depth of detail that then gives the little exchange with his doctor such poignancy.
 
St. Vincent’s, the Neurological
Institute, Tower Nine at
Roosevelt: “You’ve had too
many hospitals,” my doctor
said, “I’m going to get you
out of here as fast as I
can,” and so he did. It’s
funny to be free again: to
look out and see
the gorgeous October day
and know that I
can stroll right out into
it and for as long as
I wish and that’s what I
do. This room needs flowers.
 
“You’ve had too many hospitals” – that little response floors me every time. How nice it is, when we are at wits end, to have someone understand what we have endured and swoop in to light a path up and out. And it does seem, that this is where we find Schuyler in this poem, out from the depth, head above water, “free again.”
 
In his own version of the psalmist’s joy of deliverance which sees their enemies shamed, Schuyler finds himself on safe shores, and enjoys the simple wonder of being able to walk out of doors, for as long as he wishes… a freedom he decides to enjoy (thus ending the poem) since, after all, the room needs flowers.
 
We need to be able to lament. And the power of a poem like Schuyler’s testifies to that. We are drawn to his sufferings and find a way to voice our own in his words, even when the particulars differ. And we can read those final words either as promise and hope that we might reach such flowering fields one day, or as a reminder to give thanks that we have already. And for this reason we can give thanks to the poets who put words to our woes and give outlet to our sorrows so that we can sing heartbreak songs at full volume in our car.
 
But we also need communal lament. We need communal lament because some wounds are communal. We need communal lament because some sorrows need more than one voice. We need communal lament because grief isolates. We need communal lament because as a body, and when one member suffers all suffer together. So it behoves us as the church to find ways to lament together. Whether that be through the psalms (and surely this is a good place to start) but also through other means, creative, communal, and contextual means – saying prayers, lighting candles, sharing stories, holding silence.
 
And we also need communal lament, because, as we see with Schuyler’s poem, it so often takes another person, to recognise and name our struggles and to work with us to move out from lament toward healing, trust, and hope. It is all well and good to say, stop and smell the roses, but unless we receive the material support to be free again to walk through those fields, the words mean little. As James (not Schuyler) wrote, If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill’, and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? The act of communal lament not only allows others to lend their voice to our sorrows, but gives us an opportunity to move together toward action (whether in support of individual sufferings or collective/communal woes). It is in lamenting together that we can become awake to one another’s situations, and in so doing, commit to journey together toward better days.
 
To end, we do well to remember the nature of the one to whom we deliver our laments. For unlike a poem, we do not have to worry about a critical audience who might take issue with our syntax, imagery, or metre. As the gospel passage made clear, we do not need any great eloquence or flawless argumentation – with the bleeding woman we declare, if we but touch the hem of his coat. If we but move toward and reach out with whatever means, whatever words, whatever faith we have, Christ will know, and knowing feel, and feeling love, and loving restore. For God does not abhor the affliction of the afflicted, but earnestly desires to lead us to life and life in abundance. So cry out, friends (with no less apprehension or equivocation than Christ himself who cried a psalm of lament on the cross). Cry out, knowing that we shall be heard, and lifted into life free again to walk in fields of flowers. 
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[1] "ecstasy, nightmare, sleep in a nest of flames" (quote from Rimbaud)