Over the next few weeks, writers Michael Lecy and Sarah Southern will collaborate and mutually share four essays reflecting on various aspect of spiritual deconstruction. We hope these contemplative and thoughtful pieces will encourage and resonate with our many readers across the deconstruction spectrum.
“Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.” —Aeschylus
How do we talk about sadness and grief?
How do we speak of the thousands of different cuts that keep us bleeding when our christianity only knows how to spiritually bypass it and the culture encourages numb over-consumption and avoidance to cope?
We must lament.
Lament helps me exorcise the ghosts of my past and my pains so they no longer haunt me.
Our lament acknowledges the presence of some kind of absence.
In a culture that wants to take the drug of denial intravenously so no bad feeling is ever really felt, lament is a radical act of sobriety.
It’s a painful admission that someone or something has hurt us. That we have an ache no modern escape or medical breakthrough can cure.
The only way we make it through this ache is to let it swallow us whole…
Like a child on the shores of the Pacific Ocean we have to turn and face the waves coming for the shore.
To let all that we are feeling crash down around us and soak us clean through.
To let it climb the shore of our hearts as far as it can stretch and in time, as waves do, they will subside and the tide will go out until the next day, hour, month, or even years.
Lament takes many forms and can be spoken, wept, or screamed.
Lament can be a raging cascade of colorful words aimed at all that someone has done to you unjustly
Lament can be a silent weeping that comes while you wish you’d rather be sleeping.
Lament is the way we break open, for even the smallest crack from our sorrow can be space for Divine love to slip itself in and start to do its mending.
Lament is our entry point into healing. It’s our radical act of vulnerability like a toddler screaming and flailing undignified and sloppy in the arms of a loving parent.
Lament is our permission to hate what we’ve been through without letting it kill us with the bitter taste of resentment or cynicism.
To lament, you have to admit you’ve been wronged, harmed, or can’t handle what you’re feeling.
I lament how simply I used to believe
How easily I embraced the theological ideas I was given without having to consider their implications.
I would never want to go back to that living, I just lament how simple it was for me to exist.
I lament that people who held my babies and asked me to be in their weddings now won’t speak to me. That because I now believe a few different things about who gets saved and how to articulate the things I find in Christian scripture, I'm no longer someone they can send a text message to.
I lament the churches I used to feel home in and the fact that I can likely never step foot in one again.
I don’t miss church the way it is now or was then, I just miss the warmth it used to give me.
Naïveté is like the soft embrace of a mother, it shields a child from what they aren’t yet old enough to see.
So to cope,
I scream, I fucking swear, I cry, I stew, I write, I paint, I compose, I walk, I listen. I get up out of my bed and put my feet on the ground one more time. I do all I can when it feels too much and admit I am doing all I can to survive.
We lament to stay alive.
To look at all we’ve been through and where we are going with a clear-eyed honesty we couldn’t have if we didn’t face it all directly.
I lament the ways I feel so misunderstood. The way so many now seem to be afraid of me.
What is it about my beliefs in a God who is actually loving or a community where your sexuality won’t exclude your participation that is so dangerous?
So much of my life now feels hollow, so much has been drained out.
Lament breaks me back open so that love can fill me back up, but lament is not a denial of the bad or the painful, it's a merging of the happy and light, the depressing and heavy.
It’s like that gut-wrenching movie Inside Out. Joy and sadness both touch Riley’s core memories and it helps make her whole again (spoiler alert).
Lament helps our contradictions co-exist and our souls stay whole and mended.
It expands the country of our consciousness and the terrain of our inner being.
When you’re stepping out of faith traditions that typically have little acceptance for strong emotion, lament is your great act of liberation.
It’s your opportunity to admit you’re finished or really fucking angry.
To tell the divine mother that your sadness is all consuming and like Jonah in the belly of that whale letting what you feel swallow you whole with no certainty of re-emerging.
Yet that all-consuming feeling you thought would drown you is actually your baptism.
You can rise from your guttural cry or night of bitter weeping and become a new creation.
Lament until you can breathe again.
Lament with brush, pen, scream, song, or expression that speaks to you.
Lament until you are vibrant and whole
So that the whole universe can hear the sound of love's melody compassionately resonating through you again.
Michael Lecy is a storyteller and writer who loves to help others ask questions and discover life after harmful religious frameworks and systems. He is currently an LMFT in training and host of the “A Certain Wandering” Podcast.
this is beautiful. lament is so overlooked. i view it as a powerful form of worship. i write laments, cry, sing and paint to lament. thank you for this powerful post! lamenting with you over the loss of simplicity and feeling safe in this mixed up world.