by Lauren F. Winner
Psalm Reading: Psalm 80:1-7
For Sunday, December 22, 2013: Year A—Advent 4
We are nearing Christmas, and we are given to pray, as a community, a psalm of lament.
I feel I understand more and more about this each year. Each year, I, or someone very close to me, edges very close to sorrow at Christmas. This year, my husband will spend Christmas without either of his children —for the first time in 22 years. I am anticipating he will be sad, and moody, and he will feel there is some injustice (custody disputes do that to a person), and he will feel bereaved. (And I anticipate my own narcissistic annoyance and lack of empathy, why isn’t my presence enough to dispel your gloom, and so forth and so on. Sounds fun, doesn’t it?)
Forget Figgy Pudding and Fruitcake: Drink Bowls of Tears
We are still trying to decide what to do for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day:
a) soldier on and invent new Yuletide traditions, such as joining Catholic Worker friends who carol at Central Prison on 10 a.m. Christmas morning, or following the recommendation of Elizabeth David, and taking to bed on Christmas with a fish and wine (“If I had my way—and I shan’t —my Christmas Day eating and drinking would consist of an omelette and cold ham and a nice bottle of wine at lunchtime, and a smoked salmon sandwich with a glass of champagne on a tray in bed in the evening”)
b) ignore Christmas entirely, and spend the day watching season two of Downton Abbey and eating Indian food
c) ignore Christmas entirely and drive to Florida
d) ignore Christmas entirely and hole up with the wood stove at my aunt’s mountain house
Not really on this list, you might have noticed, is lament. But this psalm suggests that perhaps we should at least consider integrating lament into our acknowledgement of Christmas. By “we,” I mean me and Michael, and by “we,” I mean the rest of the church, since there are not too many people out there, in pew or pulpit, whose Christmas is not tinged with loss, with grief or sorrow or bereavement.
Interlude: A Parade of Faces
In fact, as I write that, a slow parade of faces begins to move across my mind’s eye, and every single one of these people I am picturing (really, I want to say “every single one of these people whom God is calling to mind”) has some sorrow smack in the middle of his or her Advent-Christmas season: a child tangled up with drugs, a terrifying diagnosis, a marriage turned to estrangement, deep anguish over being single, another miscarriage, a dying parent, a break-up, another break-up, chronic physical pain, a vocational crisis, incarceration, a house foreclosure, food scarcity, separation from kids. The parade presents itself, at first, as evidence—evidence for the ubiquitous claim that a lot of people are sad at Christmas. But then the parade becomes prayer.
And What Kind of Prayer? Lament
Among other things, Psalm 80 speaks of tears. The church has had, over its two thousand years, a vexed relationship with tears. On the one hand, crying has sometimes betokened mystical enlightenment, or a winsome religious sentiment. On the other hand, crying has discomfited. It has been a scary interruption of the rational, a seemingly uncontrollable bodily eruption. In between those evaluations of crying, the people of God lament; their body laments, with tears.
As we edge toward the Incarnation, it is worth remembering that God does not only, as Psalm 80 has it, provoke tears, feeding people with the bread of tears, making them drink tears by the bowlful. God also sheds tears. Most famously the incarnate Jesus weeps, but God also cries in the Hebrew Bible —take a gander at Jeremiah, starting with 8:21. Biblical scholar Juliana Claassens comments on this crying in her wonderful study Mourner, Mother, Midwife. Citing a rabbinic teaching, she says that when God remembers the suffering of Israel in exile, God cried two tears into the ocean, and those tears in turn unleashed tremors that shook the earth. This, Claassens says, is a startling picture of God’s solidarity with us. God’s tears offer “comfort and inspiration,” and in the midst of the “violence, bloodshed, terror, and anguish” we find in Jeremiah (and in Syria, and in homes where men beat their wives, and in and in and in….), God’s tear “offers the ‘not yet.’”[1]
A Way of Entering into God’s Way of Entering
So to cry, to lament, this Christmas season might not only be a faithful response to the reality of our lives, to the sorrowful things our lives hold. It might also be a way of entering into God’s way of entering into life with us.
Perhaps Michael and I will go to Central Prison after all, Christmas morning. After all, that act—singing carols outside a prison on a day when so that more guards can take the day off, visiting is not allowed—is both celebration and, deeply, lament.
And perhaps we will take to bed with salmon and champagne but not in an attitude of forced cheer.
And perhaps we will read Psalm 80. And perhaps, just a little, we will cry.
The Hardest Question
Where does the Advent and Christmas season hold lament for you, and where and how will you hold the lament?
[1] L. Juliana M. Claassens, Mourner, Mother, Midwife: Reimagining God’s Delivering Presence in the Old Testament (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2012), 24.
Reverend Dr. Lauren Winner writes and lectures widely on Christian practice, the history of Christianity in America, and Jewish-Christian relations. Her books include Girl Meets God, Mudhouse Sabbath, Real Sex, a study of household religious practice in 18th-century Virginia, A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith, published by Yale University Press in the fall of 2010, and, most recently, Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis. Lauren is also a contributor to sparkhouse’s animate series for adult faith formation. In the midst of lecturing and writing, Lauren serves as a priest associate at St. Luke's Episcopal Church (Durham) and a member of the board of the Episcopal Preaching Foundation.
