How about Psalm 88 as a way to lift your spirits?  And then there’s John 11:35, “Jesus began to weep.”  Or as it’s more commonly rendered in the King James and other versions: “Jesus wept.”  After the scripture readings, saying, “This is the word of the Lord.  Thanks be to God,” might feel pretty strange!

There’s a song that is not in the blue hymnal which we use (The Presbyterian Hymnal), but it is in the older red hymnal (The Hymnbook).  It’s “Be Still, My Soul.”  It’s set to the wonderful tune, “Finlandia.”  The hymnal includes three verses, but it doesn’t have this one:

“Be still, my soul: when dearest friends depart, / And all is darkened in the vale of tears, / Then shalt thou better know His love, His heart, / Who comes to soothe thy sorrow and thy fears. / Be still, my soul: thy Jesus can repay / From His own fullness all He takes away.”[1]

Be still, my soul: when dearest friends depart, and all is darkened in the vale of tears.  What a beautiful and haunting image: “the vale of tears,” the valley of tears.  It’s a somber description of our life in this mortal coil.  It’s omission from the hymnbook is a commentary on how we often reshape our singing and liturgy to avoid awkwardly acknowledging certain topics.

Still, I think that song would be loved by those who are into Goth music!

There’s a prayer website called Sacred Space.  Among the things they post are thoughts for the week, things to help guide prayer.  I made a note of something that appeared some time ago.  It dealt with a topic that is one of those uncomfortable subjects: death.  (At least, in my experience, when I’ve gone to parties, it’s not often a topic of conversation!)

According to the prayer guide, “Of the many ways to die alone, the most comfortless and solitary is when family and friends conspire to deny the approach of death.  They may feel, ‘I couldn’t take away her hope.’  But without acceptance of the truth, they remove the possibility of spiritual companionship at the end.”[2]

We’re told that in his book, How We Die, Sherwin Nuland “remembers with regret how the family conspired to avoid the truth when his beloved Aunt Rose was dying.  ‘We knew—she knew—we knew she knew—she knew we knew—and none of us would talk about it when we were all together.  We kept up the charade to the end.  Aunt Rose was deprived, and so were we, of the coming together that should have been, when we might finally tell her what her life had given us.  In this sense, my Aunt Rose died alone.’”

I think there’s a parallel between how we often speak of death, and in a broader sense, of lamentation, expression of grief, in general.

[The above image is from diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=54142, “Angel of Grief.”]

That’s also seen in the worship of the church.  I just mentioned how we try to avoid those unpleasant realities in our hymns and liturgies.  The folks who put the lectionary together tended to leave out the problematic, uncomfortable verses.  Maybe you know what I’m talking about.  Stuff like, “Slaves, obey your earthly masters,” and “I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man” (Ep 6:5, 1 Tm 2:12).  Admittedly, those need some big time work done to them!

Another good case is the story in 1 Kings 3, where it talks about Solomon’s dream, in which he asks God for wisdom (vv. 3-14).  God congratulates him for not asking that his enemies be killed or that he be made a wealthy man.

What conveniently gets skipped over is Solomon’s marriage to the Pharaoh’s daughter to form an alliance with Egypt.  My guess is that’s one of those awkward subjects!

In the same way, there are certain psalms that appear nowhere in our lectionary.  Hint: Psalm 88 is one of them.  After listening to that litany of doom and gloom, maybe we can see why it got left out.

Still, one of the most treasured psalms, Psalm 22, is filled with anguish.  Jesus on the cross screams out its beginning: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  But it does have notes of hope, and by the time we get to the end, the psalmist announces, “Posterity will serve him; future generations will be told about the Lord, and proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn, saying that he has done it” (vv. 30-31).

Surely Psalm 88 follows the same path.  It’s in the Bible; shouldn’t it also wind up as praise?  Verse 1 says, “Lord God, my savior, I cry out all day, and at night I come before you” (GNB).  Surely by the time we’re finished, we’ve worked out some kind of resolution.

Here’s how it ends in the NRSV: “You have caused friend and neighbor to shun me; my companions are in darkness” (v. 18).  That doesn’t sound very much like praise.

I think some of the other translations sound even less like praise.  Here’s the NIV: “You have taken my companions and loved ones from me; the darkness is my closest friend.”  I think the New Jerusalem Bible is even gloomier: “You have deprived me of friends and companions, and all that I know is the dark.”

“All that I know is the dark.”  Friends, this is some serious lamentation!  We are looking at the only psalm without a single note of blessing.  It’s the only psalm in the Bible without one word of hope.

There’s something we need to realize about this ancient poet.  When we read these words from so long ago, we have to keep something in mind.  This is a person of faith.  This is not the work of someone engaged in ridiculing or mocking.  Psalm 88’s first three words in Hebrew are translated into English as “Yahweh [Lord], God of my salvation.”[3]

Even though our psalm has no breath of blessing, it is still praise.  It is dark praise, and that makes us uncomfortable.

Dominique Gilliard is a minister in the Evangelical Covenant Church; he’s the executive pastor of New Hope Covenant Church in Oakland.  He wrote an article called “Reclaiming the Power of Lament.”[4]  It is a revelation.  It is a challenge.  And I think it’s a perfect meditation for the Lenten season.

“Somewhere along the way,” he says, “we modern Christians got lament wrong: we began thinking of it as optional instead of a required practice of the faith.”  That goes along with our reluctance to even mention it.  Still, scripture is filled to the brim with lamentation.  Here’s just a taste: the book of Lamentations (of course), the book of Job, a huge number of the Psalms, Paul’s grief about his thorn in the flesh, and again, Jesus’ weeping.

Gilliard speaks about tragedies in our nation.  Among others, he mentions Ferguson, Baltimore, and Charleston.  The hits just keep on coming—and that’s not counting disasters all over the world.  They just wash over us until we can’t keep track.  In response to that, he says, “Lamentation, however, forces us to slow down…  Lamentation prevents us from becoming numb and apathetic to the pain of our world…  Lamentation begets revelation…  It opens our ears to the sounds of torture, anguish and weeping that are the white noise of our world.”

Here’s something I find fascinating and challenging.  “To live without lament is to live an unexamined life.”  We lose touch with what makes us human.

[A man in Ferguson, Missouri, holds on to a fence on August 15, 2014, at the site of a convenience store destroyed during rioting after the shooting death of Michael Brown by police.  Bigstock/Gino Santa Maria]

We don’t have to look very far for something to lament.  There is much in our lives to provide reason for mourning.  But we need not yield to despair.

Our friend Dominique hits on something.  “When faithfully engaged and authentically enacted, lamentation keeps us accountable to our baptismal vows.  It reminds us of our need for God, one another, and the Holy Spirit’s guidance.”

Our baptismal vows!  When the sacrament is celebrated, we “as members of the church of Jesus Christ,” are asked to “promise to guide and nurture…by word and deed, with love and prayer, encouraging [those being baptized] to know and follow Christ and to be faithful members of his church.”  We vow to be accountable to each other, to watch out for each other, as we walk the journey of faith.

Blest be the tie that binds.  “We share our mutual woes, / Our mutual burdens bear, / And often for each other flows / The sympathizing tear.”

And what about Jesus when he weeps?  Is he putting on a show?  Surely his understanding that he can raise Lazarus from the dead would prevent the need for tears.  Does he weep with empathy for Mary and Martha, because they are weeping?  Here’s my guess.  Even though he knows he will raise Lazarus, he still feels the pain himself.  After all, he is human!

If we also acknowledge that Jesus is the image, the icon, of God, that also says something.  Do we think of lamenting, of grieving, as weakness?  If so, so be it.  God laments.  At the end of the day, maybe that’s enough.  God’s weakness is greater than all the strength we can muster.  The weakness of God serves as a model for us.

The Raising of Lazarus by John Reilly (1962)

Lent reminds us that we must pass through the valley of tears before we arrive at the resurrection.  We do not honor each other by ignoring the reality of lament.

In the book, Uncommon Gratitude, Joan Chittister says, “Darkness deserves gratitude.  It is the alleluia point at which we learn to understand that all growth does not take place in the sunlight.”[5]

Think of the hymn, “Abide with Me.”  It’s listed in the section of our [Presbyterian] hymnal called “Evening Hymns.”  I imagine that’s due to the first lines.  “Abide with me: fast falls the eventide.  The darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide!”  The hymn speaks of things in our lives which pass away.  But unlike our psalm, it ends on a strong note of praise and affirmation.

“Hold Thou Thy cross before my closing eyes; / Shine through the gloom and point me to the skies: / Heaven’s morning breaks, and earth’s vain shadows flee; / In life, in death, O Lord, / abide with me.”

As incredible as it is, deep in the depths of that darkness, there is gospel.  At the bottom of the bottomless pit, there is good news.  Even there (perhaps especially there), Christ reigns in victory.  There is gospel in the dark.

[1] library.timelesstruths.org/music/Be_Still_My_Soul

[2] sacredspace.ie (26 Sep-2 Oct 2010)

[3] יהוה אלהי ישועתי (salvation-of-me, God-of, Yahweh)

[4] www.faithandleadership.com/dominique-d-gilliard-reclaiming-power-lament

[5] www.friendsofsilence.net/quote/2012/10/darkness-deserves-gratitude

I believe that learning to ask the right question is often, if not usually, more important than having the right answer.  So with that in mind, “To be, or not to be:  that is the question.”  Shakespeare’s Hamlet is pondering the mystery of life itself.  He’s pondering the mystery of living and dying, and some would say, of taking one’s own life.

However we spin it, he’s talking about some pretty weighty stuff.  (Shakespeare’s characters tend to do that!)  He’s also talking about some stuff that we don’t easily address.  A lot of it is thought to be too dark and depressing, and we tread lightly—sometimes too lightly.

Among the things posted on the prayer website Sacred Space are thoughts for the week, things to help guide prayer.  One of the things that has appeared deals with a topic that is one of those uncomfortable subjects:  death.

According to the prayer guide, “Of the many ways to die alone, the most comfortless and solitary is when family and friends conspire to deny the approach of death.  They may feel, ‘I couldn’t take away her hope.’  But without acceptance of the truth, they remove the possibility of spiritual companionship at the end.”[1]

We’re told that in his book, How We Die, Sherwin Nuland “remembers with regret how the family conspired to avoid the truth when his beloved Aunt Rose was dying.  ‘We knew—she knew—we knew she knew—she knew we knew—and none of us would talk about it when we were all together.  We kept up the charade to the end.  Aunt Rose was deprived, and so were we, of the coming together that should have been, when we might finally tell her what her life had given us.  In this sense, my Aunt Rose died alone.’”

I think there’s a parallel between how we often speak of death, and in a broader sense, of lamentation, expression of grief, in general.

That’s also demonstrated in the worship of the church.  The compilers of the Revised Common Lectionary tend to exclude the “problematic” verses from scripture passages.  For example, there’s the reading from 1 Kings in which Solomon asks God for wisdom (3:3-14).  What gets skipped over (verses 1 and 2) is his marriage to the Pharaoh’s daughter to form an alliance with Egypt.  That might be controversial!

In the same way, there are certain psalms that appear nowhere in the lectionary for Sunday worship.  Hint:  Psalm 88 is one of them.  Listening to that litany of doom and gloom, we might well understand why it was omitted.  Saying, “The word of the Lord.  Thanks be to God!” might seem a bit awkward.

Beth Tanner’s book, The Psalms for Today, is a guide in studying the psalms.[2]  Her chapter, “Living in a Broken World,” focuses on Psalm 13, which also has some of that doom and gloom.

Tanner says about this psalm, “There are none of the nice salutations contained in the [Presbyterian] Book of Common Worship.  This prayer accuses God of ignoring the person praying.  How can prayer be so blunt?  How can we speak to God in such a disrespectful manner?”[3]

I began by mentioning how we’re hesitant to speak about certain things with each other.  I gave the illustration of the fellow’s Aunt Rose, and how spiritual companionship was denied.

But with the psalms, with prayer, with worship, we bring God into the equation.  There is an entire category of psalms that are psalms of lament.  These are cries for help, and yes, they can be very accusatory in nature.  Psalm 22 is perhaps the best-known psalm of lament, mainly because of its first line.  As he is dying on the cross, Jesus calls out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Psalm 22 begins on that agonizing note, but something happens as we journey through it.  By the time we reach the end, the psalm is positively joyful.  “Posterity will serve him; future generations will be told about the Lord, and proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn, saying that he has done it” (vv. 30-31).

And what about Psalm 13?  It begins, “How long, O Lord?  Will you forget me forever?  How long will you hide your face from me?”  But its ending has a very different tone.  “I trusted in your steadfast love; my heart shall rejoice in your salvation.  I will sing to the Lord, because he has dealt bountifully with me” (vv. 5-6).  Again, we go from lament—even pointing the finger—to elated celebration.

Surely Psalm 88 must follow the same path.  It’s in the Bible; shouldn’t it also wind up as praise?  Verse 1 says, “Lord God, my savior, I cry out all day, and at night I come before you” (Good News Bible).  Surely by the time we get to its conclusion, the psalmist has worked out some sort of resolution.

Here’s verse 18 in the NRSV:  “You have caused friend and neighbor to shun me; my companions are in darkness.”  That doesn’t sound very much like praise.

Some other translations sound even less like praise.  Here’s the Good News Bible:  “You have made even my closest friends abandon me, and darkness is my only companion.”

Here’s the NIV:  “You have taken my companions and loved ones from me; the darkness is my closest friend.”  Perhaps the New Jerusalem Bible is the gloomiest:  “You have deprived me of friends and companions, and all that I know is the dark.”

“All that I know is the dark.”  This is some serious lamentation!  We are looking at the only psalm without a single note of blessing.

I feel compelled to ask a question that others have presented over the centuries.  How much danger is the psalmist actually in?  Is the psalmist really at death’s door?  Our prayer has all kinds of “deadly” sounding language.  Our writer speaks of being “like those forsaken among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave” (v. 5).  The question is posed, “Do you work wonders for the dead?  Do the shades rise up to praise you?” (v. 10).

We really don’t know what the situation is.  Maybe the psalmist is in mortal danger.  Still, what really matters is not the particular situation; what matters is that that is how the psalmist feels.  Our writer, our poet, is in distress.  This is a person who feels a sense of despair.

Let’s pick up on a theme from earlier:  prayer being blunt and apparently disrespectful.  Following with Beth Tanner, we need “to stop and think about how we pray and what that says about our relationship with God.  How have you been taught to pray?”[4]

My guess would be that most, if not all, of us have learned to pray, whether by teaching or by example, in a polite way.  Some of us have learned certain rules.  (In fairness, if some methodology assists you in prayer, then use it.  As long as we don’t become slaves to some format, exploring the depths of prayer is obviously a good thing!)

One method I would imagine none of us learned was the chaotic, soul-baring cries of the 88th psalm.

With a title like “Dark Praise,” it might be asked, “How is this praise?”  How can these angry, painful demands of God be considered praise?

“To speak honestly and demand that God come and do something,” Tanner comments, “speaks volumes about the relationship between the one praying and God.  If I dare to speak my fears and my greatest hurts, then I am also acknowledging the importance of this other to me and the power that this other has in my life…  It is praise not because it is polite or politically correct, but because it is brutally honest and open.”[5]

This is analogous to relationships with other people.  Do we share our greatest fears and hurts with casual acquaintances?  Do we share them with a boss or a supervisor?  Do we present them with those kinds of demands?  (Not usually!)  But what about our closest friend—our closest loved one?

There’s something we need to realize about this ancient poet.  When we read these words from so long ago, we have to keep something in mind.  This is a person of faith.  This is not the work of one whose mission it is to ridicule or to defame.  Psalm 88’s first three words in Hebrew are translated into English as “Yahweh, God of my salvation.”

Even though the psalm contains no breath of blessing, this is still praise.  It is dark praise, and that makes us uncomfortable.

Mennonite pastor Isaac Villegas describes Psalm 88 in an interesting way.  He calls it “that member of the family nobody knows what to do with.  He’s at all the family reunions, and his name comes up in all the jovial stories, but nobody wants to get caught alone with him in the living room.  He’s awkward… irrational… strange.  So he sits there and everyone goes outside and explains why he’s so strange and how he fits into the whole family dynamic.  But nobody takes the time to really listen to strangeness and let him explain himself, and maybe change how everyone else views the family.”[6]

There can be a temptation to water down Psalm 88, to sand off the rough edges.  We want to force it into our predetermined ideas.  We might think, “For this to be scripture is just too outrageous!”  But what if we just accept the poet on his own terms?  Can we love her for who she is?  What if we just listened?  What would happen to us if we did?  Or maybe I should rephrase that:  what does happen to us when we do it?  What happens to us when we accept that joy also involves lamentation?

Deep in the depths of that darkness, there is gospel.  At the bottom of the bottomless pit, there is good news.  Even there (perhaps especially there), Christ reigns in victory.  When we honor that—when we honor the strangeness that is each other—then we have learned the secret of dark praise.