Recovering a Politics of Lament in Our Faith Communities

One of the most disturbing things about the American public’s reaction to the recent theater shooting in Aurora was the speed at which the tragedy was politicized, snapped up by partisan pundits and reduced to a debate about gun control. I know this is a presidential election year, but have we no sensitivity to the families and communities immediately impacted by this tragedy? Have we no grief that this is only the most recent in a abysmally long series of shootings that have rocked our nation over the last two decades?

To lament a situation like Aurora means to be engaged with and attentive to not only those people deeply pained by the event, but also to that which has caused the pain. Aurora, of course, is not the first time that our national politics has acted without really engaging the real issues that are inflicting pain on our populace. As the Occupy movement has been emphasizing in recent years, there’s a lot of talk in Washington, but very little actually gets done to address the most pressing concerns of the middle and lower classes that daily cause significant pain and grief. Indeed, the current dissatisfaction that many people feel with both parties is rooted in the parties’ lack of careful attention to the real sorts of issues that are causing pain and grief among large sectors of the American populace.

So how do we begin to imagine a politics of lament, a politics that is attentive to the deep pains that grip our populace and to the real forces that contribute to this pain? I don’t pretend to know how to answer this question on a national level, but I am hopeful that in our local faith communities, we can begin to foster substantial grassroots change in this direction. Although lament has been an essential practice historically within Christianity and other faith traditions, it is one that I suspect is largely unfamiliar to most congregations in the United States today. From at least the time of Norman Vincent Peale’s “The Power of Positive Thinking” onward, our congregations have nurtured a culture that values put on the façade that life is working out well for us. As I have argued in my recent book “The Virtue of Dialogue,” there are many reasons why our faith communities should be creating space in our life together for conversation. One of the most significant of such reasons is that we need a space in which to learn to lament together.
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