Good poetry like a favorite song wakes up the body. As hard as the lament psalms in Scripture can be to sing or pray, I wonder if they are like the songs we go to in rage and in grief. They twist our insides with their imagery of rage and sadness. They come from a raw place of pain and/or injustice. Often, they take us by surprise. Good poetry and good music can lead us to a place where we didn’t want to go. Once there, we often need some tissues. Our tears and our bodies bear witness to hurt we didn’t even remember was deep inside us, needing that permission to let go.
We need a thicker section of lament songs in our hymnals. We need to know the poems that well up from communities in pain. Around the globe, refugees cry out for someone to stand with them, to sing with them. Let us groan with the Holy Spirit and sing with our deepest emotions. Let us find a shared song of grief, to sing side by side with our neighbors. Let us finally seek change and healing with our songs.
This message is excerpted from “Sing by my side” by Liv Larson Andrews in the October 2019 Gather magazine.
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