Lamentation Station

post #2

A theological framework of lament necessitates an understanding of the trauma that is being lamented. For some trauma, Sophia Richman suggests that the process of lamentation and creative art both call participants into the full emotional experience. Despite the painful nature of recursive trauma memory, the art produced can allow a person to regain some sense of self-continuity, connection and ownership to the traumatic experience.¹ This artistic process is a transitional space for a person to rediscover a sense of self after the trauma.² Similarly, lamentation opens up space for the fullness of emotions to be expressed.³ Lamentation helps us to recognize our human limitations and the need for divine intervention of some kind in our lives. Artistic expression brings the suffering ones together through the communal experience of the art, while lamentation allows a community to confront grief as a whole.⁴

Not unlike Richman, Stephen Levine argues that the aim of therapy is not to expel this painful part of being human but to integrate it through art.⁵ Levine articulates this complexity with a simple statement: “art gives voice to suffering.”⁶ Within this framework, an intersection of art therapy as a traumatology and the theology of lament takes clear form. In Prophetic Lament Rah calls for a return to the funeral dirge and other rituals and art forms that join people together in their suffering.⁷ Reading Rah and Levine together, it becomes clear that when suffering is ignored and kept in the shadows all will experience the shame and continued trauma of the silence. A welcoming of suffering into churches, therapy, and art must occur so that new ways can be found to lament and, therefore, heal together.

Trauma’s intersection with theology is not limited to a personal context, however. In The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander, the need to lament racism in our country is addressed in the communal context of people of color who carry within themselves the damaging stigmas handed down by a majority white culture for centuries. One example Alexander points to is how our culture has sold a false stereotype of African-American men for centuries as lazy, unintelligent, violent and more prone to reckless drug use than people of other races.⁸ It is no wonder that after years of being beaten down with the message, “This is who you truly are,” many African-American men carry deep shame and stigmatization and turn to things like drugs. We as a culture and society have looked down upon this particular group and created a self-fulfilling prophecy of suffering and trauma instead of taking a posture of prophetic lament, as Rah calls for.⁹ Rather than embrace a sort of tokenism within churches and rushing to fix the racial disparity among American church leadership, Rah asks us to consider a theological understanding of leading by lament for the centuries of systemic racial violence and injustice within the Church.¹⁰

In the same vein, Cathy Caruth, in Literature in the Ashes of History, explores how difficult and uncertain the prospect of recovery from cultural and personal trauma can be in her exploration of human rights in Ariel Dorman’s 1991 play, Death and the Maiden. Caruth shows how systemic and specific violence against marginalized peoples must be lamented and named among the traumatized community if we are to avoid the tacit disappearance of the very people in need of healing.¹¹ Any effort that pushes for quick recovery and “moving on” from deep trauma is neither effective traumatology nor Biblical theology. Those wounded by violence and suppressed by those in power are in desperate need of communal lament, or else their stories (and their very identities) will be lost in the process of telling (or worse, appropriating) their story to fit within a preexisting narrative of history.¹²

As we begin to understand the causes and repercussions of trauma on an individual and societal level, we must also keep in hand a theology that undergirds both. A view of God and godliness that calls for suppression, marginalization and power disparities for a greater good not only leads to great harm in the present, but creates a self-perpetuating cycle of woundedness and loss among community and within individuals. Art and literature both offer a means of naming, preventing and healing this trauma, but lament will always be necessary to begin confronting the brokenness that imbues this world.

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1. Sophia Richman, Mended by the Muse: Creative Transformations of Trauma (New York, NY: Routledge, 2014), 13.
2. Ibid., 21.
3. Soong-Chan Rah, Prophetic Lament: A Call for Justice in Troubled Times (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2015), 135.
4. Ibid., 145.
5. Stephen K. Levine, Poiesis: The Language for Psychology and the Speech of the Soul, (London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 1992), 15.
6. Ibid., 23.
7. Rah, 44.
8. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York, NY: The New Press, 2010), 162.
9. Rah, 47.
10. Ibid., 63.
11. Cathy Caruth, Literature in the Ashes of History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 56–57.
12. Ibid., 61.

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Bibliography

Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York, NY: The New Press, 2010.

Caruth, Cathy. Literature in the Ashes of History. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013.

Levine, Stephen K. Poiesis: The Language of Psychology and the Speech of the Soul. London: Jessica Kingsley, 1997.

Rah, Soong-Chan. Prophetic Lament: A Call for Justice in Troubled Times. Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2015

Richman, Sophia. Mended by the Muse: Creative Transformations of Trauma (Psychoanalysis in a New Key Book Series). London: Routledge, 2014.