Editor’s Note: This is Part 2 of a two-part essay on Lament. Read Part 1 here.

If you’ve never heard the psalms of lament prayed, read, or recited—even inside a church building—you’re not alone. American Christian churches in particular lack a robust practice of lament in communal contexts. Part of this is cultural influence, a result of living in a wealthy and comfortable society that also prizes the ability to pull oneself up by the proverbial bootstraps. Another factor is a stubborn thread of triumphalism that can prevent honest expressions of doubt, sorrow, or anger. “It’s this idea that Christ has won the victory, so there’s no need to struggle, there’s no need to do anything but claim that victory,” explains Dr. Elizabeth Hall, a psychology professor at Biola University who researches meaning-making in suffering.

In Jewish congregations, too, corporate lament is largely absent. “The laments are almost never part of communal liturgical experience,” says Rabbi Shai Held, Bible scholar and President at the Hadar Institute. “So it becomes an experience of people who have a practice of praying the psalms, which tends to be a more individual practice.”

Lament’s absence from collective worship has its costs. For one thing, it leaves people without language and spiritual tools for navigating difficult times. For another, it alienates those in the midst of suffering.

Hall says. When lament is absent in churches, a sense of solidarity and community support also disappears. 

In his 1986 essay, “The Costly Loss of Lament,” theologian Walter Brueggemann points out other dangers of neglecting lament in church settings. “It is clear that a church that goes on singing ‘happy songs’ in the face of raw reality is doing something very different from what the Bible itself does,” he writes. Brueggemann argues that ignoring Biblical passages of lament, as well as neglecting it as a corporate practice, leads to ignoring injustices and the church’s role in addressing them: “A community of faith which negates lament soon concludes that the hard issues of justice are improper questions to pose at the throne, because the throne seems to be only a place of praise.”

But while you’re more likely to hear triumphant passages like psalm 23 recited at church—The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want—the psalms of lament the ones we turn to in extremis: at the sickbed, deathbed, burial site, or simply when reeling from one of life’s myriad calamities. Pastors, rabbis, hospital chaplains, and other spiritual care providers find these texts essential companions. In her work as a hospital chaplain, Rabbi Fredda Cohen has added the psalms of lament to her toolkit of interventions, alongside prayer and active listening. She thinks of herself as a midwife, there to accompany someone through great suffering and often into death. Just as she views her role as a companion to people in these hinge points in life, she sees the lament psalms as accompanying them as well.

“People may be so stuck in the moment that they can’t find form for their feelings,” Cohen says. “And this is where psalms are very helpful. If we allow a psalm to speak to us, and we allow ourselves to react to it, [we can] then explore our own theology and our own feelings through the psalm.” Another reason they are good company for sorrow is that the psalmists typically don’t detail the specifics of their pain. Their generality allows the reader or listener to see their own suffering reflected back in the text—not the details of it, but rather the emotional experience. These passages also tend to be comforting because of their familiarity; even nonreligious people under Cohen’s care often recognize lines from the Psalter. (From Psalm 42: “My tears have been my food day and night.”)

Rabbi Held believes lament can be a way of reclaiming one’s dignity amid suffering that feels undignified, particularly in the context of physical decline or illness. “The ability to verbalize, ‘This is impossible, I can’t endure this’—there is paradoxically a real assertion of self there that I think can be quite healing.” He points to psalm 88, which he reads as a plea for help amidst chronic illness. The speaker doesn’t just beg for God to lift a present sickness; he cries out to God for relief from a seemingly endless disease: “From my youth I have suffered and been close to death” (v. 15). 

But both those well-acquainted with suffering and those newly struggling will find the psalms of lament to be good company. These texts are powerful for the same reason poetry is: they offer language for naming what previously felt unnameable. In our moments of deepest disorientation, they offer a compass for navigating the wilderness. And in our fear that we’ve been abandoned, they remind us that people throughout history have brought their messiest, most overwhelming feelings before God.