One of the most paradoxically comforting responses to suffering is to name it. We long to acknowledge death or illness or betrayal for exactly what it is. We want a friend who sits by the hospital bed and affirms, This isn’t fair. We want a chaplain who holds the hand of bereaved parents and refuses to point out a silver lining.

Putting words to an experience of suffering is the heart of lament, an ancient spiritual practice. Both Jewish and Christian traditions have long drawn on their sacred texts—particularly psalms of lament—as a way to voice individual and collective pain. Today, these psalms still offer a compass for navigating the disorientation and turmoil of suffering.

Audacious prayers, honest sorrow

Both the Hebrew and Christian scriptures are full of people voicing their distress to God. The book of Lamentations is, predictably, a book of poetic lament, in which the author mourns Jerusalem’s destruction. In other books, characters who endure deep suffering (think of the beleaguered Job) refuse to keep silent, instead naming their pain in the presence of God. The Book of Psalms, often generalized as songs of praise, is nearly forty percent lament. It is these psalms that Jesus himself regularly invokes—most memorably during his crucifixion. Borrowing the words of King David in Psalm 22, Jesus calls out on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Rabbi Shai Held, Bible scholar and President at the Hadar Institute, sees the lament psalms as both audacious and profound. Audacious, because they don’t hold back. These psalms show people telling God exactly how they feel, begging God to intervene, and wondering whether God cares at all. They’re also profound, because their presence suggests that to be in relationship with God “not only permits but demands honesty.”

“[They] implicitly make a claim about God that I think is really fascinating, which is that God is open to something other than just being told how wonderful God is,” Held says.

Held attended an Orthodox Jewish day school as a child, where he learned that the proper response to suffering was to repeat the famous phrase attributed to ancient rabbis: “This is also for the best.” That always sat uneasily with him, but it wasn’t until he began studying the psalms of lament that the incongruity clicked into place. He remembers thinking, “Do you know what these psalmists would say to someone who said, ‘This is also for the best?’ They would say, ‘Are you out of your mind? This is horrible, and I’m going to name it as horrible, because that’s what it means to be honest.’” 

In Christianity as well as Judaism, the psalms of lament invite believers to look their suffering in the face and speak truthfully about how it feels. This doesn’t mean stewing in one’s pain forever. Coming to an eventual place of peace and surrender is a worthy aim. But it’s impossible to fast-track this healing process, says Dr. Elizabeth Hall, a psychology professor at Biola University who researches meaning-making in suffering. To do so would be “a total ignoring of the process that we know needs to happen psychologically,” not to mention overlooking the psalms and the words from Jesus’ own mouth. 

Hall argues that the presence of unfiltered lament in the Bible suggests that an authentic relationship with God involves an element of struggle. Or to put it another way, true piety means being honest about hardship. As in any intimate relationship, naming difficult truths is essential. “To express disappointment is a deeply relational and vulnerable gesture,” says Held. Think of the risk and trust it takes to express this in a marriage, to come to a partner and say, “You hurt me.” 

Similarly, religious devotion requires looking at the world as it is and naming what is wrong before God. (Psalm 62:2: “You have caused the land to quake; you have torn it open; repair the cracks in it, for it is tottering.”) To neglect lament risks the integrity of one’s relationship with God.

The psychology of lament 

The psalms of lament fall into two categories: individual lament, in which the psalmist gives voice to their own personal experience of suffering, and communal lament, in which people come together to ask God, Where have you gone? These psalms typically follow a pattern. First the speaker calls out to God, then makes their complaint, and then asks God to act in response to their complaint. The denouement is an acknowledgement of surrender and finally, praise. 

Hall traces a narrative arc in each lament psalm beginning with a “raw pouring out” and ending with an expression of praise or confidence in God’s character. “Those two things don’t at first glance seem to fit together very well,” she says. “But the idea is that working your way through the song of lament leads you to that place where there’s a restored sense of meaning centered [on] the restored relationship with God.”

This restored sense of meaning is one reason why engaging with the psalms of lament can help people cope with suffering. The psychologist Crystal Park proposes that suffering results when difficult life circumstances—a cancer diagnosis, the death of a loved one—create a rift between a person’s worldview and their interpretation of the circumstance. For example, someone who believes that a good God wouldn’t allow their spouse to die will experience deep distress at the loss of their partner—not only grief, but also a deeper suffering triggered by a shattered worldview. To move forward in a psychologically healthy way, the bereaved spouse needs to reorient their understanding of the world.

The psalms of lament provide a structure to move us through this meaning-making process. Praying or reciting one can guide someone into a place of profound spiritual surrender. The reader takes the psalmist’s words into her own mouth and journeys through each movement: address, complaint, request, and expression of trust. 

Reaching this final stage in the psalm, says Hall, can help the person entrust their suffering to God “in a way that then resolves the challenges with God and restores some sense of order in the world.” In this way, these texts offer a tool for meaning-making amidst traumatic or disorienting events. By translating pain into words with the help of these texts, one can find a restored sense of order.

Another reason why engaging with these sacred texts can be both spiritually and psychologically healing is that they offer words to explain our pain in new—and possibly more constructive—ways. As Hall points out, “Words don’t just express our feelings, words also change our feelings.” Articulating an experience of suffering with different language, particularly language that ends in an expression of hope or trust, can facilitate growth rather than despair.

Hall is currently running a study on the role of lament in meaning-making and alleviating suffering. Once a day for a month, her team sends study participants a psalm of lament paired with reflection questions via an app. They hope to see a reduction in depression and anxiety among participants, as well as increased positive affect. The team will also gather data on participants’ spiritual flourishing, and Hall anticipates that praying and reflecting on lament psalms over the course of the month will not only reduce anxiety and depression, but will also increase a sense of intimacy with God. 

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