Most days, I encounter someone who has faced significant trauma in their life. Suffering does not just exist in some corner of our city, hidden away; it is everywhere.
Trauma is the mission field of the 21st Century. What an opportunity the church has to be a place of healing and hope to so many in our congregations and also in our community, but are we missing it?
Trauma has a language, and that is lament. Trauma needs to be expressed verbally, and lament provides an opportunity for this.
“Laments are prayers that erupt from wounds, burst out of unbearable pain, and bring it into language. Laments complain, shout, and protest; they take anger and despair before God and the community. They grieve. They argue. They find fault . . . [even] as they cling obstinately to God and demand for God to see, hear, and act”. Lament thus becomes a way of naming what is going on, of standing and of hoping in the midst of ruins.”
— Born From Lament by Emmanuel Katongole
Writer Nathanial Carlson states in Lament: The Biblical Language of Trauma
“Trauma routinely invades human experience. Yet strangely and tragically, the Sunday morning worship hour has functionally denied trauma’s existence, muzzling the God-ward expression that trauma victims so deeply need. The contemporary church has abandoned the biblical language of trauma—lament. This neglect of lament isolates trauma survivors (as well as many others who suffer and grieve) from the language they need to both hear and speak in the corporate worship of God’s people.”
Throughout the Bible—especially the Psalms, we have been gifted by God with a wealth of inspired prayers and songs that invite survivors to face God with their traumatic experience. Can we unwrap this gift to allow the language of trauma to be heard among us, not hiding from the awkwardness of listening to pain & suffering, but allowing the cries of those who are hurting to land on the ears of the church so healing and hope may flourish?