Lament 2: Singing the Lord’s song in a strange land
Should we sing laments? Let me first distinguish: I have no doubt at all that there is a place for lament, both in the common English sense and in the technical psalms-of-lament sense (see previous post), in our worship. We should, when gathered before God, weep for and decry the evil in the world; we should wrestle with the disjunction between our confession and our experience. My question is whether we need do that in song. (Marva Dawn, in Reaching Out without Dumbing Down, notes that the Psalms of Lament are excluded from many lectionaries, and so lament is excluded from the whole of worship, not just from song (p. 176); this seems to me indefensible.) It seems to me that common-lament might most easily find its way into our prayers of intercession, and psalm-lament into our preaching (as noted in the previous post). ‘Ease’, of course, is not a compelling liturgical argument, but nor is it irrelevant. What reasons might there be for insisting that these ideas are expressed in our singing also? Two, as far as I can see: a canonical argument (it’s in the Psalms, so should be in our songs) and a formational argument (singing is what shapes our minds and hearts in worship, and so we should sing these things). The canonical argument seems more powerful when applied to psalm-lament, but it is perhaps worth noticing that the canonical psalms of lament contain what I have called common-lament; they just do not stop there. Assuming one song is not the whole of our worship, there is potentially space for a song of common-lament, that is moved into the Biblical key by the songs, prayers, readings, or preaching that follows it. That said, the canonical psalms contain many aspects of human experience that find no place in our hymnbooks (something I notice whenever I find myself at Free Church worship, singing only metrical psalms). Imprecation, in particular, is graphic, lurid and widespread in the Psalms, but probably not something that we are rushing to introduce into our song repertoire. (Back to the lectionaries; the old Anglican lectionary in the BCP omitted only Ps. 58 – whether this omission was right or wrong (‘all inspired Scripture is useful…’ 2Tim 3:16), asking God to break the teeth of our enemies, praying that they will be ‘like the abortion that never sees the sun’, and then looking forward to bathing our feet in pools of their blood, are attitudes that most of us, I trust, would introduce to a service of worship only with a great deal of care!) The psalms – particularly the psalms of lament, perhaps – are also rather good at confident assertions of personal holiness and righteousness before God, which again are not attitudes that populate Christian hymnody through the ages to any great degree. So, I don’t find a simple ‘the psalms did it, so should we’ argument very convincing. We know neither the origin, nor the redaction history, nor the cultic use(s), of many of the psalms (despite the best efforts of higher critics); nor do we know the reasons for their collection into the Psalter. The psalms of lament, particularly, often read as if they are very personal reponses to a very particular situation, and are not easily generisable to congregational use. I note again that, as far as I am aware, all suggestions of corporate cultic use of the psalter are hypothetical, usually relying on giving far more content to the shadowy new year festival than we can in fact do; one or another hypothesis may happen to be right, but we should not claim canonical authority for the idea. The psalms clearly have a crucial place in Christian worship, but that place might be read rather than sung, and it might be individually (in private devotion, or as a reading in the liturgy) rather than corporately. (My Reformed prejudice: they are Scripture, and so, necessarily, primarily should be preached…) The formational argument is more interesting. Music gets inside us in a way that little else does. Luther and the Wesleys knew this well. There seems to be a good argument that, if we want the people to internalise certain themes, putting them in regularly-used songs is the way to go. If we want our people to learn to lament, then we should have them sing laments. Do we want our people to learn to lament? I think another distinction is necessary here, between learning to lament and daring to lament. My observation in odd moments of pastoral ministry is that most people know how to complain to, or about, God (‘common lament’) – they...
Read MoreLament 1: Yet will I hope
Pastors complain about songwriters; it was no doubt ever thus. Somehow, no-one has ever quite written the perfect song to conclude your brilliant sermon, or to express (your sense of) the collective mood of your people as they gather together. One of the standard complaints in recent years is the lack of songs of ‘lament’. This, it seems to me, bears some reflection – enough that I want to spread it over at least a couple of posts. Three immediate questions occur to me: what is ‘lament’? Should it be sung? Does the coming of Christ make any difference to its reality? Ever since Gunkel and Mowinkel, ‘Lament’ has been one of the standard recognised forms of the Psalter. That said, the psalms of lament are not, straightforwardly, ‘laments’ in what I would regard as the normal English sense of the term. The OED offers us two meanings for lament (n): ‘a passionate or demonstrative expression of grief’ and ‘a conventional form of mourning’. The Bible knows laments in this sense – ‘a voice heard in Ramah, Rachel weeping for her children’ – but the psalms of lament are not merely expressions of regret or great sorrow – all (bar Psalm 88 ) end in celebration and/or triumph, although they begin in complaint. Some recent scholarship has found varying voices in the psalms of lament: the complainer is met with a communal or priestly response re-affirming the faith of the community in God’s goodness and justice. This strikes me as an important idea: whether we accept the idea of multiple voices within a cultic setting, or see a more ‘poetic’ idea of an internal debate within the mind/heart/spirit of the particular psalmist, all the psalms of lament seem to contain this urgent dialogue, reflecting the present disjunction between lived faith and confessed faith, and the existential struggle that arises from this disjunction. (An example of this, drawn from Mandolfo’s God in the Dock: Dialogic Tension in the Psalms of Lament (JSOTS 357): consider Psalm 7; vv. 1-7 (Eng. numbering) are clearly lament – complaint, voiced by the Psalmist to God. v. 8a, though, is a change of voice; rather than the deeply personal pleas addressed to God that have come before, this is an affirmation of the truth of who God is: ‘YHWH judges the peoples’. In response to this confession, the pleas resume in v. 8b: ‘Judge me, YHWH, according to my righteousness…’ Mandolfo suggests the same happens in 9b, which she translates as ‘The one who tests the thoughts and emotions is a just god [sic]’ (i.e., as indicative, rather than vocative, with the NRSV, NIV [which inverts the verse], &c.), and again in v. 11-16: ‘God is a just judge, &c.’ Finally, in v.17, the psalmist is convinced, and responds with praise over God’s righteousness.) If we are to sing songs of lament, then, that adequately reflect the psalms of lament, they will be songs which express a similarly dialogical process, acknowledging both the pressing questions of lived experience, and the confident affirmations of faith – and acknowledging that both deserve to be taken seriously. This seems a difficult task for a song – much more the common stuff of sermons. (This difficulty is, I think, what leads to Mandolfo suggesting multiple voices, at least in the cultic use of the psalms; the psalm of lament becomes a piece of cultic theatre, illustrating or modeling the way the faith of Israel may resolve doubts.) So, should we sing laments? Next...
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