Learning to Lament
Learning to Lament
By Jonathan A. Powers
In the months following the death of his wife, Joy Davidman, C.S. Lewis began keeping a journal. He did not set out to write a book but wrote to survive the loss that overwhelmed him. The entries were raw, unguarded, and painfully honest. Eventually those reflections were published as the now-famous book A Grief Observed. Near the end of the journal, Lewis reflects on something he discovered about grief during this time of written processing:
“I thought I could describe a state, make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process. It needs not a map but a history.”
Lewis’s insight is one of the truest things ever written about grief. It can be tempting to seek a map for our suffering. We want clear directions. We want someone to tell us how long this will last, what the stages are, and how we know when we are finally “better.” We want grief to behave like a problem that can be solved if we simply follow the right steps. But grief does not work that way.
Grief is not a straight road. It does not move neatly from one stage to the next. It comes in waves. Some days it feels manageable; other days it returns with surprising force. It interrupts ordinary moments. A smell, a song, a memory, or a date on the calendar can suddenly bring sorrow rushing back into the room.
Lewis discovered what many of us eventually learn: grief is not something we merely “get through,” but is something we live through.
Nearly all of us know something about grief. Sometimes grief comes through death. Other times it comes through disappointment, betrayal, illness, broken relationships, loneliness, financial collapse, estrangement, or dreams that never came to fruition. We grieve jobs we lost, relationships that dissolved, communities that changed, and seasons of life that can never be recovered. Even the changes taking place in our culture and churches can produce a kind of sorrow. We look around and feel that something precious has been lost.
When we stop to think about it, to grieve is simply part of what it means to love. The deeper the love for someone or something, the deeper the grief when a hard change occurs. That is why grief is so confusing. It affects every part of us emotionally, physically, spiritually, and even socially. It can leave us exhausted and numb. Sometimes it makes us angry. Sometimes it makes us withdrawn. Sometimes it makes us laugh at strange moments and cry unexpectedly in grocery store parking lots. Grief often feels irrational because love itself is not something neat and clinical. Yet, despite how painful grief is, Scripture never tells us to avoid it. In fact, the Bible is filled with an approach to grief called lament.
We see grief and lament all through the Scriptures. The Psalms are full of cries of sorrow, confusion, and even protest. Job mourns openly before God. Jeremiah is called the “weeping prophet.” Jesus Himself weeps at the tomb of Lazarus.
One of the clearest biblical pictures of grief appears in 2 Samuel 1, when David learns that King Saul and Jonathan have died in battle. The scene is striking because, humanly speaking, David had every reason to celebrate Saul’s death. For years Saul had hunted David like an animal. He threw spears at him. He drove him into exile. He forced David to live in caves and wildernesses, constantly fleeing for his life. Saul’s jealousy and abuse of power had turned David’s life upside down.
Yet when David hears that Saul and Jonathan are dead, he does not rejoice. He laments.
“How the mighty have fallen!” David cries. He tears his clothes. He weeps. He mourns not only for Jonathan, his dear friend, but also for Saul, the king who had tried repeatedly to destroy him. Why?
David understood something we often forget: grief is not only about the character of the person we lost, but it is also about the love we carried for them, the hopes attached to them, and the story we shared with them.
David’s lament is remarkable because it reveals his character. He refuses to reduce Saul to the worst things Saul had done. He refuses to delight in the downfall of another human being, even one who had wounded him deeply. David grieves because Saul was still the Lord’s anointed king, because Jonathan was his beloved friend, and because Israel itself had suffered a devastating loss. In other words, David gives his sorrow a history. He names what happened. He remembers. He laments publicly. He refuses to hide pain behind triumphalism or revenge. That is something the modern church desperately needs to recover.
Many Christians have quietly absorbed the idea that faithful believers should move quickly past sorrow. We can too easily rush grieving people toward resolution, offering quick explanations, neat theological answers, or inspirational clichés. What we need to understand, however, is that lament is not unbelief. Sometimes lament is one of the deepest expressions of faith because lament refuses to let go of God even in the depths of confusion and pain. The person who laments is still speaking to God.
The Psalms teach us this repeatedly. “How long, O Lord?” is not a failure of faith but the cry of someone who still believes God is listening. Too often we try to sanitize grief. We want Easter Sunday without Good Friday. We want resurrection without the cross. Yet the Christian story insists that redemption often moves directly through suffering rather than around it.
That does not mean suffering is good in itself. Death is still an enemy. Grief still hurts. Loss still wounds us deeply. Christianity never calls death natural or beautiful. Jesus Himself stood at Lazarus’s tomb and wept even though He knew resurrection was moments away. The tears mattered, however. The loss mattered. Love made grief unavoidable, because, again, at the center of grief is love. We do not grieve deeply over things that mean nothing to us. Grief reveals attachment, affection, devotion, and relationship. Sorrow hurts precisely because love matters. This is why Christians can lament honestly without despairing completely.
Christianity does not pretend suffering is unreal. Rather, it is built upon the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ that gives hope amid grief. Jesus’ resurrection does not erase pain and hardship from this world, but it does transform the horizon of grief. Christians mourn differently not because our losses hurt less, but because death is not the final word. The resurrection means that sorrow will not reign forever.
Still, we live in the tension of the “already” and the “not yet.” Christ is risen, but the world is still broken. We still bury loved ones. We still endure injustice. We still watch people misuse power, harm others, and fracture communities. And in moments like these, lament becomes an act of faithfulness.
Turning back to David’s lament over Saul, his grief is not only deep, personal sorrow but also a grief over the misuse of power and the suffering it caused Israel. Saul failed as king. His fear, jealousy, and pride wounded the nation. David mourned not only the deaths of the people he loved but also what could have been.
There is something deeply relevant about that today. We live in a world marked by tremendous misuse of power. We see it in governments, institutions, workplaces, families, and even churches. Leaders fail. People are wounded. Trust is broken. Entire communities carry scars from betrayal and injustice. As Christians, we are called not to respond to such realities with indifference. We should lament. Lament allows us to tell the truth about evil while still placing our hope in God. It prevents us from becoming cynical, hardened, or numb. It reminds us that the kingdom of God has not yet fully come, therefore, the brokenness of this world should still grieve us.
In fact, one of the dangers of modern life is that we often try to escape grief rather than process it. We distract ourselves constantly. We entertain ourselves endlessly. We medicate pain, scroll through it, joke about it, or suppress it. But buried grief rarely disappears. It often resurfaces later in bitterness, anger, anxiety, or despair.
Lewis understood that sorrow needs a history. It needs to be spoken. It needs to be remembered. It needs room to breathe. That does not mean we remain trapped in grief forever. But it does mean healing often comes not by avoiding sorrow but by walking honestly through it with God and with others.
The church should be one of the few places left in society where people are allowed to grieve honestly. We should be communities where tears are welcomed, not rushed away. Communities where people do not feel pressured to pretend they are fine. Communities where lament and hope can coexist. After all, the Christian faith has always held both together.
If for no other reason, we should recognize that at the cross we see the deepest sorrow imaginable alongside the greatest hope the world has ever known. Jesus Christ entered fully into human suffering. He was betrayed, abandoned, mocked, beaten, and crucified. Isaiah says He was “a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief.” He did not remain distant from human pain. He stepped directly into it. And because He entered into suffering, Christians can trust that God is not absent in our grief either. Even when He feels silent. Even when we do not understand. Even when healing comes slowly.
Lewis once admitted that grief felt like fear, exhaustion, and disorientation all at once. Many of his readers resonate with his words because they recognize themselves in them. There is comfort in realizing we are not alone in our sorrow. Perhaps that is part of why lament matters so much. Lament reminds us that suffering does not isolate us from the people of God. We join a long history of grieving saints who cried out to God before us. We stand alongside David, Job, Jeremiah, Lewis, and countless others who discovered that faithfulness sometimes looks less like triumph and more like honest endurance.
Perhaps that is what it means to give sorrow a history. We do not seek to solve grief or explain away pain, but to carry it truthfully before God while refusing to let suffering have the final word. For Christians, the final word belongs to resurrection. One day Christ will wipe away every tear. One day death itself will die. One day all things will be made new. Until then, we celebrate, we hope, and we grieve. And as the Body of Christ, we never do it alone.
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