Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work (Peterson)--The Pastoral Work of Pain-Sharing: Lamentations

The Pastoral Work of Pain-Sharing: Lamentations

The acrostic form makes certain that nothing is left out, but it also, just as certainly, puts limits upon the repetitions. If there is a beginning to evil, there is also an end to it. There are only twenty-two letters in the Hebrew alphabet. When you have used them up, you can return to the beginning and start over again, but after you have done that a few times, the realization begins to dawn that that territory has been covered. Sorrow and suffering ing are not infinite. Any serious discomfort, illness, hurt, or loss seems at the time of impact as if it will go on forever, getting worse all the time. But, in fact, it does not. There is either healing or death. There comes a time when either life ends or the suffering ends. The subjective feeling of endlessness in suffering is, in fact, false. But how is that to be communicated? It does no good to tell a person that it's going to get better tomorrow, or that if he or she just hangs in there long enough, everything will be okay. Lamentations provides a model for dealing with this sense of endlessness in suffering by putting the suffering within the frame of the acrostic. There is a countable, alphabetical scheme -so that when you are at A, you know that Z is, even though a long way off, still there, and that will end the series. The acrostic framework of Lamentations gives a context to the suffering which has boundaries. A sense of finitude is communicated by indirect, nonverbal, means. Fluant lacrimae, sed eadem et desinant! -Let the tears flow, but let them also cease!

The acrostic form serves a pastoral function also by communicating a sense of terminus to suffering. There is some reason initially to listen to persons for as long as they want to talk, but probably not more than once. After that, the conversation should be bound by an agreed-upon time. Not because the pastor has so many demands that he or she must schedule the time, but because the sorrow must be bound, placed within limits, told within the scheme.

Timing is important. If a terminus is proposed too soon, people know that their suffering has not been taken seriously and conclude that it is therefore without significance. But if it goes on too long, the pastor becomes an accessory to neurotic responses, a crippled adjustment to life that frustrates wholeness. "To some, ill health is a way to be important."10

Those who would bowdlerize the Bible by expurgating all references to God's anger hardly know what they are doing. They have not thought through the consequences of their "improvements." The moment anger is eliminated from God, suffering is depersonalized, for anger is an insistence on the personal -it is the antithesis of impersonal fate or abstract law.

Suffering is an event in which we are particularly vulnerable to grace, able to recognize dimensions in God and depths in the self. To treat it as a "problem" is to demean the person. The fact that in the Lamentations (in the Bible!) there is no recourse to incantation or magical compulsion sion to secure protection against the effects of divine anger, a common practice in neighboring civilizations, is warning against the acquisition of "techniques" to alleviate suffering. Lamentations is not grief management. It does, though, by sharing the suffering, help. But it doesn't solve it; it doesn't eliminate it. And it doesn't try. Suffering is a task on which it does not turn its back.

Encouraged by Lamentations, the pastor will have the strength to do far less in relation to suffering, and be far more. Pastors will not give in to the temptation to fix the sufferer and will engage in a ministry that honors the sufferer. Nothing, in the long run, does more to demean the person who suffers than to condescendingly busy oneself in fixing him or her up, and nothing ing can provide more meaning to suffering than a resolute and quiet faithfulness in taking the suffering seriously and offering a companionship through the time of waiting for the morning.