7 stories to help us retrieve lament with Jesus this Holy Week
Gethsemane, Nicholas Mynheer
“Then Jesus went with them to a garden called Gethsemane and told his disciples, “Stay here while I go over there and pray.” Taking along Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, he plunged into an agonizing sorrow. Then he said, “This sorrow is crushing my life out. Stay here and keep vigil with me.””
Somewhere along the decade of my thirties, I realized I needed a sturdier foundation for all the grief I saw in my own life and in the lives of people around me. Then, in 2012, during our first Holy Week in Austin, we attended our church’s Good Friday service formed around Jesus’s last words on the cross before he died. Seven members of the congregation responded to one of Jesus’s last words with their own story of suffering. I felt like I’d finally found a way to both adore Christ and acknowledge the lament of suffering in one communal act of worship. I’ve come to rely on this practice to prepare me for a more full-throated resurrection celebration every Easter.
Jesus gave us a litany of last words known as the Seven Last Words of Christ. The deathbed words of the Suffering Servant provide a framework for the stories of lament we heard in that Good Friday service and that I invite others to share here during Holy Week.
A year after our first Good Friday in Austin, during the course of a writing project, I stumbled on the words of Ranier Maria Rilke in his Requiem for a Friend: “Once, ritual lament would have been chanted; women would have been paid to beat their breasts and howl for you all night, when all is silent. Where can we find such customs now? So many have long since disappeared or been disowned. / That’s what you had to come for: to retrieve the lament that we omitted."
While Rilke seems to be speaking to his deceased friend (a woman who died giving birth to her first child), this phrase "retrieve lament" added to my understanding that part of Christ's ministry to us through his life, his Spirit, and his people is to "retrieve the lament that we omitted". I sensed a call to help others respond to this invitation.
Each Holy Week since then, I’ve published a series of lament stories written by friends and colleagues as a way to help us walk with Christ toward the cross. The guest writers tell stories of walking with Jesus on paths of suffering that include every sort of grief - illness, relational disillusionment, anxiety, joblessness, death of loved ones, and the death of dearly-held dreams. Their stories have helped form my understanding of cruciform suffering and I believe they could also encourage you too.
I hope you’ll invite a friend to join us this Holy Week. For the sake of offering my guests some privacy in this online space, I’ll be publishing their guest posts in the Stories membership area. If you’re not yet a Stories blog member you can join for $3 a month at this link: https://www.tamarahillmurphy.com/about-stories
This year’s guests include:
‘Father, forgive them’ (Sunday)
‘Today, you will be with me’ by Kendra Jackson (Monday)
‘Behold, your son! Behold, your mother!’ by Todd Hill (Tuesday)
‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ by Natalie Murphy (Wednesday)
‘I thirst’ by Aimee Sylvester (Thursday)
‘It is finished’ by Karen Hutton (Friday)
‘Into your hands I commit my spirit’ by Andrea Bailey Willits (Saturday)
Will you join us as we keep vigil with Jesus this Holy Week?
Peace,
Tamara
