To Grieve with Orlando | A Prayer

We are a people of lost lament.

 

Pain rips at our chests, loss punctures our hearts.

These dark days it seems that violence and death punctuate our communal calendar.

We ache for peace,

we long for restoration.

We miss those we lost,

we hate those who took them.

 

And in the midst of our pain, we have forgotten how to lament.

 

Grief is dripping from our fingers and we hurriedly point them at another

because we cannot sit in the silence of our sorrow.

Self-righteousness is our mother tongue,

and we have lost the verbiage for grief without hate.

 

We have had enough of hate – enough!

 

Even as our eyes turn to You, they are struck with confusion:

the Suffering One

bowed down in disgrace

the ultimate Innocent

grieving in a garden

in silence.

 

We have heard it said that we are Your people,

but we can’t see ourselves in Your way of lament.

Our sorrow curdles in our stomachs and quickly turns to hate,

and in the despair of this morning we ask for the grace to grieve.

 

Would you, Suffering One, afford to us the mercy of learned lament.

Teach us anew, Silent Lamb, to wait in the margins of our sorrow,

to wade through the discomfort of unaccompanied grief.

And, in doing so, remake us in Your likeness.

Till You come again.

Amen