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At this point in our week together, our community knows all too well exactly how badly life can hurt us. Life is not always fair, and sometimes, misfortune will pile up in doses that seem cruel. 

I did not get to live life without an awareness of suffering and loss. Disappointment and pain. One of my earliest childhood memories is of going up to North Georgia at the age of three or so for my Grandfather’s funeral. My Dad’s dad, whom I had never met. 

I asked my parents why I didn’t know him, and I don’t remember now what they told me. But it had to do with the fact that life and relationships can be complicated sometimes. I could detect their sorrow, but only much later in life realized that it really was more to do with what had never been, than what now was. 

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ groundbreaking released a book titled On Death and Dying. It lays out five stages of the grief experience, and particularly emerged from a study she conducted with dying patients. Published in 1969, it comes in and out of vogue among chaplain and pastoral counselor types. Other staged models get proposed and are popular for a time. 

Folks often misunderstand or misuse Kubler-Ross’ work, most especially trying to force it to fit into Western linear thinking and trying to make it say things she never tried to say. Somehow, though, it seems to stand the test of time if used properly. 

So also might Lamentations be, if we were willing to act like Lamentations is even in our Bibles. Most of us, me included, probably don’t have this biblical book within our thin little Bibles of personal favorites. 

Take the Lectionary, which is normally so helpful because it guides us on a whole-bible journey and causes us to go far beyond our comfort zones. Why, even the Lectionary only seems to visit Lamentations once in its three-year cycle of scripture choices. 

The Hebrew title for this biblical book is fascinating. It is Ey-kah, or a one-word question of “how?”

Why do we need a book, seemingly written by a prophet, that processes both God’s extreme lament and ours, too? We Westerners love to change the subject. We prefer to put on a happy face or move on and distract ourselves, thinking the pain will pass. We tend to busy ourselves pathologically, all in the name of trying to avoid the pain. 

But guess what? The pain will wait upon you and me anytime we think we can outrun or out-busy it. It will just sit there and wait upon us. Sadly, unattended grief or pain even does something worse eventually. It shape-changes. It converts. 

There’s that fascinating quote maybe you’ve heard before? It goes like this. “I sat with my anger for long enough until she finally told me her real name was grief.” 

When you or I are reeling from the pain or suffering of loss, among our basic questions like, Why? Or Who? Or When? I think we eventually also ask, “But how…?!” There’s that Hebrew title for Lamentations.

Uncannily, this book written during the period of Judah’s exile that began in 598 BC also seems to follow an outline of grief that is almost precisely laid out like Kubler-Ross would with her book nearly 2,500 years later. That is to say that the five chapters of Lamentations demonstrate and explore the same five human grief stages that are found in her book. 

Denial or numbness is where our grief, especially in the face of a tragedy, seems to begin. Then, when we wake up to that reality, we do some bargaining. We play the what-if game, retelling and second-guessing what happened. Third, we often get angry—angry at the unfairness of the world, angry at God, angry at others, and especially angry at the deceased. 

Eventually, though, we’ll tend to enter into some understandable grade of depression. Our struggles may not turn clinical, but we will often deal with some depression that does not mean we are mentally ill at all. Finally, given time and help, we arrive in what Kubler-Ross termed “adjustment.” That is, everything is not made all well again. But we do move forward in light of our newly understood realities. 

The biblical book of Lamentations, in its five chapters, follows this outline pretty steadily. Read it in that light and see if God doesn’t have even more to work with in bringing this vital book alive for you.

DR. CHARLES QUALLS is senior pastor at Franklin Baptist Church. Contact him at 757-562-5135.