Tule Fogs and Lament
This post originally appeared on Robert Mayer’s personal blog - onlyvisitingthisplanetsite.com.
Week three of the great isolation is nearly complete. The novelty has worn off, and we’re confronted with realities that seemed impossible six weeks ago. And, we have that nagging in our stomachs telling us that all of this has just begun.
Growing up in Northern California, several times a year we would experience what weather geeks called “tule fogs,” times when the fog was so thick that you could not see even six feet in front of you. I remember a time when Renee and I were driving from LA to San Francisco on Christmas morning 1981 for dinner with friends. We ran into a tule fog near Bakersfield, and it was so dense that you could not see three feet in front of the car. We crawled to the next exit and waited it out in an overflowing Denny’s parking lot where everyone else had the same idea.
These last three weeks have felt like a California tule fog. We are forced to drive blind without any sense of where we are, where we are going, and what the path ahead looks like. We are disoriented and unable to get our bearings. All around us we find sickness, death, job loss, and we wonder if we’re next. It is easy to wonder where God is in all of this.
I’m not here to offer cheap platitudes or easy bromides. I don’t claim to offer a magic Bible verse or theological argument that will suppress our anxiety and fear. Frankly, anyone who tries to offer things like that should be ignored. Instead, I think Holy Scripture points us in a radically different way. That way involves sorrow and lament. I agree with N.T. Wright when he writes that at this time, the way of lament is the best, perhaps the only authentically Christian response we can make.
Lament is found throughout the Old Testament, but especially in the wisdom literature (Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes). It is seen in the cries of prophets like Jeremiah and Ezekiel. Even Jesus laments over Jerusalem in Matthew’s gospel and in the Father’s absence as he suffers on that Jerusalem cross.
Lament is what we do when God seems absent. Lament is how we respond when we find ourselves in sustained times of suffering, isolation, even death. Lament recognizes that evil is truly evil, and not a mere illusion that we see on our screens. Lament is what we express when justice seems absent. Lament is what we do when the future disappears right in front of us.
A lot of Christians, especially evangelicals, have a difficult time with lament. We’ve been conditioned to think that we must always show victorious Christianity, lest others think that there is something wrong with us or that somehow God is not to be trusted. American culture teaches us to strive for “your best life now” and even many Christians have bought into the lie of prosperity. No, we don’t do lament very well.
Perhaps it is time for us to learn. This is a season of deep sorrow, one that should drive us to our knees in dependence on the Triune God. This is a time when we should mourn the suffering and isolation that has come upon millions of our fellow human beings throughout the world. This is a moment when we offer our plaintive cries. “I say to God my Rock. “Why have you forgotten me? Why must I go about mourning, oppressed by the enemy? My bones suffer mortal agony as my foes taunt me, saying to me all day long, “Where is your God?” (Psalm 42:9-10).
As I write, Easter is less than two weeks away. This year, we will mark the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ in a season that few of us in Canada and the United States have ever known. Perhaps we will identify more with Good Friday this year. We will lament not only our present world, but the very death of our God and Savior. But for us, it is always sorrow and lament tinged with hope. Way out in the distance, I can hear a faint roar. Aslan is on the move, and he is coming one more time to Narnia.