Our response to what looks like brokenness in the world around us is often to protest it. We meet brokenness with righteous indignation. Things shouldn’t be this way! This is unfair and unjust and we demand change! We post all the memes and share all the tirades from people we follow. 

There’s some value to this. We hope for a world that operates differently than what we experience in the moment, and our anger reflects that gap between current reality and the world we envision. Our values are the building material for something that doesn’t exist, and as we’re trying to build the world to come, other people seem to keep coming along and knocking things over. Of course we’re angry.

Our shared messages demanding change remind us that we are not alone. That’s one of the greatest advantages of rallies and protests today. It may feel futile at times, but attending a protest can connect us with other people who share our values and our vision for the world. We can begin collaborating on mutual aid networks. We can share encouraging stories of hope to keep our spirits buoyant. We can honor our interdependence in all sorts of ways.

Even so, we might still feel like the harm and brokenness in the world around us is still too much to bear sometimes. It feels powerful to voice our anger, sure. When we shake our fists and scream at the top of our lungs, something in us feels validated. And yet, the world has so many places of brokenness, we can’t even keep track of all of them, much less tend them all ourselves.

Which is why every spiritual tradition has a place for lamentation. Except, maybe Unitarian Universalism. We are very good at telling other people what they should be doing. We are amazing at angry protest. We are not so good at the vulnerability and powerlessness of The world is too broken to bear, and yet here I am… bearing it. 

Lamentation is honest humility that we do not control much of anything. It is allowing ourselves the space to say, I grieve this and I don’t know what will happen and I feel powerless. Historically, lamentation is something done in community, where we hold one another up and blend our wails in a chorus of grief. No demand. No call to action. 

There’s power in that too. Lamentation moves us from anger to honest communal trust. It has a kind of efficiency and efficacy that’s invisible to our productivity-driven culture. We don’t stay in a place of lament. We give it a defined space so that we can move forward. We find our place in the repair work more confidently when we take time to deeply lament the places that need repair.

So what would it take for you to gather with others in communal grieving? Not coming up with a plan to fix. Not demanding policies that prevent this ever happening again (whatever the wound may be). Just grieving that the harm happened at all. Holding space to honor the woundedness of the world honestly and vulnerably without having answers or solutions. What would it take for you to co-create that kind of space? Who would you lament with— interdependently bearing one another up within a defined space of grieving the broken places of the world? 

If we can imagine that experience, and trust ourselves and one another enough to genuinely lament, we may find that the brokenness we bear witness to in the world around us becomes less burdensome. In a strange way, we may find that authentic lament opens space for hope.