Contemplation: Creating Room for Lament & Surrender

Step 3 / Ash Wednesday

"Contemplation is any way one has of penetrating illusion and touching reality."

~ Parker Palmer

Step 3: Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God.

As we begin the season of Lent, I’m going to invite you to consider your intentions for the season, perhaps your lament, through contemplation.

Contemplation is not just an emptying of oneself but rather an opening and receiving.

It is easy for us to avoid reality, to avoid our emotions. In so doing, we might harm ourselves and those around us. Choosing contemplation and creating space for reflection often allows emotions to surface. Often uncomfortable emotions. When we move through these emotions, when we lament what is wrong, when we allow the seed to fall to the ground, we open up new space for growth inside of ourselves. 

In her book, Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church, Barbara Holmes writes, "It is the turn toward the contemplative that loosens the 'psychological shackles.'" Quoting Howard Thurman, she continues, "When people under siege face the power within, they uncover 'a bottomless resourcefulness...that ultimately enables [the person] to transform the spear of frustration into a shaft of light."

Lament is a cry for what is wrong, for what is not as it should be.

Cole Arthur Riley writes, in This Here Flesh, "Lament is not anti-hope...lament itself is a form of hope. It's an innate awareness that what is should not be.”[i] And I would continue, it is a cry of the soul. Lament means to express sorrow, mourning, or regret.  Often, especially white American culture masks grief with anger or fear; or we numb it with a variety of substances and activities. Grief is meant to be expressed, to be voiced, to be wailed. Many of us have forgotten how to wail. To lament, in sadness, and in a cry of hope.

Maybe it is clear what you are crying out for, or maybe you are unsure.

I invite you to have grace on yourself. Riley continues by saying, "Denial of pain is born of self-preservation." In other words, you may have needed to stifle your cry as an act of survival and coping.