Grieving: confronting despair, even in the Bible

Scripture: Psalm 22: 1-18
--Do you think it is okay to express feelings of hopelessness and despair? What is your reaction to reading Psalm 22?
--How can we minister to one another when we feel despair?

It is important to acknowledge that we do not always have hope. The familiar passage from Psalm 22 that Jesus is recorded as crying out from the cross encourages us to cry out as well. We do not have to be Stoics.

"Our roots in the Hebrew tradition, with the full support of the Old Testament as well as the New, testify to the appropriateness, indeed the necessity, of raising an angry clamor when struck with loss. Our baptismal vocation calls for us to be full, whole persons, which means experiencing the full range of feelings naturally arising out of loss. The refusal to grieve openly and actively is essentially an atheistic stance, for it denies that we have a relationship with a God who covenants with us. … We are more free to grieve precisely because our faith is grounded in the promise of a Presence from whom we cannot be separated. It is God's presence, embodied in Christ and continued in the church, that provides a shelter from the fear of abandonment. The testimony both of the Bible and of the history of the Christian faith is that those who have a living relationship with a living God are willing and able to argue with God, cajole God, scream out their anger and pain at God." (Kenneth R. Mitchell & Herbert Anderson, All Our Losses, All Our Griefs, Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1983, p. 102-3)

You may well want to cry in despair. Do so! Go to a safe place and wail. Read the words of the angry and desperate Psalmist and cry them aloud yourself. But do finish the reading. The Psalms also provide us with reassurance, while acknowledging our difficulties and fears and shortfalls. The writers of the Psalms were people who strayed, sinned and doubted, yet returned to God, remembering God's love and covenant.