Jo Bailey Wells AYR Interview
“On the Psalms of Lament and Resources for Healing” was a promo video by Jo Bailey Wells for the 2011 After the Yellow Ribbon conference at Duke University. Interview by Logan M. Isaac, videography by Pilar Timpane.
Transcript
The Psalms of Lament are always the place where students go, "Whoa. We as a church don't do much with these.”
What do we do with the Psalms of Lament? And what do we do with places of pain? And the lament, I think, shows us, teaches us resources, us that we can cry to God when God is the only safe place and even when God may not be a safe place. In other words, we can scream at God, we can yell at God, we can voice the injustice of our world, human and divine as we perceive it, and God will hear.
The whole of the Psalter is in our liturgical tradition, but it's curious to me that it's faded out of the church's practice. And insofar as the Psalms do have a place, it's Psalm 23, or it's the Psalms of rejoicing. We are not very good in corporate worship at acknowledging pain. Of going to the dry places, of voicing the Psalms of lament.
Psalm 89 is the de profundis, would be the toughest Psalm of lament. The one that does not even have a vaguely positive ending. But is a cry from the depths that go deeper and darker all the way through. Another classic one happens to be, my favorite is Psalm 73, which is a cry of a person who feels the injustice. The injustice where the wicked prosper and those who do good seem to suffer for it. To help someone follow Jesus, even, to the Holy Saturday of the silence and abandonment by God through good Friday and not jump too quickly to Easter Sunday. You know, I mean, I think we're brilliant in this culture at celebrating Easter, but not at celebrating Holy Week.
So therefore, it doesn't go to our deep place of need. So first and foremost, to recognize that Jesus has been there , that is the resource of our faith. The brokenness, the devastation, the abandonment, the mistakes can become the resource out of which we minister to others. My sense of calling, whatever that may be, to be a professor, to be a priest, has to do with, it's not only about, but includes the places of pain in my own life.
And indeed, I don't think it's a sequential process. I am healed and therefore I can function pastorally for somebody else. I think it's, as I'm functioning pastorally for someone else, I realize that God is doing something in me. God's Grace reaches us as we minister God's grace to others, and that is my picture of healing.
