At a conference focused on community development I met Jeremy, a white man actively involved in developing affordable housing in the city where he lived. When he attended my workshop on white identity, he felt a strong connection to my story. He had worked on staff at a large, white, suburban church, as I had, and he could point to a definitive racial awakening there that led him into his role. He asked if we could meet for coffee after the workshop.
When we sat down to meet, the thing that jumped out at me was Jeremy’s energy and enthusiasm. It was apparent that he had a lot of passion for the work of justice, and he was excited to share about the good work he and his team were doing. It was also apparent to me that he didn’t like other white people very much. I first noticed it in the negative way he described the church he had attended and worked in before his current role, but I figured that had to do with unresolved hurt from the way he transitioned out. But then he began to talk about the white residents in the city where he ministered, describing them with a great deal of disdain. This was very interesting to me, so when he finished describing all the justice initiatives he was part of, I asked him to tell me about his cultural identity journey.
Jeremy was a talker, but at that point he didn’t have much to say. I tried to give him some starter questions around white identity to get him rolling, but I couldn’t find an approach that helped him engage. Finally, I acknowledged the great work he was doing toward justice and asked if he had spent much time processing what it meant to be a white male doing the work he was doing.
Jeremy paused and then answered, “I have to admit I don’t think about my own race much. I’m embarrassed by the history of our country, and I’m ashamed to be associated with white America. So I decided a few years ago that I would no longer identify myself as white.”
When Jesus summons us into the journey of “seeing” the kingdom, he invites us into transformation. As amazing as this journey can be, there is no getting around the fact that with clearer vision comes internal chaos. We began to explore this chaos in the previous chapter, “Disorientation,” and here we’ll go even deeper. Carl Jung, the founder of analytical psychology, said, “There is no coming to consciousness without pain,” and this applies to the cultural identity path of a white Christian. An increased consciousness of our present and past history ushers in new levels of discomfort.
Identifying the internal chaos that comes with our awakening is an important but challenging exercise. Dr. Brené Brown, a professor of research at the University of Houston’s Graduate College of Social Work, explores this process at length in her bestselling book, Daring Greatly. She says that some of the most common words used to describe the array of feelings evoked in times like this are embarrassment, guilt, humiliation, and shame. While it’s possible that all of the above apply, she asserts that it’s important to focus on two words from that list: shame and guilt.
Brown believes that the difference between these two words is far more than semantics. Guilt can be a positive and helpful motivator in a person’s quest for transformation, but shame rarely produces healthy outcomes. She has done extensive research on shame, and here is the definition that emerged from her research:
Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging. Shame is the fear of disconnection—it’s the fear that something we’ve done or failed to do, an ideal that we’ve not lived up to, or a goal that we’ve not accomplished makes us unworthy of connection. I’m not worthy or good enough for love, belonging, or connection. I’m unlovable. I don’t belong.1
I resonate with her description of shame for a number of reasons, but the most relevant to this book is the way she links shame to a sense of identity. When people think they’re too flawed to be worthy, valuable, or lovable, they’ve crossed into a new realm of identity formation. This is no longer the quest to just reject bad actions, behaviors, and histories; instead, it opens up the possibility of rejecting their very personhood.
This is why Brown contends that shame is a poor tool for instigating transformation, despite the widespread belief that it’s helpful for keeping people in line. She believes it’s not only wrong to use shame to motivate people but also dangerous. Her research suggests that it’s virtually impossible to correlate shame with positive outcomes of any type, as there are no data to support that shame supports good behavior.2 Instead shame is more likely to cause destructive and hurtful behaviors than it is to open up solutions. When we’re filled with shame, we tend to engage in self-destructive behaviors such as addiction, violence, aggression, depression, eating disorders, and bullying.3
Guilt, on the other hand, has all kinds of potential to yield positive behaviors. Brown says it like this:
When we apologize for something we’ve done, make amends, or change a behavior that doesn’t align with our values, guilt—not shame—is most often the driving force. We feel guilty when we hold up something we’ve done or failed to do against our values and find they don’t match up. It’s an uncomfortable feeling, but one that’s helpful. The psychological discomfort, something similar to cognitive dissonance, is what motivates meaningful change. Guilt is just as powerful as shame, but its influence is positive, while shame’s is destructive. In fact, in my research I found that shame corrodes the very part of us that believes we can change and do better.4
At a personal level, I have found this distinction between shame and guilt to be an important and helpful resource for the cultural identity journey. It’s impossible to have your eyes opened to the history of race in our country without experiencing “psychological discomfort” and “cognitive dissonance,” both terms that Brown uses in her description above. When the feelings come, we can choose how we will process and internally categorize them.
One option is to go to a place of shame. When we do, we create a story not about what we have done or witnessed but about who we are. Shame makes allowance for us to wallow in self-pity and to sink into a hole sustained by a looped message that broadcasts some combination of “I am bad/unlovable/stupid/unworthy/unredeemable.” Nobody can survive in a shame spiral for long, so unhealthy coping mechanisms quickly surface. Sometimes a person who feels shame resorts to shaming others. Sometimes a person who feels shame disassociates from his whiteness, as Jeremy did in the opening story. Sometimes a person who feels shame becomes numb and simply shuts down her willingness or ability to receive any additional revelation.
The other option is to embrace guilt as an uncomfortable but meaningful source of growth. Brown says that the majority of shame researchers and clinicians agree that the difference between shame and guilt is best understood as the difference between “I am bad” and “I did something bad.”5 As we are on the cultural identity journey, we might tweak this difference to be understood as “I am bad” and “I have seen something that is bad.” When we recognize the building blocks of race—the ideology of white supremacy, the narrative of racial difference, ongoing systemic oppression, etc.—we must learn to avoid falling into a shame spiral and instead appropriate the guilt of our discoveries in a way that yields healthy outcomes.
The quest in this stage is to find a way to awaken to the painful truths that come with the journey from blindness to sight, while at the same time not being overcome by shame. I propose that the primary practice to learn is that of lament.
I recently participated in a two-day retreat with some Christian leaders from around the country, and every attendee was significantly involved in the work of justice. The gathering was multiethnic, and it was a sacred time together. The agenda was loose, and the topic of conversation shifted as different groups shared burdens they were carrying. One of the tender and transparent moments came when some of the leaders of color who work in all-white organizations shared about navigating that world. Most of them had been recruited to work in atmospheres where they could provide direction for greater levels of diversity and equity, but they often found that their place of employment was as racially stressful as what they experienced in the outside world—or more so.
As the conversation came to a climax, one of the white leaders asked if he could say something. “It breaks my heart to hear of the experiences you all have had in these primarily white organizations, and I’m thankful for your transparency in sharing. I guess I’m seeking some advice, since I work in an organization that probably has some of the very same challenges. I believe we’re sincere in wanting to move forward on these initiatives, but I fear we’re creating the same type of difficult environment as you’re talking about now. So I guess I’m asking, what am I supposed to do?”
As he asked this, I couldn’t help but smile. “What am I supposed to do?” seems to be the universal question for white people in the process of awakening. I certainly wasn’t judging him for asking it; that question had defined a large part of my own journey. But it was a fresh reminder that most of us react to the initial experience of racial brokenness by searching for an immediate fix. For cultural reasons that go beyond what we tend to comprehend, our instinct is to go right into problem-solving mode.
I understood why he asked it, and I appreciated his desire to improve the organization he led. He had directed his question to the leaders who had shared about working in all-white organizations, so it was theirs to answer. They looked at each other to see who would volunteer to be the spokesperson, and their expressions confirmed that they were all thinking the same thing. One of them finally answered: “What we would ask for you to do is lament.”
“Lament?” A furrowed brow showed how confused the question asker was by that answer. He had expected a more concrete answer, so he probed for further clarification. “We’ve been talking about centuries of oppression that has affected every system, and all you want me to do is lament? I apologize if I’m being slow to get this, but it seems to me that lament is an insufficient prescription to a major problem. Even if we lament, we still need to do something to change all of this, right? Lament isn’t going to make my organization become the kind of place for you to work, is it?”
His followup question was understandable. We can’t become awakened to the problems of race and then fail to do anything actionable—and nobody in that gathering would have suggested otherwise. Yet, on another level, the incredulousness he showed revealed both a sociological and a theological deficit. Those of us who grew up immersed in white American Christianity often have an anemic understanding of lament, so we fail to understand why it’s such a critical part of the reconciliation process.
In the Old Testament times, lament was required yet also had to be learned (2 Samuel 1:18). So what is lament?
One of the best books on this topic is Prophetic Lament, a study of the book of Lamentations by Dr. Soong-Chan Rah. He launched a church in the Boston area and pastored it for a decade before taking on the position of associate professor of church growth and evangelism at North Park Theological Seminary in Chicago. In the introduction of his book he relies heavily on Old Testament scholar Claus Westermann, who suggests that the Hebrew poetic material of the Bible falls into two broad categories: praise and lament. Whereas praise poems express worship for the good things God has done, laments are prayers of petition arising out of need. Lament in the Bible is a liturgical response to the reality of suffering and engages God in the context of pain and trouble.6
The dichotomy between these two is the basis of Rah’s book, and he contended that the modern American church has over-elevated praise, which he called triumphalistic. Churches that are triumphalistic share a set of common characteristics: they elevate stories of success, gravitate toward narratives of exceptionalism (a view that sees America as inherently different from other nations, with a unique mission to transform the world), emphasize problem solving, and are marked by a can-do attitude backed by a belief that human effort and positive thinking can conquer the big problems we face.
Though there are some redemptive themes in the triumphalistic approach, its dark side is its inability to grasp lament. Rah says it like this:
The crying out to God in lament over a broken history is often set aside in favor of a triumphalistic narrative. We are too busy patting ourselves on the back over the problem-solving abilities of the triumphant American church to cry out to God in lament.7
American culture tends to hide the stories of guilt and shame and seeks to elevate stories of success . . . which results in amnesia about a tainted history. The reality of a shameful history undermines the narrative of exceptionalism, so it must remain hidden.8
Rah’s book has been a helpful tool for me, not only for understanding lament but also for understanding why large sections of the American church seem imbalanced in their theology. While I can appreciate the importance of praise and celebration, I also see the damage that flows from an insufficient emphasis on lament. Suffering, tragedy, oppression, and pain are everyday realities for most of the earth’s citizens, and an inability to cry out and grasp for the presence of God in the midst of that suffering is a recipe for hollow spirituality.
Rah’s book has also helped me make some important connections between shame, lament, and the cultural identity journey. The praise vs. lament dichotomy shows us why the dominant-culture church often moves quickly toward denial when faced with its historical sins of racial oppression. The process of unearthing our painful history of racial oppression inevitably creates space for guilt and shame, which make human beings uncomfortable. Without a theology to support lament, we become paralyzed in the search for balance and often turn back to the triumphalist narrative as a crutch.
Rah references Brown to underscore this point, effectively bridging shame and lament. When speaking of the inability of the dominant culture to have honest conversations about race, Brown says, “You cannot have that conversation without shame, because you cannot talk about race without talking about privilege. And when people start talking about privilege, they get paralyzed by shame.”9
So one of the primary reasons American Christians (white, in particular) are unable to deal with the shame stage of the cultural identity journey is we have a feeble lament theology. We’re conditioned to celebrate those who experience success and triumph while screening out the message of those who suffer. We too often become “one who sings songs to a heavy heart” (Proverbs 25:20). We’ve been groomed to search for quick and easy answers to complex problems, and we rarely have the ability to appreciate the act of crying out to God in brokenness and pain.
One event that rattled the city of Chicago and brought the need for lament to the forefront was the 2015 release of a video from the dashboard camera of a police cruiser that recorded the shooting of teenager Laquan McDonald. Videos of the shootings of unarmed civilians often exacerbate the divide between the white community and certain communities of color, but the pervasiveness of abuse in this episode left our city in a nearly universal state of shock, anger, and sadness.
The video shows a teenager stumbling erratically down a busy street at ten o’clock at night, appearing to be under the influence of some kind of substance. He was also in possession of a three-inch pocketknife, and you can hear the officers shouting at him to drop it. But instead of dropping it, McDonald began heading in the other direction and was then shot as he walked away from the officers. In contradiction to this, the police report claimed that McDonald had verbally threatened the officers first, and the police use of lethal force without provocation served as the first major offense.
Shooting a teenager from behind was bad enough, but what happened next is what made the killing seem cold blooded. After watching McDonald collapse after the first shot, the officer shot him an additional fifteen times, expending the capacity of the semiautomatic firearm. McDonald may have survived the first gunshot, but he had no chance after the second onslaught.
Once the sixteen shots were fired, the scene moves as if in slow motion. Many who’ve watched the video have felt helpless at the chilling display of a young man dying alone. No one came to his aid or checked on his status as he lay there. Not one person showed even a modicum of interest in this precious child of God as he breathed his final breath. Like the blood of Abel crying out from the ground, McDonald’s blood screamed for justice.
Fuel was poured on the fire when it was discovered that a multilayer conspiracy had covered up evidence for more than thirteen months. This was the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back, as it exposed a system of justice failing on all levels. Members of the Chicago Police Department, who are employed to serve and protect, had chosen to tamper with evidence to protect one of their own. The Cook County State Attorney’s Office, which was tasked with bringing cases of negligence like this to light, turned a blind eye. The Office of the Mayor, tasked with overseeing the police department, failed to take action of any kind until a whistleblower exposed it. And it certainly didn’t dispel perceptions of conspiracy as the coverup overlapped with the political season in which Mayor Rahm Emanuel was running for reelection.
McDonald’s death shook Chicago, and it was tragic no matter how one looks at it. But for a time it snapped the city out of its collective slumber. To me, this was most evident in the white church of Chicago, which historically had been silent during eras of racial unrest. White pastors traditionally fear talking about racism from the pulpit, as there is a predictable set of adversarial responses that tend to follow. But something about the undisputable nature of this crime broke through the code of silence. The fact that so many witnessed both the egregious act of the individual officer and the systemic failure of the justice system created a temporary window for honest discussion.
This led to a number of good and important conversations for me. I heard from more white pastor friends wanting to talk about race after the release of the video than I’d heard from over my entire ministerial career. The driving question behind each conversation wasn’t a surprise: “I’ve seen with my own eyes the ways racism is still alive and active. My congregation has seen it with their own eyes as well. We’re canceling our normal programs this Sunday to talk about it. But I don’t know what to say. What are we supposed to do?”
In every case, I encouraged the pastors to focus on one word: lament. I encouraged them to reflect on some questions for their congregations, questions I was also asking of myself. For example, could we lament not only for the loss of McDonald’s life but also the loss of the tens of thousands of others killed in the name of race? Could we lament the ideology of white superiority that set the stage for injustices in the first place? Could we lament for the ways our churches had perpetuated racial ideologies, often inadvertently? Could we lament the limitations and blind spots in our theology? Could we lament that we live in a manner that leaves us so disconnected and segregated from the suffering in many communities of color? Could we lament that until we watched the video, we denied that mistreatment was happening?
I found that while my pastor friends were open to considering these questions, the theme of lament seemed insufficient to them. Their reaction reminded me of the previously mentioned young white leader who was incredulous about lament being a response to inequalities: “We’ve been talking about centuries of oppression . . . and all you want me to do is lament?”
During this season, it became abundantly clear that the dichotomy between a triumphalist and lament approach to church is more than an interesting theological exercise; it has a tremendous impact on how we process pain and suffering in the world. When we’re under the influence of triumphalism, we search for “success” in virtually every circumstance, so when a societal problem surfaces, it must be fixed so we can feel a sense of achievement. Therefore an unresolved problem poses a threat. We don’t know how to manage the dissonance created by the unsolvable problem, and we struggle to understand the nervous energy created by that tension.
Lament, on the other hand, doesn’t function according to the rules of success. It sees suffering not as a problem to be solved but as a condition to be mourned. Lament doesn’t see the power of salvation as being in the hands of the oppressors; instead it cries out to God for deliverance from the grip of injustice. Lament is a guttural cry and a longing for God’s intervention. It recognizes, as the psalmist so eloquently stated, that hope is found not in chariots and in horses but in God alone (Psalm 20:7).
This contrast points to one of the many reasons lament can be a gift to the white church in particular, if we can just receive it. Lament grants us the freedom to no longer view success as the only viable outcome. Lament gives us permission to admit that we aren’t capable of fixing (and may have been part of causing) the problems we’ve suddenly become awakened to. Lament gives us resources to sit in the tension of suffering and pain without going to a place of shame or self-hate. Lament allows us to acknowledge the limitations of human strength and to look solely to the power of God instead.
Lament can take on a variety of forms, and the most helpful image of lament within my community at River City is a funeral. Rah suggested that this form of lament most clearly shaped the Old Testament book of Lamentations: “This opening cry of desolation acknowledges that Lamentations occurs in the context of tragedy. The city has died and the people must respond with lament. . . . Lamentations serves as ‘an outpouring of grief for a loss that has already occurred, with no expectation of reversing that loss.’”10
This image is both simple and powerful, and I’ve found it to be a helpful resource for white Christians who are trying to grasp lament at a practical level, particularly in times of distress. When my pastor friends were looking for ways to integrate lament into their services after the release of the video of McDonald’s shooting, we emphasized treating services like funerals. This proactively prepares the congregation to let go of the temptation so common in the dominant culture: to go on the hunt for immediate resolutions to the problem of racism—a temptation that can be difficult to curb. The imagery of a funeral creates much-needed boundaries, as no one would attend the funeral of a friend and then try to rally a group for an immediate problem-solving session. Rah made this point definitively:
Lament is honesty before God and each other. If something has truly been declared dead, there is no use in sugarcoating that reality. To hide from suffering and death would be an act of denial. If an individual would deny the reality of death during a funeral, friends would justifiably express concern over the mental health of that individual. In the same way, should we not be concerned over a church that lives in denial over the reality of death in our midst?
Our nation’s tainted racial history reflects a serious inability to deal with reality. Something has died and we refuse to participate in the funeral. We refuse to acknowledge the lamenters who sing the songs of suffering in our midst.11
Lament has been an important resource for River City when we’ve needed to create spaces that can be occupied by members across the spectrum of privilege and oppression. We’ve learned the hard way that a community can fracture when there are no clear expectations of those who are shaped by a triumphalist/success narrative as they attempt to enter into a space of lament with those not bound by that set of rules. Those who are already familiar with the spirit of lament go quickly to a place of mourning and suffering, but those who aren’t familiar with it either try to fix things or even challenge the very premise of the suffering. However, lamenting by setting the atmosphere of a funeral, the posture of the entire congregation changes. We are then able to enter sober mourning and divert our attention from solving a problem to fixing our gaze on the character of God.
Those lessons helped me gravitate to the image of a multicultural funeral, and that was the image I passed on to my pastor friends during that time of turmoil in Chicago. Let me put it in the form of a question: If a beloved member of a household is killed, isn’t it assumed that the entire family will be at the funeral service to mourn the loss? How odd would it be if one of the family members didn’t show up? How conspicuous would her absence be?
That’s the problem we’re facing in the American church right now. The funeral services are happening, and people of color are being mourned over. But where are the white members of the family? Why are we not at the funeral? How conspicuous is our absence? Who is noticing our absence? Is it everyone but us?
Because most of us are unacquainted with lament, it can feel daunting to practice it when the necessity arises. Though I understand the insecurity many of us feel, I believe this insecurity erects an unnecessary obstacle. Lament is meant to be accessible to each of us, regardless of where we are in our journey.
A number of biblical stories and psalms have inspired my understanding of lament over the years, and one of the most enduringly helpful is in the book of Esther: Mordecai adopts his orphaned cousin, Hadassah (Esther), and raises her as if she were his own daughter. He refuses the governmental decree to prostrate himself before Haman, a vizier in the Persian Empire under King Xerxes. In retaliation, Haman instigates a plot to kill all the Jews of Persia. Haman convinces the king to sign off on this execution order (Esther 3:10), and when Mordecai hears the news he responds with lament: “When Mordecai learned of all that had been done, he tore his clothes, put on sackcloth and ashes, and went out into the city, wailing loudly and bitterly” (Esther 4:1).
The raw simplicity of Mordecai’s response gives us a clear picture of how to lament: we posture ourselves before God to wail, cry, and mourn. To lament is to acknowledge the pain that we aren’t home and that this world is too often marked by evil and injustice. To lament is to ask God the haunting questions “Where are you? What are you doing? How long must we wait?”
To ask these questions is not to doubt or challenge God. Instead, as Dr. Dan Allender eloquently states,
It is crucial to comprehend a lament is as far from complaining or grumbling as a search is from aimless wandering. A grumbler has already reached a conclusion, shut down all desire and postures with questions that are barely concealed accusations. . . . A lament involves even deeper emotion because a lament is truly asking, seeking, and knocking to comprehend the heart of God. A lament involves the energy to search, not to shut down the quest for truth. It is passion to ask, rather than to rant and rave with already reached conclusions. A lament uses the language of pain, anger, and confusion and moves toward God.12
I’ve also learned from Mordecai’s response that lament is identification with the pain of the people. Though Haman’s actions affected Mordecai personally, the primary thrust of his lament was the threat toward the Jews of Persia. Their lives were in serious danger, and the recognition of this compelled him to wail loudly and bitterly before God.
This last point has particular relevance for the cultural identity of white people. One of the most common concerns I’ve heard from white Christians regarding this kind of lament is that they feel sheepish doing it, especially when the injustice they’re lamenting doesn’t affect them the way it does many people of color. While I’m grateful for the self-awareness they show through this observation, I challenge the premise that privilege should stop us from following in the footsteps of Mordecai (and others).
A couple of passages from the apostle Paul remind us of the importance of solidarity. In Romans 12:15, we’re told to “mourn with those who mourn,” and in 1 Corinthians 12:26, Paul says, “If one part [of the body] suffers, every part suffers with it.” In other words, we are not only allowed to lament in solidarity with those who are suffering, we are commanded to.
That’s why solidarity around suffering is one of the most important actions in our cultural identity journey. When our sisters and brothers of color are suffering—or worse, being killed—it’s an absolute imperative that we suffer alongside them. We need to show them that we see them and that we see their suffering. We need to show them that we see the injustice behind the suffering and that we lament its ongoing presence. We need to be locked arm in arm with our extended family, crying out to God in a collective spirit of lament.
Carl Jung wrote, “There is no coming to consciousness without pain.” An authentic cultural identity journey always results in seeing the kingdom of God in new ways, and with those new discoveries come new challenges. An increased understanding of our present and of our history ushers in new levels of discomfort. Learning to respond in a healthy way to the internal chaos aroused by our awakening is an important step forward.
Shame is one of the stages of racial awakening, and it’s understandable how feelings of guilt can take on a life of their own. But shame is an ineffective tool for instigating the transformation of our lives Jesus seeks. Shame creates a story that’s not about what we’ve witnessed, discovered, or been complicit in, but about whom each of us is as a person. This story then pulls us in the opposite direction of a Christ-led, cultural identity journey. When we fall into a shame spiral, we give in to coping mechanisms that further disconnect us from the pursuit of reconciliation and justice.
Instead we need to discover the deep spiritual resources that come with the practice of lament. We need to learn to see the side of God’s character that sees the misery of his people and that hears the cries of the suffering (see Exodus 3:7; Psalm 10:17). We need to become conscious of our instinct to look for quick fixes and to avoid the full weight of the suffering.