Deep Lament as a Remedy to Superficial Complaints

We live in a culture that has made optimism a duty. Think positive. Count your blessings. Others have it worse. Pain is to be managed, distracted, scrolled away: a thousand short videos, another evening out, one more painkiller so that we can keep moving the injured arm. Christians have often baptized this reflex. Prayer becomes a row of little hearts: thank you, God; Jesus loves you; all is well. None of this is false, and gratitude is indispensable. But we arrive there too quickly. A gratitude reached in a hurry rings hollow, because it has never looked at what is not well at all.

The Bible is far less embarrassed by pain and lament than we are. Depending on how one counts, the Psalter holds some fifteen to twenty psalms of thanksgiving and sixty to seventy psalms of lament, more than a third of the prayer book Jews and Christians have shared for over two thousand years. “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me.” Jesus died with such a psalm on his lips.

Yet the same Bible is merciless toward another kind of complaint. In the book of Numbers, a people just freed from slavery murmurs in the desert. They are tired of manna. They remember the fish they ate in Egypt for nothing, the onions, the garlic. They want to choose a new leader and go back. God answers with fire, pest and serpents. That generation never sees the promised land.

Why is the psalmist’s cry precious and the people’s murmuring intolerable? Not because one is polite and the other angry. Job is anything but polite. For some forty chapters he curses the day of his birth and accuses God of tearing him apart, of setting him up as a target for his arrows. His friends, meanwhile, speak impeccable orthodoxy: God wounds and God heals; surely you must have done something wrong. And yet the verdict falls on them: “You have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has” (Job 42:7).

The difference is not the volume. It is the direction. Lament speaks to God; murmuring speaks about him. The Pharisees murmur among themselves (the Greek gongyzō even sounds like it), but they do not simply ask Jesus the question. The lament psalms, as Bernd Janowski calls them, are conflict conversations with God. Murmuring is a monologue that has given up on being answered.

Lament also remembers. “In you our ancestors trusted; they trusted, and you delivered them” (Ps 22:4). A baby cries because it expects to be heard. In India I once saw a very small child who no longer had the strength even to cry, so abandoned had it been. Why waste the strength to scream when no one is listening? The murmurers in the desert have forgotten that they had a Father who cared for them. The God who heard their cry under Pharaoh’s taskmasters now looks to them like a taskmaster himself. Maximilian Hofmann puts it precisely: in lament, unlike in murmuring, God is still recognized as the Lord of the history of salvation.

And lament goes deep, while murmuring stays on the surface. We complain about the late train, the weather, the job. Light things are made heavy so that heavy things never have to be faced. “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord” (Ps 130:1) requires going down into the depths: into weakness, into darkness, into sin. Where there is no sin, there is no mercy either. Nineveh weeps, and God relents.

Pain that finds no voice does not disappear. It hardens into resentment, into hatred, into the endless murmur of a society that is against everything. And in hatred we are always alone; that is the world of the devil: the “diabolos”, the one who divides. Someone once said to me: I cannot be with you in your hatred. But we could weep together.

This reflection is based on a lecture given for the Katholische Erwachsenenbildung Schwäbisch Hall on October 2, 2026.

How to cite this article
Marie-Thérèse Gerstner, S.S.L.. (2026, October 5). Deep Lament as a Remedy to Superficial Complaints. Rielo Institute for Integral Development. https://riidblog.org/post/05-10-2026/