Well, after posting the first section of my paper on religious history, I succumbed to one serious virus and have hardly been out of bed since. The rest of the paper is on my computer at work, so I will have to wait till I get back there to post the next installment. In the meantime, I am re-reading one of my favorite books of theology (admittedly, I don't read much theology!), Walter Brueggemann's The Message of the Psalms. These are his wise words on the psalms of lament:
'I think that serious religious use of the lament psalms has been minimal because we have believed that faith does not mean to acknowledge and embrace negativity. We have thought that acknowledgment of negativity was somehow an act of unfaith, as though the very speech about it conceded too much about God's "loss of control".
The point to be urged here is this: The use of these "psalms of darkness" may be judged by the world to be acts of unfaith and failure, but for the trusting community, their use is an act of bold faith, albeit a transformed faith. It is an act of bold faith on the one hand, because it insists that the world must be experienced as it really is and not in some pretended way. On the other hand, it is bold because it insists that all such experiences of disorder are a proper subject for discourse with God. There is nothing out of bounds, nothing precluded or inappropriate. Everything properly belongs to this conversation of the heart.'
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