Eliza Lynn

Aquinas Institute of Theology

In Belief of Tears: American Blues as an Entrance into the Psalms of Lament

INTRODUCTION

A Thesis submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in Theology

by

Eliza Civility Lynn

Saint Louis, Missouri

October 2017

A small child, standing in its crib, cries out in the darkness. There is a deep primacy of this cry within all of us. We are alone, in the dark and we need help. We vocalize this need in the caverns of our existence. Not all cries are met with a response to the situation as it is, with compassion, but for many of us, we have experienced some relief in response to our expressions of need. Cries in the dark are part of the human experience.

             As we age, these cries – these expressions of fear and loneliness and excruciating need – they change in an infinity of particularities. We may be a child of loving parents who cared for our needs as we expressed them, who taught us that we are God’s beloved, that the world is a safe place and that love is a way of being. That when we cry out, we are heard, we are responded to, we are given what we need. We may trust the relief that comes after tears, the embrace of community and the fellowship that will sustain us in the ebb and flow that is life.

Or we may have grown up in a setting that left us stifled or shamed or punished or tortured or so completely neglected that our cries no longer come, and neither does the openness to the relief we seek. With the loss of this transaction, our deepest fears are verified and we may trust solely in the false safety of our fear. We are alone. There is no one to hear our cries. We must defend the little we have that brings us tangible and existential comfort.

We all experience pain and loss, loneliness and fear. Most of us exist between extremes, utilizing the tools at our disposal to handle life’s stressors. We may pile on band aid solutions for years, escaping into alcohol or food or the internet or work rather than letting ourselves be still and feel pain and loss. But we are holding wholeness at bay until we can relinquish our resistance and feel.

Thankfully each generation gives us solutions to this ancient problem, artistic and theological surrogates who make room for entire communities to hear a truth it would otherwise ignore. My own stifled cries may be so deeply buried under decades of attempts to ameliorate my symptoms that I can’t name the original pain. But when I witness another’s expressions, another’s cries in the dark, another’s naming of the truth behind the pain, my defenses relax just enough to connect me with my own enshrined cries. Vicariously, through another’s bravery, I feel. Maybe it is only a thimble full of a river held deep, but in crying with another, I receive a bit of relief.

We lean into each other’s pain. The truth of expression cascades across decades and generations and millennia and sometimes needs only to be reinterpreted in today’s dialect to grant us entrance into this cathartic communion. Such is the case for American blues and such is the case for the psalms of lament. Through speaking truth into pain and eliciting emotions to arise and be felt, both modalities provide an opportunity for relief. The blues and their recent birth and evolution provide familiar cultural access to repressed painful emotions. This access can then be utilized as a transport into the gifts of emotional relief available from the psalms of lament, where the barriers of ancient language and distant context exist.

In this paper, I will examine the commonalities of the communities which birthed the blues and the psalms, dwelling in the shared experiences of isolation and separateness, the conditions which created two of the world’s most well used vehicles of lamentation. Utilizing the vantage point of one blues singer and his most famous blues song, I will use this lens as a relevant method for mining the depths of relief possible from what is called the “saddest psalm” of lament (Psalm 88). I will then show one possible application of these understandings through a liturgy of lament.

What does it mean to be alone, to be separated from your family, your community, your culture? How does this transform an everyday pain into an existential pain and what does that mean for the intensity of the responding cry? These examples of separation (the blues and the psalms of lament) provide wrenching extremes of the human experience from which such poignant and prophetic art has emerged. When dealing with the loss inevitable in all mundane lives, the entire human family can lean into the art formed under extraordinary pressure and find some relief. When we have a common experience, we can step outside of time and space and creatively recognize ourselves, our humanity, in all those who walk this earth. Slave or free, exiled or in power, incarcerated or suburbanite. We all experience pain and loss and we need the sound of each other’s voices to help us to find our own.

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