What do you do with Despair?

January 27, 2025

I don’t know about you or your community, but my community has been shaken over the past few weeks. Not in order of importance, and not exhaustive:

• The intense local grief for a neighbor who died in a house fire the other night, several others made homeless.
• The mundane challenge, for federal worker friends and neighbors, of the need to abruptly reorient to fully in-person work schedules, and for those with long-term approved remote work agreements, choose between uprooting their life or losing their job.
• The dizzying array of legal, policy and political changes hurled in quick succession, some of which seemed designed primarily to break things, inflict pain as an a victory lap.
• The abstract concern for vulnerable communities you can reasonably expect to suffer from some of these changes.
• The concrete rage against the injustice of undoing, in one fell swoop, the long, meticulous legal process that resulted in convictions against many of those who stormed our capitol.

I may not have mentioned what is most distressing you—the list of ways the world is broken is long and varied. But whatever it is, I wonder if you, like me, like many in my community, are wrestling this week with despair.

I shared with a friend how I was feeling, the powerlessness of holding that feeling without a silver-lining, lacking any discernible way to change things to make it stop.

“Maybe the thing to do is acknowledge the feeling of despair,” she replied, “maybe that’s what God is inviting you to.”

There are many things we can do with our despair. You probably reject out of hand the kind of easy escapist moves, that numb the feeling but leave the mess waiting in a closet you can’t really shove closed. You can ignore it in a way that looks surface-level healthy, short-circuiting pain with a flimsy sugar-coated hope. We tout the value of community, gathering with our emotion, seeking solace in each other. I saw a newsletter entitled “40 breath prayers for your despair” The first, “Show me who to be, and what is mine to do,” was a soft call to let go of the urge to feel I should do it all, the reality that it isn’t all mine to hold, not even just the pain on my own block.

In the midst of all this coping, there’s something to my friend’s observation. Sometimes, the only realistic thing to do with despair is to speak it aloud. To rage against the broken things that underly it, a rage that rests in a confidence this isn’t how it is meant to be.

The Judeo-Christian tradition has a beautiful tool for speaking despair, one our churches often neglect: lament. The lament is a raw cry of pain, no sugar-coating. The Psalms echo time and again despair from personal betrayal to a nation in distress:

• My soul is in deep anguish. How long, Lord, how long? . . .  I am worn out from my groaning. All night long I flood my bed with weeping and drench my couch with tears. (Psalm 6)
• Why, Lord, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble? In his arrogance the wicked man hunts down the weak, who are caught in the schemes he devises. (Psalm 10)
• You are God my stronghold. Why have you rejected me? Why must I go about mourning, oppressed by the enemy? (Psalm 43)

As Jesus was dying, it was a Psalm that gave voice to deepest despair, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Psalm 22)

Lament dares to yell at God. To demand of God. To accuse God. To ask why, and where are you. Reading the Psalms, you get the sense that no feeling is off-limits, as long as you bring it to God. These cries are rooted in a tradition that dared to believe in a God powerful enough to create the earth and yet somehow interested in the affairs of men. The Psalmists, and the peoples who have used the prayers they wrote, actually thought an all-power deity cared that they felt alone, that they hurt, that they despaired.

The term “extremists” came on as I was listening to NPR with my eight year old son the other day. He requested I pause, asked me what it meant. “What do you think,” I asked him, “based on the context? Did you hear they talked about it in connection with January 6? Do you know what that was?”

“Oh yeah, that was when some people attacked the Capitol,” he said, DC-child through and through. We talked about how they believed strongly in their ideas, but it wasn’t the strength or quality of their beliefs that made it ‘extremist,’ but the actions they took to live them out, their willingness to hurt people.

“What about Jesus?” I asked him, “how strong were his beliefs?”

“Pretty strong,” my son answered.

“And how did he live out those beliefs?”

My son paused for a minute. “He didn’t hurt people. He let hurt be done to him.”

That, in a nutshell, in the words of a child, is where the end of all this despair ultimately points for me. To a God who I believe to be not only powerful and actually interested in what happens to us, but who is so committed to love that he would let hurt be done to him to show it. Where, in all my rage and despair, is God? I can ask that question when it feels like God is absent, and I keep coming back to Jesus, asking the same one as he died.

I don’t think I’m often very ready to follow that example, to love at the point of letting myself be hurt for what is good and true. I want to be, I think. I want to grow in that direction. I’ve been reflecting that in the relative infancy of my grappling with this, there are examples in our midst, our shared history, of people and communities who have endured more than a week of bad news, who have against all odds, persisted in faith, hope and love. The Black church in America, for example. She has held her head high through more than one challenging political season.

It is a Black woman’s voice who has echoed in my ears for the past few decades when I despair at this world’s pain. A Black woman, pointing to an ancient Jewish musician, singing out, “I remain calm, reading the 73^rd Psalm, with all that’s going on I got the world in my palm.” For the lament begins, but does not end, in despair. In the final destiny, as Psalm 73 vividly portrays, evil is swept away, wickedness destroyed. “Keep your eyes on the final hour,” Lauryn Hill proclaims.

But it is not only a distant balm. As I recently prayed with someone about how to hold on to hope in her personal life, the words seemed to reverse on us. A realization dawned that hope isn’t a thing we strive for and muster up. Hope is a reality outside us, greater than us, given to us. We don’t hold hope. Hope holds us.

“Yet I am always with you; you hold me by my right hand. . . . My flesh and my heart may fail,” the writer of Psalm 73 concedes, “but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.” Though circumstances haven’t yet changed, the lamenter is held.