Lamentation Wall
Greetings Dear One,
Welcome to a safe space to sit, tell your story of loss, and heal (in due time). Lamentation walls exist across the world. They are spaces to articulate grief, commune with others who have mourned across time, and simply be present to loss.
To add your story to the lamentation wall, please fill out this form or email me, and trust your story will be held gently and safely. Unless otherwise indicated, I will post your offering with your first name and last initial.
I will place the words of each lamentation I receive on sturdy paper, pray over each, burn it with incense as prayer, and reverently bury the ashes in your honor under an oak tree on the banks of the Colorado River.
I will also post selected lamentations on my website as a living and evolving offering in our lamenting community.
Alongside you,
terra
Please note my workshops include similar practices. You can also sign up for my newsletter at the bottom of this page to keep in touch. I hope to connect in person.
LAMENTATIONS
For more on writing a song or poem of lament, see page 49 of Hopeful Lament. Here’s an excerpt of that practice:
“To write your own song or poem of lament, you don’t need any special skills. The finished work doesn’t have to be good. It is more about the process than the product.
Start with bringing to mind what you need to lament today. It could be something systemic. It might be something small but significant. It can be a loss or sorrow from the past or something going on right now.
Take a moment to decide what you want to focus on, noticing what happened. Who was involved? What did you hear or feel or see? Hold this memory in your mind. Take a few minutes to journal a little about what you want to grieve. As much as you’re able, try not to censor your thoughts. As one person who I host in spiritual direction described it, let your words rest on the page. You can lay them down there without needing to be clear or concise for now.
To create your own psalm, use your journaling as a basis for writing your own song of mourning and release. You might want to use questioning words as the Psalmists often do like why, how long, and when (see Psalm 13:1; 44:24; 119:82).
“You might try reading your song aloud. You could even sing it to the tune of a favorite song.”
--Hopeful Lament, chapter 3
Please feel free to complete the Google form or email me your lamentations.
And be sure to visit our other resources.
Why Are Walls and Other Structures Dedicated to Lamentation?
Sometimes particular geographies are connected with loss. When a tragedy like a natural disaster, accident, or mass shooting takes place, makeshift memorials are often created as people leave flowers, stuffed animals, and notes along a gate, sidewalk, or around a tree trunk. Texas residents Brandon and Heather O’Neill placed nineteen maroon and two pink bags in their front yard representing the children and teachers killed in Uvalde, Texas in the days immediately following that calamity.
Sometimes more intentional memorials are created. The Grand Candela is a memorial honoring the twenty-two lives lost in 2019 due to a racially motivated attack in El Paso. The Gun Violence Memorial Project is four structures made of glass bricks with openings intended to hold mementos from those whose lives were lost in a shooting. It was originally on display in Chicago and later, in Washington DC.
To create memorials like these connected with places associated with tragedy or loss is not a new impulse. In the American Southwest, Chimayo is a place of pilgrimage associated with both loss and healing. Bonnie Smith Whitehouse recalls seeing a group making their way toward the small New Mexican church when she was a child: “Many of the pilgrims we saw used wheelchairs or crutches to make their way down the dusty roads. Some carried candles, rocks, or photographs of loved ones. Others bore large wooden crosses on their backs. I vividly remember seeing an old man crawling on his bare knees in the dirt.” (Read more in her fabulous book of family devotions Seasons of Wonder.)
The only part of the second Jewish temple left standing in Jerusalem has been a place of lament and worship for them from time immemorial. In English literature dating back to the 19th century, it was referred to by Christians as a wailing wall or wailing place and even before then, it was well known as a space sacred for Jews. In his 1868 Memories of Olivet, John Ross MacDuff recounting the story of David leaving Jerusalem in disgrace due to his son’s coup attempt, wrote that he was,
Probably with the loose cloak (‘abaya) as we have seen it worn by the weeping Jews who gather on Fridays at the “wailing wall” of their old Jerusalem Temple. Muffled in these to secure against intrusion on grief and with their heads pressed against them, they kiss the stones and intone their plaintive lament. The entire shrouding of the head formed the Jewish symbol of grief, as we see too in David's subsequent “covering of his face” in his touching lament for Absalom (2 Sam. xix.4.).
You can view a real-time view of the Western Wall (and have a note placed there if you’d like) here.
Note: we hold the ongoing conflict in Israel and Gaza in prayer and grieve the violence, all the loss of sacred lives, and the displacement and destruction of homes and communities of nearly two million Palestinians. If you’d like to donate to help two seasoned relief organizations are the World Food Program USA and Doctors Without Borders.
