Years ago, Neil Diamond wrote and recorded a song that became quite popular; it was entitled “Song Sung Blue.” The lyrics have long left me, but that title came rushing back when I began looking at David’s lament for Saul and Jonathan. That’s a good definition of a lament a song sung blue.
A Medium for Grief
At first this might strike us as a bit strange singing our grief but there it clearly is in the first chapter of 2 Samuel:
Ye daughters of Israel, weep over Saul,who clothed you daintily in scarlet,who put ornaments of gold upon your apparel.How are the mighty fallenin the midst of the battle!
Jonathan lies slain upon thy high places.I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan;very pleasant have you been to me; your love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women. (2 Samuel 1:24-26)
Actually, singing about grief isn’t that unusual at all. If we are attentive to the titles and lyrics of the songs that flood the airwaves about us, we discover that all the time people are singing laments over their disappointments and discouragements and failures. We need only call to mind the genre of music called “the blues” or the lyrics of some country and western songs and we hear about broken hearts, homes, and hopes. Rock music, likewise, expresses those concerns. A recent listing of rock songs that young people most enjoy included these titles:
“Roll With It” "I Don’t Want to Live Without Your Love” “Please Don’t Go Girl” “I Don’t Wanna Go On With You Like That” “I Hate Myself For Loving You” “Fallen Angel”
What David is doing is done all the time.
Laments over Laments
It’s done all the time, but one easily gets the impression that even in the Christian community a community that continually hears the psalms, knows about Jesus’ teachings on grief and knows full well that crucifixion preceded resurrection there is sometimes subtly related the not-so-subtle suggestion that Christians should always be joyful and that if they must be sad, they should be sad in private. Tears of disappointment and grief, expressions of sadness born of failure and tragedy these are best shed in the privacy of one’s home after everyone else has gone to bed. Cry there, if you want to and must, but certainly not on the sabbath when everyone else has risen to sing a rousing rendition of “Joyful, Joyful,” or not in the church school class when the teacher has spent considerable time preparing and certainly wouldn’t want you to pour your tears all over his stellar lesson on the first chapter of Second Thessalonians.
Pardon me, if that’s in order, but I choose to differ with this ill-founded contention. I differ if we are talking about bona fide grief and disappointment, legitimate lamenting if you will, and not about chronic complaining and a regularly fed appetite for a discontented spirit. They are not the same thing. Grief is something through which we must pass; with chronic complaining we have taken up a residence.
We hear a great deal in our day about positive Christianity, but please understand that Christianity that is authentically positive incorporates into itself the inevitability and rightfulness of sometimes feeling disappointed and saddened.
Grief as Witness
It occurs to me, moreover, that the measure of our grief can easily be the measure of the meaning we have derived from a relationship, or an assignment, or an experience. It can be understood to be a barometer of our investment; when that investment has been significant and we are asked to divest, it brings pain. There is no way around that.
I heard a beautiful lament (not a complaint, mind you, but a lament) a short time ago. It was from a beautiful, ninety-five plus, legally blind, now crippled, but always engaging Christian woman named Elsie. Her waking moments are now totally spent in a recliner. A while back she was told she needed an operation if her life was to be prolonged for a time, and she elected to go for the additional time. She spoke of this in her characteristically delightful way: “It was,” Elsie said, “like being asked whether I wanted to be hung or shot.”
When Elsie talks, her words are interspersed with high-pitched sounds, a whining of sorts, but not the kind of whining we associate with agitation or chronic complaining. Rather, it is a whining expressive of her sense for life’s fullness and God’s goodness. It is more like the singing of whales, clearly a language, but not a language imprisoned in the twenty-six letters of an alphabet.
Elsie laments what has happened and is happening to her, but it is lamenting that is dynamic and not static. Her whining is a way through which Elsie is pushing the limits of her life up against the reality of death so that she can win through to death’s beyond.
So it is that we have this sad song from David, so thoroughly soaked with the importance and richness of his friendship with both Saul and Saul’s son Jonathan. It is as though a tiny video camera has been inserted into David’s soul and there on the television screen before us is some of what has filled that soul with meaning and purpose.
Grief as a measure of value is, I believe, what Henri Nouwen is describing in a passage from A Letter of Consolation. He is writing to his father about the death of the woman who was for the one mother, and the other wife:
If time does anything, it deepens our grief. The longer we live, the more fully we become aware of who she was for us, and the more intimately we experience what her love meant to us. Real, deep love is, as you know, very unobtrusive, seemingly easy and obvious, and so present that we take it for granted. Therefore, it is often only in retrospect Ñ or better in memory that we fully realize its power and depth. Yes, indeed, love often makes itself visible in pain. The pain we are now experiencing shows us how deep, full, intimate, and all-pervasive her love was. (pp. 16-17)
Toward Resolution
Finally, a song sung blue implies that there is movement from one point to another. There is a struggling, a reckoning, an effect to understand, integrate and resolve. Whether or not we literally sing, this musical imagery captures the essential dynamism that must be there if resolution is to occur. Remember Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof lamenting his economic state? “If I Were a Rich Man” is the lament he sings and one gains the impression, hearing Tevye sing, that the lamenting is therapeutic and affords him some sense, if not of resolution, at least of relief.
Frederick Buechner has put it this way:
Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace. (Now and Then, p. 87)
There is a time to lament, as David lamented, and during those moments we have this assurance:
Lord, all my longing is known to thee, my sighing is not hidden from thee.My heart throbs, my strength fails me; and the light of my eyes it alsohas gone from me.
But for thee, O Lord, do I wait;it is thou, O Lord my God, whowilt answer. (Psalm 38:9-10, 15)