There is plenty to lament about as we age! We lament our increasing limits and losses. Adjusting to losses of roles, loved ones, and a reliably functioning body can be challenging! Now we have to learn to live with new limits on how far we can comfortably travel, how many hours a day our mind is sharp, how much we can accomplish in a week’s time.
When listening to another’s lament, it’s tempting to “fast forward” through it. How eager we can be to offer a quick spiritual fix or suggest a pious bypass! We may feel it our duty to offer that person some kind of spiritual perspective on their suffering. In doing so, the implicit message they may receive is that of our discomfort with their difficulties.
Better to listen empathetically to another’s recital of woe. Better to convey acceptance of another’s wrestling with questions that have no easy answers. Give them “a good listening to” rather than a “good talking to”!
Listening this way, we support the activity of the Holy Spirit. In time, the lamenter may segue of their own accord, sharing how their faith gives them perspective on their losses. They may set their own experience in the context of a Gracious Reality more encompassing than that from which they suffer. On other occasions, the sufferer may resolve to keep on “living the questions” that are unanswerable.
Through offering this accepting form of listening we spiritually empower the other. It is more healing than slapping a spiritual band-aid of our own on their wound.
We can also respond with sincere and curious questions:
- How does their experience of loss and limits have them wrestling with who God is?
- How might the call of God on their life be changing under these new conditions?
And these are good questions to ask ourselves, periodically. Each new season of life makes such questions lively. Can we accept and sit with the ambiguity, mystery, vulnerability, and not knowing in our own life? If so, this helps us sit hospitably with another’s experience of the same.
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