UNDERSTANDING THE LITURGY by John J. O'Brien C.P.

The Prayer of the Faithful: Learning to Lament

Charismatic Renewal, Cursillos, prayer groups, 12 Step Recovery groups and a renewed liturgical life have taught us how to pray better. We are better at petition, thanksgiving, and praise. The liturgy of the word ends with what is called "the universal prayer," or "the prayer of the faithful." It is a simple prayer format. The presiding priest invites the Assembly to pray. Then the petitions or bidding prayers are sung or recited by the deacon, the cantor, or the reader. These petitions are for church and civic authorities, for world needs, (e.g., when flooding or famine exists), for the sick, the imprisoned, and the poor, and for local needs. the Assembly responds to each petition. The presider's final prayer concludes this ritual unit. There are no set texts to be prayed. The Sacramentary gives examples and various homiletic companies print canned petitions. (For ten years I wrote them for Paulist Press). Sounds pretty simple, eh?

This is one part of the liturgy requiring fresh prayer composition weekly. Sometimes you can tell clergy wrote them or just trotted out the canned stuff. The petitions are churchy and hierarchically biased. Often boring. Othertimes insipid, inelegantly crafted, without umph!

Why is this so? First, our petitions can get stuck in private piety and the prayer lacks any communal dimension (e.g., this is not a prayer for special intentions.)

Second, the language of our petitions is not graphic or passionate enough to capture the depth of anguish in the human heart. Praying for the generic poor doesn't do it. Praying for those dirt poor with no place to lay their heads and no food for aching stomachs is a more concrete starting place.

Third, the root of banal prayer goes deeper. We live in societies structured to forget. We have corporate amnesia in the face of horror. We cop out on social justice and mollify our American consciences by contributing money. We advertise for perpetual youth and whisper about those with chronic, disfiguring, mental, and addictive illnesses. We have lost the capacity to express our trauma and the scandal of genocide and geocide. We need to retrieve biblical lament afresh.

Dianne Bergant says "the lament is a form of speech that cries out against any form of suffering or loss whether personal or public..It is..a prophetic mourning, an official lawsuit, a funeral dirge, or a psalm of lament (The Collegeville Pastoral Dictionary of Biblical Theology, p 533)." Laments name human suffering and plead with God for liberation. Lament is holy bitching, powerful plaint for the plight that punches us in the gut, the psyche, the heart.

Where do we learn lament? I learn it from modern Judaism. I was speechless at Elie Wiesel's Night. (Reading Night changed my life). His two plays Zalman, or the Madness of God and Ani Ma'amin (I Believe )taught me to be silent and reverent before God's pathos. Deborah Dwork/Robert Jan Van Pelt's Auschwitz taught me the power of inquity. Rabbi Byron L. Sherwin's Sparks Amidst the Ashes and Rabbi Abraham J. Heschel's The Earth is the Lord's left me sorrowful for what is no more. Maybe God is crying, too.