Last Sunday at Carlisle Cathedral, we began a commemoration of the Safeguarding Season with a special eucharist and the launch of a dedicated prayer space in one of the side chapels.  Hitherto I have had very little awareness of the local efforts with safeguarding in my own area.  Retired clergy do not seem to be included in any mailing network for the regular dissemination of diocesan news.  What took place on the 15^th October seemed to be something much more than paying lip-service to an idea sent down from higher authority.  It felt like a genuine attempt by Canon Benjamin Carter, who holds the safeguarding brief for the cathedral chapter, to involve the congregation in this national focus.   Canon Carter was also the preacher. He knows of my safeguarding interests and he made sure that I was introduced to another local person, Antonia Sobocki. She is working in safeguarding through her Loud Fence project.  A google search will reveal the scope and importance of this international initiative for supporting abuse victims.  Antonia and I, through the medium of Zoom, had met on one previous occasion but it was good to make real, as opposed to virtual, contact on this occasion.  

In his sermon Canon Carter referred to the prayer space in Carlisle Cathedral which is being made available throughout the Safeguarding Season.  Each visitor is invited to identify with an emotion which they feel as a result of engaging with the terrible realities of abuse.  He was, of course, not unaware of the strong emotions that have been aroused in all of us as a consequence of the events in Gaza and Israel.  These emotions, whether responding to Israel/Ukraine or abuse victims, range across anger, grief, compassion and love.  Each of these was linked to a ribbon of a different colour.  I cannot recall all the different ribbons and the emotions they represent, but I was attracted to the emotion of lament, this being represented by the colour purple.  I attached my purple ribbon to the branch which formed part of the display.  This represented the feelings of anguish that I have often felt when faced with the fact of abuse alongside the grotesque failures of institutions like the Church.  Institutions have so often failed to respond adequately or to provide any kind of healing for those victims/survivors who looked to them for help.

The act of identifying with this one particular emotion involved in lament, has had the effect of making me scrutinise the word and examine my reasons for choosing it.  How does our understanding of lament relate to the enormity of church abuse with all its many ramifications?  Lament involves an expression of strong emotion. Most of the time we would rather avoid it.  Typically, it is present in the outpouring of emotion that accompanies the hearing of bad news, like the death of a loved one.  It is also a word that is used to indicate a deep sense of remorse that comes when the conscience finally reveals to us how much damage we have inflicted on others by our thoughtless or evil actions.

Although being in the presence of someone expressing a heightened sense of grief or remorse that we associate with the word lament is demanding, we know that sorrow and tears are both stages along the path of processing terrible and seemingly overwhelming pain or information.  There can be no healing without first encountering this initial spasm of grief.  Watching someone break down in tears is never comfortable for a witness, but simply being present with someone going through such an expression of lament may be all that is required of us at that moment. Any attempt to supress or bypass this lament, for fear that it may make someone embarrassed or uncomfortable, is usually unhelpful.  Such a reaction forms part of a cultural response that wants to move suffering out of sight and pretend that pain should and can always be neutralised by the right word or the right medical intervention in the form of pills. 

As I was pondering this word lament, I realised that human culture through the ages has been far more familiar with the idea of a corporate lament.  Lamenting in Scripture seems typically to be a group activity.  In Jesus’ day there were professional mourners, such as those who filled the street outside the home of Jairus when it was believed that his daughter had died.  However we react to the idea of strangers performing the task of sharing the grief with the entire community, these formal rituals of loss did serve a clear purpose.  Those closest to the departed one were clearly the most affected, but the employing of professional mourners had the effect of making each death in the area a matter of community-wide importance.  The grief of the family was being shared right across the area.  Everyone knew of the death and each person could respond by supporting the affected family in whatever way that felt right. 

This community or corporate dimension of lament brings me to a further thought.  As a parish priest I have sat with countless bereaved individuals and families over the years.  The role of the parish priest is not to utter platitudes about death but to act as a kind of echo-chamber for the bereaved as they lament their loss.  Every visitor who seeks to bring support to the bereaved is also part of the lament process. He/she plays their part by providing a safe space for the grief to find its full expression as the bereaved individual/family stumbles on their way to find acceptance and eventual wholeness once more.  Symbolically the parish priest makes present both the community love and care as well as the intangible overarching sense of a loving God who is there to comfort us in our time of lament and our journey through pain.  

Applying the word lament to the safeguarding activity of the Church, we can see a number of parallels with the bereavement process.  The original focus of a safeguarding case is not a death but a highly damaging and exploitative abuse of power.  In the majority of cases this has left a wound similar to a bereavement.  Ideally, the injured party should be met with a respectful caring individual who understands the process of abuse and is prepared to act as an echo for the lament that survivor/victim is feeling and wants to articulate.  Just as the skilled bereavement visitor gives permission for the sufferer to express all the emotions that are pouring out, so the safeguarding listener and responder is seeking to create a space to respect and honour the flood of feelings that survivor needs to express and thus understand.  The pain and lament are real and that is why, as the Archbishop of Canterbury and others have claimed many times, the feelings and emotional needs of the survivor have to be at the heart of every safeguarding event.  When we see this lament being shuffled off to the side because it makes someone important or an institution look bad, it is right that there should be a loud and vocal expression of outrage and protest.  The string of shameful events in the Church’s story over the past twenty or thirty years is a cause for deep sorrow and lament.  If the Church is ever to recover its role of providing light and inspiration for the nation, it will need to engage properly with its past shame and learn to enter the emotions that are summed up in the single word lament.  Honesty and an appropriate level of sorrow and remorse are what are required today.  Anything else resembling triumphalism or squabbling over issues which are fought to give one faction of the church power over another, seem massively petty when set against the enormous task of rediscovering the place of mercy, humility and justice that the prophet Micah so clearly sets before the Church.  Perhaps the task of reviving the Church could be boosted if our leaders were to show some true understanding of how to repent through a real experience of lament and sorrow.  It is perhaps thus we can find again our path back to experience anew the ‘steadfast love’ of God.     

Some words from Lamentations which were read to us last Sunday morning.   These are particularly appropriate as we contemplate a possible total collapse for the Church through its own failure to honour and uphold justice and integrity.  ‘The thought of my affliction and my homelessness is wormwood and gall! My soul continually thinks of it and is bowed within me.  But this, I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases …………great is your faithfulness.’