Pilgrims of Hope: Lent 2025

Lamentation: A Prayer for the Soul

In his August 2024 keynote address at the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) Assembly, Reverend Bryan Massingale stated, “Lament opens the space for the new, for dreams and new vision.”

The evening before the second Synod gathering in October 2024, Pope Francis led a penitential vigil, acknowledging the Church’s collective sins. He reflected, “I wanted to write down the request for forgiveness because it was necessary to name our principal sins. We often hide them with polite words. Sin is always a wound in relationships—with God and with our sisters and brothers.”

Michael Guinan, OFM, observed, “Despite its wide-ranging presence in the Bible, we Christians have, by and large, lost touch with this dimension of prayer. It is something we need to recover.”

Our focus during Lent 2025 is “Pilgrims of Hope: Let Us Begin Again.” As challenging as it may be, we will name, acknowledge, and lament the ways we may have wounded our relationship with God, our sisters and brothers, and Mother Earth. Saint Francis of Assisi is quoted as saying,

“Let us begin again, for until now, we have done nothing.”

Both Francis and Jesus lived in a time of division, loss, distrust, exclusion, and power over the “other.” Lament prepares us to open our hearts to discern what must be done to navigate the challenges we face. Together, as pilgrims of hope, we seek forgiveness and begin again to “prepare for the arrival of something new.”

Join us on this Lenten Pilgrimage! Each week we’ll post a new Lenten reflection which will include a prayer, reflection questions, and ideas to put our hope into action. In addition, scroll for more resources about our Lenten theme and lamentations, as well as information about our Lenten Donation Drive.

Resources

• Lenten Message for 2025 by Pope Francis
• Our Time Is Holy: Lamenting and Dreaming in an Interim Time – Reverend Bryan Massingale
• Reflection of His Holiness Pope Francis – St Peter’s Basilica, Altar of the Confessio, Tues, Oct 1, 2024
• Biblical Laments: Prayer Out Of Pain – Michael D. Guinan, OFM

What is a Prayer of Lament?

Lament is a prayer that comes almost naturally but which few people appreciate.  Prayers of lament are expressions of frustration, anger, or grief that arise out of painful situations in which we feel overwhelmed, abandoned or punished by the presence of brokenness, suffering and loss.

Prayers of lament remind us of our human vulnerability, but they are also prayers of faith and hope. While lament expresses our deep frustration in a painful situation, it also expresses our trust in God, incarnate in Jesus Christ, who is already at work in the world, healing what needs to be healed and redeeming what needs to be redeemed.

 Expressions of lament are common in the Old Testament, where the Hebrew people frequently felt overwhelmed by the challenges they faced.  At least one-third of the Psalms are prayers of lament; lament is also common in the Prophets and plays a key role in the Book of Job.  An entire book of the Old Testament, Lamentations, consists of prayers of lament.  In the New Testament, people in need often approached Jesus with a short prayer of lament: “Jesus, son of David, have pity on me!” (cf. Mark 10.47).  

How to Create a Prayer of Lament

Generally, prayers of lament have three parts:

• the first part is a statement of complaint – an emotionally honest description of what is wrong.
• the second part is a request – it expresses what we are asking God to do
•  the third and final part is an expression of hope and trust – our confidence that God hears our prayer and will respond in God’s own way and in God’s own time.

Prayers of lament are highly emotional prayers that arise out of the heart (or the gut), not the head. That makes some people uncomfortable because they assume being so “real” or so honest before God is inappropriate or childish.  But God already knows how we feel, so our prayer is simply an expression of what we may be trying to hide inside.

 We may fear that prayers of lament make us look weak, helpless, vulnerable, or ungrateful, but that is often exactly how we feel in difficult and painful situations.  

The Book of Ecclesiastes reminds us that there is a time for everything, including a time to weep and a time to mourn.  Reverand Bryan Massingale encourages us to “turn to our faith tradition of lament to discern what must be done to better navigate the severe challenges that face us…. Lament prepares us for the arrival of the new.”  

Mindful Moment

One of the trickiest things about being a person is all the big, messy feelings we carry around inside us. Sometimes it’s helpful to create rituals that allow us to be with those feelings.
 
Lament is a special ritual that gives us a place to sit with our sadness. Let’s practice lament today. Have you ever lost someone you loved? (A person? A pet?) Or something you loved? (A special toy? A dream?)
 
Loss fills us with sadness, and that sadness shows us just how deeply we loved. It’s easy to try to fix our sadness or chase it away. But what moves it through our bodies in a healthy way is to do what Jesus, Mary, and Martha did: simply be sad.
 
Try putting one hand over your heart and one over your belly and take some deep belly breaths. Hold a picture in your mind of who or what you lost.
 
– Spend some time breathing as you sit with your sadness, whatever shape it takes.
-Notice how your sadness feels in your body. (Is it heavy? Hot? Wobbly? Squeezing?)
-Notice what thoughts you have and share them with God. (It’s not fair! I feel forgotten! You let me down! Why?)
-Think about how you can show love and care to someone else when they are lamenting.

Clark, Mariko. The Book of Belonging (p. 261). PRH Christian Publishing. Kindle Edition

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