Wailing Women

In ancient times, guttural grief pierced every soul within earshot as these women’s wails cut between heaven and earth. They flailed their arms, threw dust on their heads, disheveled their hair, and even bared their breasts as they wept. Their cries were not in vain, they had a message to deliver. These women were instructors, midwives of mourning, tasked with modeling lament. Charged with communal grief work, wailing women of the ancient world publicly proclaimed that all was not well with their souls. Intimate knowledge of deep sorrow and sadness qualified older women to wail, but in Jeremiah 9, all of Israel’s daughters are beckoned to lead their community as they publicly grappled with grief, not as exhibitionists but as practitioners. In an ancient world where women held little institutional power, we witness a call for them to lead their community in the face of calamity.

Our cries of lament are necessary to mourn all that we’ve lost, all that’s been taken from us. Naming what has happened is vital to the healing process. Not a step to skip but a ritual to embrace, lament clarifies our limitations and our finitude. Lament contends with untamed grief. As we accept the sting of suffering, our grief becomes the seedbed for our healing, our strength. Extended from an individual process to a communal calling, we open the doors for our brothers and sisters, our sons and daughters, to thread their cries together and vocalize their anguish when we go first.

We may be tempted to gloss over our wounds with platitudes when wails are what’s truly needed. Our bodies hold our traumas, abuses, and shame, and as embodied creatures, we are not weak when we wail; rather, it’s in our cries of vulnerability that our strength is developed. Honestly, few of us have made it far in life unscathed, most of us bear scars that we wouldn’t wish on our worst enemy, yet it is the women who’ve spoken of the bitterness of life, it is the women who’ve named their losses and openly lamented their suffering, that have led us in times of tragedy. They’re the women we’ve been waiting for, the women we wail with. The women we’re becoming.

Tiffany Bluhm, The Women We’ve Been Waiting For, Brazos Press, a division of Baker Publishing Group, September 24, 2024. Used by permission.