Teaching Through the Lens of Lament

Nearing the end of my lecture on comparative religion, I shifted subjects. I was speaking on the philosophical problem of evil: How can God be all good and all powerful when there is so much suffering in the world? After a brief overview of this problem (I don’t think it swamps theism), I moved from the conceptual to the existential by speaking of my experience with suffering in light of my deepest convictions. All eyes — except two, which were closed — were on me; the fidgeting stopped, and the class was hanging on my words. All teachers savor these moments.

I told these students that my wife suffers from a rare and viciously cruel form of dementia called primary progressive aphasia. Her words recede from her thoughts, and her thoughts recede from reality. It will only get worse. We found out in March of 2014 when she was hospitalized for depression. That was the year of learning things I never wanted to know — the etiquette of psychiatric units, the prognosis for my wife’s illness, how to endure the decline of a brilliant woman who is my wife, how to become her legal guardian and conservator, and how to soldier on despite it all as a husband, philosopher, and professor.

I am learning to graft my story into my teaching. In this, I have an authoritative model. When writing of the inhumanity of the Nazi concentration camps, Viktor Frankl was hesitant to be named as author because of his “fear of exhibitionism.” Yet Man’s Search for Meaning became a classic of the 20th century. Frankl, a young Jewish psychiatrist, had to speak his name so the tale could be told aright. He was there. I lack Frankl’s genius, but my students seem to benefit by reflecting on suffering through the lens of my lament.

The classroom — which I strive to make a sanctuary for knowledge — is where I am fully alive, intellectually and emotionally. I improvise within the matrix of text, teacher, and student. But what does my autobiography have to do with it?

If Nietzsche is right, I cannot ignore the contours of my life when teaching, since, as he argued, all philosophy is autobiography. George Santayana went further. When asked what he was teaching one term, he replied, “Santayana 1, Santayana 2, and Santayana 3.” That may be overstated, but not by much. Nothing happening in my life is very far from my vocation as a professor. I teach on the problem of evil, and I live through the reality of suffering. But one should be wary of oversharing, as my students say. Given the endless ego effusions on Facebook, that is easy to do. What should we say and when?

One of my mentors, a longtime professor at my institution, said, “When you unzip the viscera in the classroom, you should only go so far.” The podium is not a confessional, nor are students our counselors. Both applause lines and tear jerkers should be avoided. Our candor is best shared in measured doses, lest we embarrass our students and ourselves. And yet, we are part of an educational community. We are not merely imparting information but investing in our students, many of whom want to hear our stories.

By teaching our subjects in light of our suffering, we enliven our discourse. We participate in it rather than only talk about it. This has been my experience in teaching about suffering through the lens of lament.

Lament is a category of literature and a mode of existence. It is a response to suffering and a form of suffering itself. Lament is the anguished cry of sorrow, grief, and often anger. Frequently, but not always, it cries out for healing and resolution. Sometimes lament agonizes over an irretrievable loss. Lament is stirred by the loss of perceived value or by fearing its loss. We may lament over ourselves, others, or the whole world. The teacher of the Book of Ecclesiastes does all three. He writes what is perhaps the most poetic of all laments. As the King James translation puts it:

I returned, and saw under the sun,
that the race is not to the swift,
nor the battle to the strong,
neither yet bread to the wise,
nor yet riches to men of
understanding,
nor yet favour to men of skill;
but time and chance
happeneth to them all.

Laments make up about 60 of the 150 Psalms in the Hebrew Bible. Laments may be religious or secular. Pink Floyd’s classic album, Dark Side of the Moon, is a nonreligious lament of depth and beauty concerning money, aging, insanity, and death. I listened to it after spending 12 hours in the emergency room before my wife was admitted to a psychiatric unit.

Lament can also be felt musically in John Coltrane’s “Alabama,” which I play for my students so that they learn jazz lament. On September 15, 1963, four black schoolgirls were murdered while they were getting ready for church services at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. Without words, while telling a story, Coltrane’s quartet voices sadness and anger over the bombing. These children became civil-rights martyrs. As James Cone wrote in The Spirituals and the Blues, the old Negro spirituals exude lament over slavery, but with a hope for redemption on earth and beyond. Coltrane tapped into this rich vein of moral sentiment.

I have not experienced racism, but I am moved by this music and the story behind it. “Alabama” challenges me to lament over social injustices, yesterday and today. It resonates universally with the human condition. It gives me another voice to lament the ravages of my wife’s dementia and to feel for all those suffering from dementia. I hope this mournful song triggers an awareness of suffering, injustice, and hope in my students. It may lead them to more compassionate and productive lives of service for those denied their due.

Suffering well before our students also paves avenues for empathic knowledge. Philosophers often define knowledge as justified true belief. But there is another dimension to how humans receive reality. To empathize is to put oneself into the inner world of another, simulating their being in the world as we can. This has epistemic as well as therapeutic benefits. It belongs in both the counseling office and the classroom.

I may explain Frankl’s theory of suffering by quoting from his books, rephrasing his ideas, discussing them with students, and testing them. Through this, my students gain knowledge. But when I add that Frankl’s ideas kept me going when I visited my wife in a psychiatric unit, another layer of knowing emerges. Frankl’s psychological theory, his story of suffering, and my experience meet in agreement and win a deeper hearing. When I tell my class that I had to smelt meaning out of suffering while aspiring to be “worthy of my suffering” (a phrase Frankl drew from Dostoevsky), students can begin to empathize with me and learn more from Frankl. They may encounter ideas from the inside-out through their emotional perception and imagination.

Seeing through tears may be the truest seeing of all. So there is no need to ban suffering from our pedagogy. By suffering well with students, qua students, teachers can breathe new knowledge into their classrooms and so curate a community of intellectual achievement and emotional involvement.

Douglas Groothuis is a professor of philosophy at Denver Seminary and the author of Philosophy in Seven Sentences, published this year by InterVarsity Press.