Lin-Manuel Miranda is a blessing for the USA for which I am truly grateful. I suspect that my reasons for saying that are somewhat different from those which his high-profile fans, supporters, and friends would offer, but I’m no less serious for all that. Of all my reasons, the most important—if we could learn to listen—might be this: he offers our death-denying culture a model for lament.
The novelist and publisher Carolyn Givens wrote beautifully about this in an essay posted on The Rabbit Room a couple months ago called “Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hopeful Grief.” Givens reflects on “Alabanza” from In the Heights and “It’s Quiet Uptown” from Hamilton, which she calls “two of the most beautiful and hopeful expressions of grief I’ve ever heard.”
Givens considers Miranda’s work in the light of a brilliant insight from Walter Brueggman: lament is “the language of disorientation.”
In “It’s Quiet Uptown,” that disorientation is front and center—it’s the heart of the song. As Jeremy McCarter put it in Hamilton: The Revolution, “One day [Lin] realized that his inability to grasp the enormity of Alexander and Eliza’s loss wasn’t a barrier to writing the song, it was the song.”
In the Heights has Usnavi express the community’s disorientation with the words, “When she was here, the path was clear. And she was just here, she was just here . . .” The song “Alabanza” is the communal response to that disorientation: when your source of gravity is gone and the compass is spinning aimlessly, lift it up to the Lord.
This illustrates Givens’ point that lament is directional:
its bent is toward God. It is honest about pain, and it is a surrendering of that pain and of the tension of who God is and what we see. Lament engages God in the pain, but trusts God—he will renew our spirits, but that renewal is birthed out of pain. . . . Directional lament is a beautiful, hopeful thing.
This means lament has two profound effects on us. First, it makes hope possible, because it moves our horizon beyond our pain. Perhaps we might say that it orients our disorientation—it doesn’t remove it, but lament gives us the perspective to remember that our disorientation neither extends nor lasts forever. Second, lament enables us to speak our anger and pain without having to make it go away or find someone to blame. In Brueggeman’s words,
What the psalms of disorientation do is lift up and call attention to the reality of human loss and human pain without making moral judgments about whose fault it is. It is simply a given of human life that needs to be processed theologically.
Contemporary Western culture does not, on the whole, face death honestly. Its animating spirit is that of Woody Allen: “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve immortality through not dying.” Because of this, our culture lacks a robust practice of lament. As much as possible, we localize dying to health-care facilities and grief to monuments and memorials, keeping both safely out of the ordinary run of life. Given Brueggeman’s observation, I’m beginning to wonder if this is why our dominant cultural response to suffering and disaster is “making moral judgments about whose fault it is.” Could it be that we politicize every calamity because it’s the only way we have to deal with it?