A Third of the Psalms Are Complaints

If you learned about the Psalms from music, you would assume the book is mostly praise. It is not. Scholars group the psalms into types, and the largest group by some distance is lament: psalms of complaint, addressed directly to God, about a situation that has not been fixed. Depending on how strictly you count, they are somewhere between a third and forty per cent of the book.

What a lament actually does

The form is remarkably consistent. It addresses God by name. It states the complaint plainly and often bluntly. It asks for something. And it usually — not always — turns at the end toward trust. That turn is what people remember. The three-quarters of the psalm before it is what they forget.

Psalm 13 opens with 'How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?' — four times the same question in two verses. Psalm 88 is the one to know about: it is a complete lament that never turns. It ends in the dark, with the last word being, in most translations, 'darkness'. It is in the book. It was kept, copied and sung for millennia, by people who evidently thought a prayer that does not resolve was worth preserving.

Why this matters if you are waiting

Almost everything produced for this audience says the same thing: give thanks, believe harder, speak it out. None of that is wrong, but as a complete diet it leaves a person with an unanswered prayer holding something the tradition has no words for — when in fact the tradition has an entire genre for it, and put it at the centre of its own prayer book.

The practical version: if you have been carrying something for years and have only ever been given the language of gratitude for it, you have been handed about two thirds of the vocabulary. The complaint is permitted. It is, statistically, the most common thing in the book.