A few weeks ago, a candidate for elected office said the wrong thing. In fact, they took a giant swing and missed by a yard.
Their campaign went into damage control mode. Meetings were held, community groups vied for their pound of flesh, and the candidate’s party scrambled to manage the fallout. That party then scrubbed a record of its own internal rebuke while the campaign added carefully crafted language to its website.
Ben Huelskamp
You might be able to figure out the story I’m referencing, or you might pass over it as yet another unremarkable gaffe in a world where gaffes have been traded for outrageous post-truth statements.
I’m not going to name the candidate, the party or the state here. That’s a deliberate choice, not an oversight. Even as I write a piece about our collective refusal to sit with hard things, I’m aware of my own impulse to keep this general; to gesture at “a situation” rather than say a name, to let the piece live a little further from controversy than it should.
That impulse is worth naming, because it’s the whole subject of this essay. Our complicity in moving on runs deeper than we like to admit, deep enough that I can’t fail to acknowledge it in myself.
You and I have watched it play out hundreds of times: Someone says the wrong thing, gets caught in a lie or is swept up in a controversy big or small. There’s a burst of attention. Statements are made, op-eds written, and a news cycle’s worth of righteous indignation unfolds. But within days the collective energy shifts toward the next story.
“This is maturity,” we tell ourselves. We call it “focusing on what matters” and rationalize it as “not getting distracted.” We double down on our desire to “stay on message.” We can confidently look at ourselves and our friends without shame.
But somewhere along the way, “not getting distracted” quietly becomes a euphemism for “making this go away before we have to reckon with what it cost someone.”
Moving on is comfortable, even safe. Staying — not so much.
We’ve built an entire civic and ecclesial habit of confusing the first for a virtue and the second for a character flaw as if the people who won’t let something go are the ones who lack perspective, rather than the ones who noticed something the rest of us are eager to forget.
This isn’t a partisan problem. It’s a human problem, and religious communities are not exempt. In fact, we may be worse. Equipped with centuries of theological and colloquial vocabulary for grace, forgiveness and reconciliation, we are tempted to employ the language of transformation to offer cheap relief.
“Lament doesn’t perform outrage and then pack up. It stays. It names what happened.”
Grace never was meant to excuse consequences. Forgiveness never was meant to erase wounds. Reconciliation always has meant engaging in the work of repair lest we practice avoidance.
There’s an older tradition than the one that pushes us to move on. It runs through the prophets, who refused to let people talk themselves out of what they’d seen. This tradition has strong roots in the practice of lament, which insists that some events and some situations don’t get resolved by the next news cycle and shouldn’t be rushed toward resolution just because sitting with them is unbearable.
Lament doesn’t perform outrage and then pack up. It stays. It names what happened, specifically, out loud, for as long as it takes, and it refuses the comfort of vagueness precisely because vagueness is where harm goes to hide.
As Christians, we’re called to the moral work of lament; indeed, it’s the work in front of us right now. But it’s smaller and harder than it sounds. It calls us to notice when we’re reaching for “let’s move forward” as a way to avoid staying with what actually happened. To ask, when we feel that pull toward the next story, whether we’re moving toward something or just running from the discomfort of having witnessed something true. To resist the language that treats memory as grudge-holding and treats forgetting as grace.
Of course, lament doesn’t require that we never move forward. Rather it precisely requires that we not confuse forward motion with erasure. A community that can’t sit with its own failures long enough to actually name them isn’t practicing grace. It’s practicing amnesia and hoping people won’t notice the difference.
I still haven’t told you who said what, or which party tried to bury its own criticism of them. That’s still on purpose. Find it if you want to (I don’t recommend it). But don’t let the finding be the end of the work.
The harder discipline isn’t learning what happened. It’s refusing to let yourself move on before you’ve taken the time to actually sit with it.
Ben Huelskamp serves as executive director of LOVEboldly and as pastor of Blue Ocean Faith Columbus.