ISSUE No. 67 | March 2026
WELCOME
If you’re new to CULTIVARE we welcome you! CULTIVARE is a monthly field guide for life and faith, brought to you by TEND. Each month we explore a specific “field” – a topic or theme through which we seek to cultivate contemplation, engagement, and deeper understanding. Our guiding questions are:
What are you cultivating in your life?
What fruit do you want your life to bear?
Each issue of CULTIVARE is structured into three parts:
Cultivate: Examines a specific “Field” or facet of life and offers questions to unearth and challenge our held perspective; along with concise kernels of truth which we call “Seeds.”
Irrigate: Explores the ways we nurture our understanding, which varies from individual to individual. We offer six means of irrigation: Art, Poetry, Profile, Film, Essay, and Books.
Germinate: Encourages practical ways to engage in becoming more fruitful and free in our lives.
Our name, CULTIVARE, in Spanish means “I will cultivate.” We hope each issue of our field guide will encourage you to do just that – cultivate new thoughts, actions, faith, hope, and fruitful living. We invite you to dig in and DIG DEEP!
FIELD
For we are partners working together for God, and you are God's field.
(I Corinthians 3:9)
Our theme this month is lament. Lament is the soul’s honest confession: I am in pain. It is the posture of a heart that turns toward God and dares to ask for His advocacy. Lament is not the same as despair—though it may pass through despair’s shadows. Rather, it is grief given voice, sorrow made articulate before God. It is the anguished cry against suffering, persecution, injustice, and the atrocities of sin inflicted upon humanity and creation alike. Lament does not retreat into silence; it speaks. It protests what is broken and pleads—actively and expectantly—for relief, for justice, for deliverance.
At its heart, lament is the act of bringing our sorrow and suffering into the presence of God. It may be intensely personal, whispered in solitude, or it may rise from the gathered community as a shared cry. We lament our own wounds, the wounds of others, and even the sin within us that harms God’s world and the relationships He has graced us with. Far from being faith’s opposite, lament is one of its purest expressions. We lament because we trust that God hears—even when He seems silent. We lament because we believe that God cares, that He is good, and that He possesses the power to act—even when His action unfolds differently than we imagine or desire.
More than a third of the Psalms are laments—a striking reminder that grief and faith are not opposites but companions on the journey with God. This alone teaches us something essential: the life of faith is spacious enough to hold sorrow, protest, and longing. As theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wisely observed, “The Psalms teach us to pray. They show us how to bring our suffering before God.” The Psalms give us language for what we often struggle to say—anguish, confusion, pleading, hope—woven together in prayer.
Those who dwell deeply in these prayers discover that God does not ask for polished piety, but honest hearts. Lament reflects an act of trust: we bring our pain to God because we believe He hears. Even deep intimacy can carry a note of boldness and humor. Reflecting her profound closeness with God, Teresa of Ávila could pray, “Lord, if this is how you treat your friends, no wonder you have so few!” Such words remind us that lament is not faith’s failure—it is faith speaking candidly, courageously, and expectantly before the God who welcomes our tears.
In this issue we spotlight artist Käthe Kollwitz whose artwork spanned two World Wars and strikingly illuminated the loss, suffering, and grief of those in pain. We feature an essay by pastor Mark Vroegop who authored the book Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy: Discovering the Grace of Lament. And we profile Professor Jerry Sittser who wrote A Grace Disguised three years following a car accident that took the lives of his mother, wife and child. All three have much to teach us!
Lament stretches the heart toward God’s promised future. It refuses to let suffering have the final word and keeps alive our yearning for the day when sorrow will cease and justice will roll down like a mighty river. In lament, we anchor our pain to hope, daring to believe that the story is not yet finished.
And so we join the ancient chorus of God’s people: “How long, O Lord? How long?” This cry is not despair, but defiant trust—a prayer that leans forward into redemption. May God meet us in our weeping, strengthen us in our waiting, and knit us together as we lament both individually and as one body. (DG)
***
God, listen! Listen to my prayer, listen to the pain in my cries. Don’t turn your back on me just when I need you so desperately. Pay attention! This is a cry for help! And hurry—this can’t wait! (Psalm 102:1-2 MSG)
For no one is cast off by the Lord forever. Though he brings grief, he will show compassion, so great is his unfailing love. For he does not willingly bring affliction or grief to anyone. (Lamentations 3:31–33 NIV)
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
(Matthew 5:4 NIV)
As he approached Jerusalem and saw the city, he wept over it and said, “If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace, but now it is hidden from your eyes.”
(Luke 19:41–42 NIV)
***
TEND CAN HELP! If you would like to take tangible steps working toward a new chapter in your life TEND can help. Explore our offerings by clicking here:
SEEDS
A handful of quotes to contemplate and cultivate into your life
Lament is the language of a people who know God well enough to complain.
(Walter Brueggemann)
In the disorientation of life, we need a language for the pain, a vocabulary for the dark nights of the soul. (John Mark Comer)
Nothing heals us like letting people know our scariest parts: When people listen to you cry and lament...it's like they are holding the baby of you. (Anne Lamont)
It’s no secret that we as a culture are uncomfortable with lament. Rarely do we look to share our pain publicly. In fact, we are encouraged to mourn quietly and in private.
(Latasha Morrison)
The Psalms are a gymnasium for the soul—lament trains us to speak truth to God.
(Kathleen Norris)
The American church avoids lament. The power of lament is minimized and the underlying narrative of suffering that requires lament is lost. But absence doesn’t make the heart grow fonder. Absence makes the heart forget. The absence of lament in the liturgy of the American church results in the loss of memory. We forget the necessity of lamenting over suffering and pain. We forget the reality of suffering and pain. (Soong-Chan Rah)
Prayerful lament is better than silence. However, I've found that many people are afraid of lament. They find it too honest, too open, or too risky. But there's something far worse: silent despair. Giving God the silent treatment is the ultimate manifestation of unbelief. Despair lives under the hopeless resignation that God doesn't care, he doesn't hear, and nothing is ever going to change. People who believe this stop praying, they give up. This silence is a soul killer. (Mark Vroegop)
I shall look at the world through tears. Perhaps I shall see things that dry-eyed I could not see. (Nicholas Wolterstorff)
Lament is the honest cry of a hurting heart wrestling with the paradox of pain and the promise of God's goodness. (Christopher J.H. Wright)
ART
Artist of the Month
Käthe Kollwitz
(1867-1945)
By Greg Ehlert
Käthe Kollwitz stands among the most powerful visual voices of lament in modern art. Working in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Germany, she devoted her life to depicting the suffering of the poor, the grief of mothers, and the devastation of war. Her art does not turn away from pain; it enters it. In etchings, lithographs, woodcuts, and sculpture, Kollwitz created a visual language of lament through which private sorrow and public tragedy converge.
Born in 1867 in Königsberg, Kollwitz came of age amid industrialization and widening social inequality. After marrying Dr. Karl Kollwitz, a physician who served the working-class poor in Berlin, she encountered daily the toll of poverty: hunger, illness, and exhaustion carried by the bodies of laborers and their families. These realities shaped her early prints, including The Weavers and The Peasants’ War, in which she portrayed collective struggle and crushed hope. Her figures bend, huddle, reach, and collapse; their hands are often oversized, expressive, and raw. Even before personal tragedy struck, her art bore the marks of solidarity with the suffering. She lamented not only individual loss but systemic injustice.
The deepest wound of her life came in 1914, when her younger son, Peter, was killed in the opening weeks of the First World War. His death marked a decisive turn in her work. Grief was no longer engaged from a distance but took root in her personal experience. In her journals she wrote of an abyss that opened within her, a grief that could not be reasoned away. Out of this darkness emerged some of her most searing works: the woodcut piece War and, over many years, the sculptural memorial The Grieving Parents, installed in a Belgian cemetery where Peter is buried. The two stone figures—mother and father—kneel in silent anguish, their forms heavy, their faces withdrawn. The sculpture embodies lament as a posture: bowed, attentive, unresolved.
Kollwitz’s woodcuts from the 1920s intensify this language of lament. In stark black and white, mothers clutch lifeless children; widows gather in shared sorrow; crowds press forward in desperation. The medium itself with harsh cuts into wood and bold contrasts mirrors the severity of her subject matter. There is little ornament or background. Suffering stands in the foreground and is unavoidable yet her art is not nihilistic. Even in images of death, there is a fierce tenderness: arms encircle, bodies shelter, faces lean close. Lament, for Kollwitz, is bound up with love and is rooted in the reality of the preciousness of life.
Under the rise of National Socialism, Kollwitz was forced to resign from the Prussian Academy of Arts and was increasingly isolated. Nonetheless, she continued to work and created images that warned against war and pleaded for peace. Her famous poster “Never Again War!” distills lament into protest with a cry that grief should never again be repeated. Here lament becomes ethical, even prophetic.
Käthe Kollwitz died in 1945, months before the end of another catastrophic war. Her legacy endures because she teaches us that lament is not weakness but witness. Through honest engagement with the pain of loss and suffering, she made sorrow visible and dignified. She invites us to look steadily at suffering, to grieve honestly, and to hold fast to compassion in a fractured world.
Explore more of Kollwitz’s work at the following websites:
Berlin Kollwitz Museum: View Now
Cologne Kollwitz Museum: View Now
POETRY
A Short Testament
By Anne Porter
Whatever harm I may have done
In all my life in all your wide creation
If I cannot repair it
I beg you to repair it,
And then there are all the wounded
The poor the deaf the lonely and the old
Whom I have roughly dismissed
As if I were not one of them.
Where I have wronged them by it
And cannot make amends
I ask you
To comfort them to overflowing,
And where there are lives I may have withered around me,
Or lives of strangers far or near
That I've destroyed in blind complicity,
And if I cannot find them
Or have no way to serve them,
Remember them. I beg you to remember them
When winter is over
And all your unimaginable promises
Burst into song on death’s bare branches.
“A Short Testament” by Anne Porter from Living Things. © Zoland Books, 2006
PROFILE
Jerry Sittser
By Bonnie B. Fearer
One might say that lament, at its deepest level, is an existential reckoning—an outpouring of bewildered anguish to a God whose sovereign goodness sometimes seems starkly, and painfully, at odds with our life experience. Such is the story of Jerry Sittser, whom we are profiling in this issue.
In 1991, Jerry Sittser was a religious studies professor at Whitworth University, happily married for 20 years to his wife Lynda, and father to four children. As he and his wife were snuggled one night on the couch after the kids were in bed, she commented on how happy she was and said, “I can’t imagine life being any better than it is right now.” The next day, the Sittser family, including Jerry’s mother, Grace, took a field trip to a nearby reservation as part of a homeschooling study on Native American tribes. As they headed home that night, their minivan was struck head-on by a drunk driver and, in one instant, Jerry Sittser lost three generations of his family. His mother, his wife, and his 4-year-old daughter all died instantly. In the mangle of twisted metal and broken glass, Sittser tried to attend to his other three children, one of whom was screaming in pain with a broken leg, all of them traumatized beyond comprehension.
In his book, A Grace Disguised: How the Soul Grows Through Loss (here), Sittser recounts a waking dream he had after the accident. He said:
I dreamed of a setting sun. I was frantically running west, trying desperately to catch it and remain in its fiery warmth and light. But I was losing the race. The sun was beating me to the horizon and was soon gone. I suddenly found myself in the twilight. Exhausted, I stopped running and glanced with foreboding over my shoulder to the east. I saw a vast darkness closing in on me. I was terrified by that darkness. I wanted to keep running after the sun, though I knew that it was futile, for it had already proven itself faster than I was. So I lost all hope, collapsed to the ground, and fell into despair. I thought at that moment that I would live in darkness forever. I felt absolute terror in my soul.
This vision was so disturbing to him that he shared it with his sister, who told him that the quickest way to reach the sun and light of day was not to run west, chasing after the setting sun, but to head east, “plunging into the darkness until one comes to the sunrise.” And thus began Jerry Sittser’s journey through tumultuous grief and lament.
Embedded in every catastrophic loss are the existential questions it raises. Why, God? If you are so good, how could you allow this to happen? What do you want from me? Sittser had gone into the field of theology because he liked to ask the deep questions; now, he had to. Lament is the arena for such questions, and it is the prayer language of suffering. Sittser allowed lament to shape him and change him. As he struggled with the new reality of being the single father of three young children and full-time professor, all while swimming through the depths of trauma and depression, he remained aware that he still had choices about the direction of his life. The choice to lament his losses—facing them rather than running from them or numbing them—became his daily work. He said, “I wanted to pray but had no idea what to say, as if struck dumb by my own pain. Groans became the only language I could use, if even that, but I believed it was language enough for God to understand.”
Jerry Sittser wrote A Grace Disguised three years after the accident that took his mother, wife and child. In concluding the book, he said that he had neither “recovered,” nor “gotten over it.” The tragedy would remain with him and color the rest of his life. And yet…he was able to say this:
Never have I felt so broken; yet never have I been so whole. Never have I been so aware of my weakness and vulnerability; yet never have I been so content and felt so strong. Never has my soul been more dead; yet never has my soul been more alive. What I once considered mutually exclusive—sorrow and joy, pain and pleasure, death and life—have become parts of a greater whole. My soul has been stretched.
Perhaps that’s what lament is—the deep cry we utter as our soul is being stretched.
To read more about Jerry Sittser, visit here
FILM
Each month we recommend films focused on our theme
Feature Film
Silence
(2016)
The film is based on a novel of the same name by Shūsaku Endō. Set in the 17th century, it tells the story of two Portuguese Jesuit priests (played by Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver) who set out for Japan in search of their mentor (played by Liam Neeson) who is rumored to have apostatized in the face of persecution. While there, the two men minister to the Christian villagers who worship in secret. If caught by feudal lords or ruling samurai, they must renounce their faith or face a prolonged and agonizing death.
The film does not sugarcoat missionary life. Though the choices of some of the characters are questionable, the reality of what persecution and torture can do to a soul is not hidden. No one—not even a priest or missionary—is exempt from temptation, and even failure. Human nature is weak, and the movie is a stark reminder of that. This is not a movie about answers. God’s silence is not resolved; it is endured. The film refuses the easy link between faithfulness and visible victory. Lament is remaining in relationship when God does not explain himself.
This film can disturb certainty; that disturbance is the point. Directed by Martin Scorsese. Nominated for the Academy Award for Best Cinematography. Available on various streaming services.
Watch the trailer here: View Now
Short Films
The After
(2023)
(18 minutes)
The After is a 2023 British short film directed by Misan Harriman in his directorial debut and written by John Julius Schwabach from a story by Harriman. The film starring David Oyelowo and Jessica Plummer, tells the story of Dayo, a grieving Uber driver who, after losing family members to a violent crime, picks up a passenger who helps him confront the past. Nominated for the Academy Award for Best Short Film. Available on various streaming services.
Watch the trailer here: View Now
A Theologian Reflects on Lament:
John Goldingay on Lament
(11 minutes)
John Goldingay is Professor of Old Testament in the School of Theology at Fuller Theological Seminary. In this video from Fuller Studio Dr. Goldingay discusses the Psalms of Lament and their applicability to the Christian life.
Sermon
The Necessity of Lament
Soong-Chan Rah
What happens when the church does not know how to lament? When the church doesn’t know how to engage with the pain and suffering that is in our communities, neighborhoods, nation? Soong-Chan Rah observes that it often disconnects us from God’s sense of justice and injustice in the world because if you don’t lament you don’t acknowledge the presence of injustice, and you don’t acknowledge the presence of pain and suffering. Sadly, churches often ignore what is going on in the world because their community fails to lament. Listen to this sermon from Fuller Seminary professor Soong-Chan Rah when he served as guest preacher at Washington Community Fellowship in Washington DC.
ESSAY
Dare to Hope in God:
How to Lament Well
By Mark Vroegop
Since life is full of sorrows, and since the Bible is clear about the plan of God, Christians should be competent lamenters. We should regularly talk to God about our sorrows and struggles. Christians should learn to lament. (Mark Vroegop)
Mark Vroegop is the lead pastor of College Park Church in Indianapolis, and the author of Dark Cloud, Deep Mercy: Discovering the Grace of Lament (which we highly recommend). In this short article published in Desiring God, Vroegop offers practical helps in understanding lament and helping individuals and church communities to learn to lament. He concludes:
Until Jesus returns, the world will be marked by tears. Children will continue to be born and their first cry will announce their arrival into a broken world. To cry is human, but to lament is Christian.
Read the article here: View Now
Explore his book Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy: Discovering the Grace of Lament here: View Now
BOOKS
Each month we recommend a book (or two) focused on our theme
NON-FICTION
Prophetic Lament
By Soong-Chan Rah
When Soong-Chan Rah planted an urban church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, his first full sermon series was a six-week exposition of the book of Lamentations. Preaching on an obscure, depressing Old Testament book was probably not the most seeker-sensitive way to launch a church. But it shaped their community with a radically countercultural perspective.
The American church avoids lament. But lament is a missing, essential component of Christian faith. Lament recognizes struggles and suffering, that the world is not as it ought to be. Lament challenges the status quo and cries out for justice against existing injustices.
Soong-Chan Rah's prophetic exposition of the book of Lamentations provides a biblical and theological lens for examining the church's relationship with a suffering world. It critiques our success-centered triumphalism and calls us to repent of our hubris. And it opens up new ways to encounter the other. Hear the prophet's lament as the necessary corrective for Christianity's future.
FICTION
Homegoing
By Yaa Gyasi
Effia and Esi are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and lives in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle. Unbeknownst to Effia, her sister, Esi, is imprisoned beneath her in the castle’s dungeons, sold with thousands of others into the Gold Coast’s booming slave trade, and shipped off to America, where her children and grandchildren will be raised in slavery. One thread of Homegoing follows Effia’s descendants through centuries of warfare in Ghana, as the Fante and Asante nations wrestle with the slave trade and British colonization. The other thread follows Esi and her children into America. From the plantations of the South to the Civil War and the Great Migration, from the coal mines of Pratt City, Alabama, to the jazz clubs and dope houses of twentieth-century Harlem, right up through the present day, Homegoing makes history visceral, and captures, with singular and stunning immediacy, how the memory of captivity came to be inscribed in the soul of a nation.
CHILDRENS
Tear Soup:
A Recipe for Healing After Loss
by Pat Schwiebert and Chuck DeKlyen
Tear Soup is a family story book that centers around an old and somewhat wise woman, Grandy. Grandy has just suffered a big loss in her life and so she is headed to the kitchen to make a special batch of Tear Soup. To season her soup Grandy adds memories like the good times and the bad times, the silly and the sad times. She does not want to forget even one precious memory of her loss. If you are going to buy only one book on grief, this is the one to get! It will validate your grief experience, and you can share it with your children. You can leave it on the coffee table so others will pick it up, read it, and then better appreciate your grieving time. Grand's Cooking Tips section at the back of the book is rich with wisdom and concrete recommendations. Better than a casserole! Winner of the 2001 Theologos Book Award, presented by the Association of Theological Booksellers.
DIG DEEPER
Practical suggestions to help you go deeper into our theme
1. QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION
Devote some time and thought to these reflective questions on our theme:
a. What is your natural response to things that make you sad or mad?
b. What do you tend to do with your pain? How do you act it out? Rationalize it? Blame it on others? Deny it?
c. What messages about crying did you pick up as a child?
d. According to Psalm 56:8, God collects your tears and puts them in a bottle (ESV). How does it feel to reflect on this?
e. What does it mean to you that the Trinity is in a solidarity with the pain and suffering of humanity?
f. Turn to John 11 and imagine you are present when Jesus begins to weep (v. 35). Pay attention to him. What do his tears say to you?
g. What may God be inviting you to lament for in this season?
2. BOOK OF LAMENTATIONS
Some of us may forget that there is a specific book of the Bible about lamenting called Lamentations. It is a commonly overlooked and underappreciated book of the Bible. To remedy that we offer two video resources on the book of Lamentations. They include:
*The Bible Project video on Lamentations (7 minutes): View Now
*Fuller Seminary Professor Cynthia Erickson illuminating Lamentations video (5 minutes): View Now
3. SONG: DEATH OF A SON by Michael Card
We encourage you to listen to this song written by Michael Card based on Psalm 22: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? A beautiful example of lament. View Now
4. SUFFERING IN GOD’S PRESENCE: THE ROLE OF LAMENT IN TRANSFORMATION
In this insightful article by Elizabeth Lewis Hall, Professor of Psychology at Rosemead School of Psychology, she observes: When our theological world view is weak lament bolsters it by reminding us of that foundational reality of a loving God. Lament also helps us to bridge this gap by putting our suffering, our view of the particular event in the larger context of the world view bringing those two together so that we are increasingly bringing our suffering into the redemptive domain of this loving God who is in control of this world that we find so incredibly uncontrollable.
Read the entire article here: View Now
5. PRAYER
O Lord, you who welcome our bitter tears and our raging words of protest, cease your silence and hear me this day: Awake, Lord! Rouse yourself! Heed my cries! Be the God that you say you are and do not abandon me to my pain! Show yourself, I pray, and meet me in the depths, so that I may know that there is a God in heaven who hears my voice and sustains me in the hour of my need. I pray this in the name of the God of Job. Amen.
(Prayer from Prayers for the Pilgrimage by W. David O Taylor)
ROOTED
But blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord,
whose confidence is in him.
They will be like a tree planted by the water
that sends out its roots by the stream.
It does not fear when heat comes;
its leaves are always green.
It has no worries in a year of drought
and never fails to bear fruit.
(Jeremiah 17:7-8 NIV)
POLLINATE
CULTIVARE is a ministry of TEND and is offered free to our subscribers. We are grateful to our donors who help underwrite our costs. If you would like to support the ongoing work of CULTIVARE, please consider us in your giving. All financial contributions to TEND
(a 501c3 ministry) for CULTIVARE are tax-deductible.
Subscribe to CULTIVARE for free!
FIELD NOTES
Images used in order of appearance:
1. FIELD: From https://www.faithward.org/a-call-to-justice-and-mercy/
2. SEEDS: Aztec ritual weeping; Florentine Codex, Book 1, Laurentine Library of Florence, Florence, Italy.
3. ART: All three images are of Kathe Kollwitz work. They include:
a. Lamentation (1938-1941), Bronze, St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO.
b. Grieving Parents (1914-1932), slightly enlarged replicas of the original sculptures,
shell limestone, German federal memorial for the fallen of the two world wars in the
church ruins of Alt St. Alban, Cologne; executed by the workshop of Ewald Mataré
in 1953/54, inaugurated in 1959.
c. Seed Corn Must Not be Milled (1942), Lithograph, Kathe Kollwitz Museum, Cologne, Germany.
4. POETRY: Albert György, Melancholy (2012), Lake Geneva, Switzerland.
5. PROFILE: Photo of Jerry Sittser, uncredited. https://www.jerrysittser.com/bio
6. FILM: Ultra-Orthodox Jews pray at the Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest site, in Jerusalem. Photograph: Atef Safadi/EPA
7. ESSAY: Makoto Fujimora, Charis-Kairos (The Tears of Christ) (2008). The painting is frequently curated by Waterfall Gallery, NYC, https://www.waterfall-gallery.com/
8. BOOKS: Evelyn Williams, Couple Reaching Up (1981) https://fineartamerica.com/featured/couple-reaching-up-evelyn-williams.html
9. DIG DEEPER: Eduardo Kingman, Woman at a Wake (1955)
10. ROOTED: Eduardo Kingman, Grief (Desconsuelo) (1981)
TEAM CULTIVARE: Duane Grobman (Editor), Greg Ehlert, Bonnie Fearer, Lisa Hertzog, Shinook Kang, Eugene Kim, Olivia Mather, Andrew Massey, Rita McIntosh, Jason Pearson (Design: Pearpod.com)
WE'RE LISTENING:
We welcome hearing your thoughts on this issue
and suggestions for future issues.
Email us at: info@tendwell.org
