When Lament Is the Only Honest Language

Feb 15
3 min read

February 15, 2026

A Meditation by Rev. Cameron Trimble*

(Posted Online Jan 09, 2026)

“Truth has stumbled in the public square, and uprightness cannot enter.” — Isaiah 59:14

Grief is accumulating faster than we can metabolize it.

Many of us are still reeling from the murder of Renee Nicole Good, a life taken by a federal ICE agent, followed not by humility or accountability from our national leaders, but by a manufactured narrative designed to justify the unjustifiable. Within hours, government officials labeled her a terrorist. Video evidence clearly contradicts those claims. The truth does not matter. Control of the story does.

Before that grief could even settle, more blood was spilled.

In Portland, Oregon, two additional people were shot by federal agents during an immigration enforcement operation. Once again, officials claimed necessity. Once again, communities are left stunned and terrified. Oregon Governor Tina Kotek named what many feel in our bodies: the federal government is causing chaos in our cities and shattering trust across the nation.

Power rarely admits its own violence. It reframes it. It renames the dead. It insists the victim deserved what happened. James Baldwin warned, “It is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent.”¹ And yet, innocence is precisely what this administration claims—through repetition, spectacle, fear and declarations of absolute immunity.

When the state kills and then lies about why, it asks the public to participate in unreality. That demand is itself a form of violence. Lament becomes refuge for the sane.

In the Hebrew scriptures, lament appears most fiercely when truth is under assault. The psalmist cries out not only against suffering, but against falsehood. Prophets rage when injustice is paired with deception. “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil,” Isaiah says—not as poetry, but as diagnosis.

This moment carries many layers of sorrow. The killing of innocent people. The terrorizing of immigrants. The violating of international laws. The withdrawal of the United States from global humanitarian commitments. The steady drumbeat of a masculinity that confuses domination with strength and cruelty with order. These are not separate events. They are expressions of the same moral corruption: the replacement of truth with power; and care with control.

Grief, in this context, is discernment.

The Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel once wrote that indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself. Lament is the refusal of indifference. It is what happens when conscience stays awake even as institutions fall asleep. It is what keeps us human when lies attempt to numb us.

So many of us are feeling anger, and it is warranted. Rage rises when accountability is mocked and victims are erased. Our African American and Native American siblings can attest after long histories of erasure. But lament gives rage a different shape. It slows it. Grounds it. Keeps it from becoming what it opposes. Lament says: This matters. This life mattered. Truth matters.

Faith traditions do not rush lament toward closure. They let it linger. They allow grief to speak in full sentences, not soundbites. They understand that before repair comes truth-telling, and before truth-telling comes the guttural cry: How long, O God?

So let us name together: calling Renee Nicole Good a terrorist does not make it so. Repeating a lie does not transform it into justice. And defending violence with propaganda deepens the wound it claims to heal.

We are allowed to cry.

We are allowed to rage.

We are allowed to say this is wrong, without qualification.

And we are allowed to keep believing in the long, unfinished work of goodness and justice, not because we are certain of outcomes, but because surrendering to lies would cost us our souls.

Be kind to your tender hearts this weekend. I’m going to let mine have a good cry. And then we get back to work for a more just and generous world.

We are in this together,

Cameron

*Rev. Cameron Trimble, Piloting Faith: An (Almost) Daily Meditation