Biblical Lament and Tahlequah the Orca

Lament is the practice of mourning what is wrong in the world and calling on God to repair it. We lament the sins for which we are responsible, the sins for which we are only indirectly responsible, and, perhaps especially, the sins for which we are not remotely responsible. We lament the things that are broken, whether or not we broke them. Lament, then, is part of repentance—of grieving personal sins and turning away from them.

But it’s also part of grieving the large-scale injustices for which we may be only indirectly complicit, and those losses that have no evident moral failure or culpability attached to them, but which result from living in a fractured world. In other words, lament is a practice that is appropriate whether I am repenting of the lustful thoughts I’ve been nurturing yet again, or whether I am grieving the death of Michael Brown and the structural injustices that have historically privileged white people in America, or whether I am mourning the death of a friend to cancer. Lament is a fitting response in any of these situations.

Tahlequah lamented the loss of her daughter for a thousand miles, off the coast of Seattle, Vancouver, and Victoria, British Columbia, swimming unceasingly through the same cold waters that had held her safe through seventeen months of pregnancy. An orca, Tahlequah pushed her calf, who had lived for less than an hour, through the Pacific Ocean for seventeen days before letting her go—an unprecedented show of mourning that drew international attention. Tahlequah’s pod of killer whales is endangered; they are dependent on Chinook salmon for food, but Chinook salmon are also endangered, so food is scarce.

Tahlequah’s baby wasn’t just her baby; it was her pod’s hope for the future. Now scientists say the seventy-five killer whales in the Salish Sea have only five years to produce offspring if they hope to continue to exist. I can’t help but think Tahlequah knows this, and her unparalleled tour of grief was a cry for humans to notice the damage we have done to natural habitats. Orcas gestate for seventeen months. Tahlequah mourned one day for every month she’d bonded with her calf. Perhaps this is coincidental, but I doubt it. Lament needs structure. Lament needs form. It will come in waves that cannot be entirely predicted. God will seem silent. The suffering must be honored. Relief, when it comes, may be minor, more exhausted than triumphant. And we must expect to be changed by our grief.