LEARNING TO LAMENT:
Our Heavenly Father’s Embrace When We Grieve
By Paul Mallard
Union Publishing. 188 pages. £9.99
ISBN 978 1 739 342 661
One of the positive outcomes of the season marked by Covid was a renewed emphasis on Biblical lament. This timely book explores how Scripture provides us with a warrant to use Biblical lament as a robust mechanism for dealing with our puzzling questions, pain and grief.
Paul Mallard shows us how to be honest about expressing our feelings when we speak to the Lord about the pain in our lives. It is truly liberating to be given permission to tell God what we are feeling when life hurts, and to see these prayers of lament as within the range of true spirituality:
‘When we become Christians, we do not shed our humanity. To be human is to experience brokenness, frailty, and frustration – our Christian faith does not lift us above these things. Moreover, sadness does not constitute spiritual failure.’
The author displays a mastery of the psalms of lament, including the most difficult one of them all, Psalm 88. We are shown how these psalms relate to the overarching Biblical story that finds its climax in the person and work of Christ.
Yet this penetrating Biblical analysis is not the only reason why this book speaks with such resonance. What the author writes has been forged in the furnace of personal sorrows. We read here of the way that the author has used lament to help him navigate the death of his dad, walking alongside his wife in her 30-year experience of MS, and his grandson, born with multiple complicated health issues.
The word learning in the title is a reminder that the practice of faithful lament is shaped by a process of life-long learning. The heart needs to be trained in the art of expressing our emotions to God in prayer. This book is an invaluable tool in that training. It distills decades of Biblical reflection, pastoral practice, and a theology lived in the midst of real life; it teaches the reader to trust a loving God even at those points where we tremble with life’s pressures. The book is enhanced by the addition of a range of searching practical questions at the end of each chapter.
