Hopeful Lament, Terra McDaniel. Downers Grove: IVP/Formatio, 2023.

Summary: Out of a string of experiences of loss, the writer, a spiritual director writes about grief, lament, and the hope inherent in biblical lament.

Terra McDaniel and her family went through a season of life where her friends began to liken her to Job. Their house burned to the ground, their daughter lost a child amid a life-threatening miscarriage, and her husband lost his pastoral position, resulting in their deparure from a church community they helped nurture from a home group.

As a spiritual director, and with the aid of others, she turned to the practice of lament to tend her grief. She writes because she believes we all need to recover the practice of lament. If nothing else, we’ve all lived through the experience of loss and grief in the pandemic, and the societal and environmental upheavals of recent years. And lament both heals and engenders hope in allowing us to express our griefs, all our emotions, questions and losses to God rather than being caught in a downward spiral.

Over ten chapters, she walks us through how this is so. Lament gives us permission to grieve and not suppress our grief but walk through it. Lament allows us to speak our sadness, with biblical lament offering us language to express our sorrows to God. Lament allows us to give our vulnerability, our “broken hallelujahs” to God and to discover that this is enough. She explores trauma and how it manifests physically and the practices that allow one to gently and safely lament trauma. She addresses how we lament when what we’ve lost is a toxic Christian community and the complicated work of both grieving and confessing our own complicity. Sometimes grief comes to whole families and she offers guidance of how we do that both individually and together, particularly with children who may grieve differently but need to grieve, whether it is the loss of a pet or a parent. Finally, she explores how we make our way through lament to life beginning anew.

Each of the chapters is accompanied with an exercise with suggestions both for adults and children. And this is one of the strengths of the work, its recognition that lament is important to children and shared experiences, whether making collages, using our bodies to express how we feel, or terra divina, identifying an object in nature and thinking about what God might say to us through the object.

McDaniel’s book gives permission to “feel all the feels” and express them to God, to take the time to tend and go through our grief, and offers ways to give voice both verbally and bodily, with all our being, to our laments. She shows sensitivity to safety, to what triggers, and to times when we need to get help. It’s a book born of real-life experience honestly shared. We and those we love will face loss. This book, along with caring friends, can be a trusted companion offering help and hope.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.