‘The traditional question of theodicy is, Why does God permit moral evil and permit suffering that serves no discernible good? If we hold that God is not impassible, then in addition to that question we have another: Why does God permit what disturbs God? Why does God allow what God endures in tears? I do not know the answer. In faith I live the question.’

A pastor is a general practitioner: someone who has to be able to deal with all kinds of situations, emergencies and crises. Anyone in such a position needs to know his limitations, and needs to recognise that there are occasions when the wisest course of action is simply to remain silent.

When it comes to dealing with bereavement, I know my limitations. I can sympathise and draw alongside people, but I know enough to know that mourning over a death is like death itself, to be experienced alone. To pretend to understand the pain of someone else is the worst form of hypocrisy.

I have found it particularly difficult to minister to those who have mourned the loss of their own children. Since I cannot begin to imagine what that pain must be like, I have had to find other ways of assisting people in it. One is to offer what I think is one of the most moving books I have read: Nicholas Wolterstorff’s ‘Lament for a Son’. I have recently been re-reading it, and it remains as powerful now as when I first picked it up.

Wolsterstorff is one of the world’s leading Christian philosophers. Having graduated with distinction in philosophy, he taught at Calvin College and Yale. His interest in philosophy led to a passion for social justice, and consequently Wolsterstorff has been asked to lecture on a variety of subjects.

However, when his son, Eric, died at the age of twenty-five in 1983, as the result of a mountain-climbing accident in Austria, it was as if his whole identity changed. He could no longer view himself as the consummate academic; in the words of the preface to his book he writes, ‘If someone asks, “Who are you, tell me about yourself,” I say – not immediately, but shortly – “I am one who lost a son”. That loss determines my identity…..’.

The story Wolsterstorff writes in ‘Lament for a Son’ is as profound as it is moving. Alternating between past and present, he describes the pain of travelling to Austria to claim his son’s body (‘Grim duty,’ he writes, ‘It had been his body. Now it was mine to claim, mine to sign documents of release for, mine to take ownership of’).

He reflects on why Eric had to be on that mountain at that time (‘His deepest self drew him there, a self his mother and I helped to shape’). And Wolsterstorff knows that he can never be the same again (‘I shall look at the world through tears. Perhaps I shall see things that dry-eyed I could not see’).

‘Lament for a Son’ combines the pain of a father’s loss with the incisiveness of a philosopher’s meditations. ‘There’s a hole in the world now,’ he writes. ‘In the place where he was, there’s now just nothing … There’s nobody now who saw just what he saw, knows what he knew, remembers what he remembered, loves what he loved….My son is gone. Only a hole remains’.

And haven’t we all been in the situation where we just have not known what to say to those who suffer the agony of bereavement and loss? How comforting, then, for miserable comforters to hear Wolsterstorff say that ‘Some blurted out strange, inept things. That’s OK too. Your words don’t have to be wise. The heart that speaks is heard more than the words spoken’.

I don’t find it easy to clothe thoughts with words; sometimes my attempts at sympathy seem pathetically shallow. I officiate at funerals and draw alongside mourners, but where will I find words with which to express someone else’s agony? Wolsterstorff has often been a corrective to my lame attempts to enter into a pain of which I know nothing: ‘I buried myself that warm June day,’ he writes. ‘It was me over whom we slid that heavy slab, more than I can lift’.

‘What do I do now with my regrets?’ he asks. A basket of regrets, he calls it: times when ‘I postponed writing letters… I unreasonably got angry with him…times he was sad and I saw, but did little or nothing to console… times he was something wonderful or did something fine and I was oblivious or silent’. Wolsterstorff’s suggestion is that the God of love will grant a day ‘when we can all throw ourselves into each other’s arms and say “I’m sorry”’.

This is a remarkable book. I regularly order it and give it away, more often than I would wish. In many ways, it ought to be mandatory reading for us all. It will keep us from speaking when silence will do; it will remind us that even although death is a great leveler, every death is unique.

Above all, it reminds us that there are some questions that cannot easily be answered. ‘I do not know why God would watch him fall. I do not know why God would watch me wounded. I cannot even guess’.

In an interview on the internet, Wolsterstorff is asked about his book. He concludes the interview with these words: ‘The traditional question of theodicy is, Why does God permit moral evil and permit suffering that serves no discernible good? If we hold that God is not impassible, then in addition to that question we have another: Why does God permit what disturbs God? Why does God allow what God endures in tears? I do not know the answer. In faith I live the question.’

Sometimes that is exactly how faith lives: asking questions and never finding answers. At least not in this world, where our tears, so often, are our food both by night and by day. When it comes to dealing with the dark night of the soul, I find Wolsterstorff a far better pastor than I can ever be.

Iain Campbell is a native of the Isle of Lewis in northwest Scotland where he serves as pastor of the Free Church of Scotland congregation in Point. He also serves as Adjunct Professor of Church History at Westminster Theological Seminary. This article first appeared on his blog, Creideamh ((pronounced ‘kray-jif’), Gaelic for ‘Faith’, and is used with his permission. http://creideamh.blogspot.com/