It can sometimes seem as if Christians don’t have permission to be unhappy, to have regrets, to feel broken, to express deep sorrow, or to lament. Which would have been news to the writers of Scripture. The major giveaway being that there is literally a book of the Bible called “Lamentation”. The Psalms – the Bible’s very own songbook – has an entire genre called “Psalms of lament”. There are more psalms of lament than there are psalms of any other kind – in fact, a whole third of them are lamentation of one kind of another.

Like many teenagers who had a lovely upbringing in a safe suburb with kind parents and many friends, I was often miserable.

I spent many evenings with my cassette walkman, just the two of us, listening to doomy  English music like Depeche Mode, and thinking that no one else understood, or could possibly understand, just how deep I was. I specifically recall one of my friends’ mums looking at my miserable face and saying, “Cheer up, it might never happen.” To which I responded, “Too late. It already has.” And I was so pleased with this response that I probably would have smiled, had smiling not already become physically impossible for me.

There is a kind of sadness or melancholy which is delicious and addictive, which can make us feel special and, yes, even superior to others. A kind of misery that, if we give ourselves over to it, tips into self-indulgence and self-pity.

But you can also fall off the horse the other way. You can mistake “being chipper” for being godly. You can start to believe that Christians have no right to be sad about anything, because everything will be okily dokily in the end.

I’m afraid this poor theology has infected many of our churches, and it’s nowhere more obvious than in the songs we often sing. Some songs have so little gravity that NASA could use them to train astronauts in.

It’s not we that shouldn’t sing songs of joy, of course we should. But where are the songs of lament? It can sometimes seem as if Christians don’t have permission to be unhappy, to have regrets, to feel broken, to express deep sorrow, or to lament. Which would have been news to the writers of Scripture. The major giveaway being that there is literally a book of the Bible called “Lamentation”.

Read More