'Lament For A Son' by Nicholas Wolterstorff

 This is beautiful and painful.

 It is not a book in the ordinary sense of the word, it is more like a collection of diary entries - but all on one subject. The author is grieving for his twenty-five year old son who died while climbing a mountain. It is a ‘Grief Observed’, but more eclectic, perhaps more intimate. There is sadness in every entry; gentle prose; some poetry; many questions; some profundity, and some bruised hope. It is a book to read slowly. After finishing it, I thought I should go through it again and write down some of what is there. Here is what I copied.

 Every lament is a love-song. Will love-songs one day no longer be laments?

 We took him too much for granted. Perhaps we all take each other too much for granted. The routines of life distract us…I didn’t know how much I loved him until he was gone. Is love like that?’

 His absence is as present as our presence, his silence as loud as our speech.

 It is the neverness that is so painful. Never again to be here with us…Only our death can stop the pain of his death.

 Must we all be swept forever on, away, beyond, beauty lost, and love, sorrow hard on sorrow, until the measure of our losses has been filled?

 Each death is as unique as each life…and the solitude of suffering which accompanies that uniqueness. We say ‘I know how you are feeling’. But we don’t.

 I shall look at the world through tears. Perhaps I shall see things that dry-eyed I could not see

 Nothing fills the void of his absence

 My son is gone. Only a hole remains, a void, a gap, never to be filled.

 But please: Don’t say it’s not really so bad. Because it is. Death is awful, demonic.

 To comfort me, you have to come close. Come sit beside me on my mourning bench.

 To fully persuade us of death’s reality, and of its grim finality, our eyes and hands must rub against death’s cold hard body, body against body, painfully.

 Now here I was, standing in front of that congregation, they too standing, tears streaming down my face and down theirs, tears answering to tears.

 I do not remember what I said – only that he was a bright flower cut down before he bloomed, that I did not know how much I loved him until he died, and that his great love was his death.

 Mystery, terrible mystery

 Something is over. In the deepest levels of my existence something is finished, done.

 Instead of lines of memory leading up to his life in the present, they all enter a place of cold inky blackness and never come out.

 Sorrow is no longer the islands but the sea

 When someone loved leaves home, home becomes a mere house

 I walked into a store. The ordinariness of what I saw repelled me…How could everybody be going about their ordinary business…?

 Is there no music that fits our brokenness? The music that that speaks about our brokenness is not itself broken. Is there no broken music?

 Grief isolates…As each death has its own character, so too each grief over a death has its own character – its own inscape. My sorrow is not your sorrow.

 Wounded love is special love, special in its wound. Now I think of him every day; before I did not.

 Death is shalom’s mortal enemy. Death is demonic. We cannot live at peace with death. The writer of Revelation…said on that day, ‘There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain for the old order of things has passed away.’

 I shall accept my regrets as part of my life

 God is appalled by death

 I do not know why God did not prevent Eric’s death. I have no explanation. I can do nothing else than endure in the face of this deepest and most painful of mysteries

 My wound is an unanswered question. The wounds of all humanity are an unanswered question.

 And where are you (God) in this darkness? I learned to spy you in the light. Here in the darkness I cannot find you.

 A bruised faith, a longing faith, a faith emptied of nearness

 Everyone knows that there is no technology for overcoming death. Death is left for God’s overcoming.

 Our net of meaning is too small. There’s more to our suffering than our guilt.

 Truly you are a hidden God (Pascal)

 Am I deluded in believing that in God the question shouted out by the wounds of the world has its answer?

 We are surrounded by death. As we walk through the grasslands of life it lurks everywhere. We live among the dead, until we join them

 How is faith to endure, O God, when you allow all this scraping and tearing on us? If you have not abandoned us, explain yourself…instead of hearing an answer we catch sight of God himself scraped and torn.

 Instead of explaining our suffering God shares it.

 In what respects do we mirror God? One answer rarely finds its way onto our list: in our suffering. Perhaps the thought is too appalling.

 Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted. Who then are the mourners? The mourners are those who have caught a glimpse of God’s new day, who ache with all their being for that day’s coming, and who break out into tears when confronted by its absence…. the mourners are aching visionaries.

 Suffering is a mystery as deep as any in our existence. Suffering keeps its face hid from each while making itself known to all.

 Suffering is for the loving. If I hadn’t loved him, there wouldn’t be this agony. In commanding us to love, God invites us to suffer.

 Suffering is down at the centre of things, deep down where the meaning is. But mystery remains. Why isn’t Love -without suffering the meaning of things? Why is suffering-Love the meaning?

 ‘Put your hand into my wounds’, said the risen Jesus to Thomas, ‘and you will know how I am’ The wounds of Christ are his identity. In my living, my son’s dying will not be the last word. But as I rise up, I bear the wounds of his death. My rising does not remove them. They mark me. If you want to know who I am, put your hand in.

 Suffering is the shout of ‘No’ by one’s whole existence to that over which one suffers…And sometimes when the cry is intense there emerges a radiance which seldom appears.

 Suddenly here he is again. The chain of suggestion can begin almost anywhere: a phrase heard in a lecture, an unpainted board on a house, a lamp-pole, a stone. Everything is charged with the potential of a reminder. There is no forgetting.

 Will I hear Eric say someday, really now I mean, ‘Hey Dad, I’m back’?

But remember I made all this and raised my son from the dead, so…

 At the end of the book, which is barely a hundred pages long, there is the text of a requiem, also very moving. The requiem begins with the awfulness of death; but at the end there is hope, ending with these final words:

 Behold I am making all things new. I am the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. (Revelation 21)