Permission to Grieve
Lament as a Posture and Practice of Formation in a Culture of Denial
- Counseling, Grief & Mental Health
- Prayer & Spiritual Formation
- Publisher: Wipf and Stock
- Published: 2024
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Publisher's Description
Being a follower of Jesus in the evangelical community in America is equated to a posture, practice, and pursuit of triumphalism. Followers of Jesus have misunderstood, maybe even lost, the great value of public and private lament. Lament is incongruent with a theology of continual and ongoing triumphalism. Yet, suffering, loss, and lament permeate Scripture and the human experience. To lament is to cry out to God with our doubts and to bring complaints against God. It is a posture and practice of worship and surrender that helps followers of Jesus wrestle, engage, process, and understand loss, creating a sacred space for the suffering voice to speak. Lament is a practice absent in the church that is recognized and understood as a way of naming grief and suffering, of standing and hoping in the midst of ruins. In the context of San Francisco, the practice and theology of lament in the lives of those who follow Jesus becomes a parody of cultured syllogisms and hyper-vanquishing that forms a community frail to moments of liminality, anxious in seasons of uncertainty, and ill-equipped to deal with the obscurities of everyday life.
Endorsements (6)
“In Permission to Grieve, Toby Castle provides a practical resource for the church through the powerful communal practice of lament. This book is a helpful tool for ministry leaders as they facilitate ways for their congregations to actively respond to the suffering, injustices, and violence of our times.”
“When I was a child growing up in Baltimore, Maryland, I found an incredible amount of solace in reading Lamentations. I never fully understood why until reading Permission to Grieve. The biblical chapter made me feel less alone in my personal suffering and the suffering I witnessed all around me. As Toby Castle brilliantly argues, this is by design. I can only hope that pastors and church leadership across the nation open their hearts to this truth and roadmap. As he makes abundantly clear, the future of the American church depends on it.”
“Permission to Grieve is an act of radical love. In the same way that being a citizen of any nation requires active engagement, accountability, and thoughtful critique, so we have with the church. Here, Toby Castle dishes out his well-documented observations with a healthy serving of solution. He takes care to carve a path forward. What an absolutely generous and insightful read.”
“Forget the façade; grief and suffering are normal parts of the human experience. Being genuinely spiritual in the American Evangelical Christian tradition and being genuinely human are not mutually exclusive pursuits. To pull them apart is to pull apart what God has put together. Toby Castle exposes a flaw in American Evangelicalism, where notions of triumphalism and exceptionalism clash with Scripture and normalize a denialism that weakens both our faith and our witness.”
“Humans suffer. People experience and witness difficult, exhausting, and painful events. These are part of the human condition. Evangelical churches and pastors too often numb the tragedies of life with cliches which, though well intentioned, ultimately do not ring true. Toby Castle invites us to encounter the events that break our hearts, to even embrace these events, recognizing that God meets us right at the center of our aches. Allow this book to give you the freedom to be venerable and to experience the presence of God in all of life.”
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