Beth Allen Slevcove

The author begins the book by telling her own stories of loss. I found this to be the most interesting and instructive part of the book in many ways. She looks at several different types of loss, including the loss of innocence, the loss of one’s childhood home, the collapse of a business venture, the loss of physical health, and infertility. She has some beautiful things to say about the ways that grief colors one’s walk with God. For example, describing her six-year struggle to have a baby, Beth writes, “Slowly, subtly, I began distancing myself from my longings…and from the hurt this journey was creating. I did not want to keep waiting for a future yet to be determined. I also began distancing myself from the God who refused to answer the question I desperately wanted to know the answer to…” I appreciated the variety of experiences she considers under the heading of loss or grief. Understandably, however, the story that occupies much of her reflection on grief is the slow, excruciating death of her brother from brain cancer. Mark’s personality, and their wonderful sibling relationship, come through poignantly in the stories of both joyful and sorrowful times spent together. This is certainly a great strength of the book.

The second part broadens into her discoveries about grief both personally and as a spiritual director. The milieu of spiritual direction is not unfamiliar to me—as Beth describes it, its goal is “to help a person notice God’s presence more deeply in their life and circumstances”—though it is not a model I have gravitated toward in recent years. She offers some helpful insights throughout this section, such as the harmful consequences of minimizing grief, ways that grief is regarded as culturally inappropriate, and the point that we “don’t pray [Jesus] into a situation; he is already there.” I also liked her comment that things like failure, instability, and slowness “might be just what I need to let go of my constant compulsion to judge every moment of my unfolding story.” Especially when navigating a painful experience, we can’t always see the bigger picture.

The third part explores ways she has “engaged creatively in loss in order to make room for hope.” Some of these include encountering beauty in nature, serving the needy, creating a “sacred space” for prayer and remembrance, and making up a healing ritual. In the chapter on forgiveness, Beth writes, “At times I’ve needed to forgive God for allowing atrocities to tear into my life and the lives of those I love.” I think I understand what she is getting at from an emotional standpoint, but I found it to be unfortunately worded, because I don’t think there is anything scriptural about the idea of “forgiving God.”

She closes each chapter with a “prayer practice” that she has found helpful in journeying through loss, with the caveat that if they feel forced or contrived, the reader should feel free to skip over them. Some of these practices include taking a bath, throwing a tantrum at God, and the Ignatian practice of imagining oneself into a biblical scene. Certain ones, such as writing a prayer patterned after a psalm of lament, did seem potentially useful. But many I found to be insufficiently grounded in scripture, and that really sums up my reaction to the book as a whole.

Beth writes with such generous openness about painful experiences in her life that it is difficult to come away from this book without feeling as if I know her a little bit. She writes in the cadences of strong, godly women who have mentored me over the years. In fact, I’m sure I would enjoy having a cup of coffee with her—there are several areas in which I suspect we would find common ground. There is great tenderness in her discussion of losses of all kinds, and she doesn’t shy from the messiness of grief.

Yet, as the book went on, I grew less comfortable with the ways she recommends engaging with grief and the grounds on which she suggests approaching God. There is too much of a tendency to lean on our experience, seeking to read God’s presence back into it, with too little awareness of the ways that sin and the fall distort our affections. I would not say that this book is devoid of scripture, certainly. But I find that God’s promises to his people in Christ must be the explicit foundation of all our attempts to make meaning of suffering, the light by which we read our experiences—and I did not find that to be consistently the case throughout this book. Without this, however good our intentions, it is simply too easy to drift from a firm knowledge of God as he has revealed himself in his Word, and this has weighty implications for our prayer and practice. I suspect my discomfort stems from our being differently located along the evangelical spectrum, to an extent that slightly surprised me when I began reading a book from IVP. However, for this reason, I would recommend that this book be read with careful discernment, especially the final third of the book and the “prayer practices” appended to each chapter.… (más)