When Tears Sing The Art of Lament in Christian Community

William Blaine-Wallace writes with a prophet's eye, wisdom's soul, and a pastor's heart. When Tears Sing offers a poignant overture to lament and re-enter 'life-the-way-it-really-is' in order to reclaim who we are as a witnessing community still daring to imagine and create a future worth living. 

Grief as prayer, lament as communal contemplation: Bill Blaine-Wallace invites us to embrace rather than escape pain in this wise, quiet, arresting text. Written in a warm, lyrical voice made resonant by an authentic and hard-earned pastoral imagination, the text functions as both devotional reading and constructive theology. It provides a compelling vision of what church can be and how relational practices can take us there. Generative reading for skeptics, laity, and pastors alike. Recommended. 

When Tears Sing is at once scholarly and affectively devotional. Blaine-Wallace urges voices from many social positionalities -- racial, ethnic, sexual, gendered, and religious -- to speak for and among themselves in verse and through theological and psychological references. 

This slim volume represents a distillation of the author’s breadth of experience in hospice and parish, opening and cleansing the wound of grief with a clinician’s skill and a chaplain’s care. He presents us with an image of the church not as the fixer of problems, but as companion and community with the grieving, finding a common space in which to live and die—and rise.