Simon P Stocks - Songs for Suffering: Praying the Psalms in Times of Trouble

There are times when I have felt unable to pray because of the pain or turmoil that I was going through. Bereavement, family breakdown, prolonged illness, betrayal by a friend... Im not alone in any of these. This is the normal stuff of life.

So I have written this book for anyone who is going through tough times, whatever form that takes. The book is intended simply to help you to pray. It is a book about finding a way through, when there does not appear to be one.

By praying I do not only mean asking God for help, though that surely is very significant in times of distress. But I have in mind the whole spectrum of ways of talking to God, whatever form that takes.

Perhaps you are praying already. Even the cry of O my God! can be a prayer, if it is meant that way. Its not a bad starting point. I want to help you to build on it and add to it, in a way that has real resonance with your situation.

Perhaps you are not praying yet. If thats the case, I want to encourage you to find your voice and express yourself to God. After all, thats prayer. No matter how you feel, you matter and your voice matters.

Most of the examples I will give will come from the book of Psalms, the prayer book of the Bible. This wonderful book has been passed down through the centuries by so many people of faith. It offers us the tried and tested means to pray in just about any situation imaginable. It offers us soaring hymns of praise, confessions, heartfelt pleas, and songs of thanksgiving. Most importantly for those who are suffering, it includes many prayers that express the full measure of human pain and need. These are known as psalms of lament.

The psalms have tremendously enriched my own prayers, and so I offer to you the wonderful ways in which they have helped me. Having said that, the language of the psalms can be alien to us, and I still find it difficult at times. Please dont be put off by that. The psalms can still offer us a model and a pattern of prayer, even if we dont use their exact words.

The psalms of lament tend to express the most extreme cases of suffering, which is what makes them usable in any situation, whether extreme or not. I have written this book in the same way, generally with the most serious situations in mind. It is intended, therefore, to be of use in any difficulty. Dont think Well, my situation isnt that bad. Every situation is bad enough for the people concerned, and the principles explained in this book will be relevant.

So I offer you the psalms and the ideas explored in this book so that you can make them your own. May you find deeper connection to God as you do so, even in the toughest of times.

There are times when we feel awful: bad, down, fed up, depressed, frustrated, despairing, wound up, hopeless. Call it what you will. Sometimes words failwe cant even begin to express how we feel. Or perhaps we can, but not in a form of words we would want anyone else to hear. Difficult, negative feelings can be very real and very strong. Sometimes I feel them eating me away from inside and threatening to extend outward, gradually tainting more and more of my life with their malignant presence. At other times they seem to be out there, hemming us in, holding us down, engulfing us and thwarting any attempt to avoid them.

So this is where we begin: in the reality of strong negative feelings, feelings that at least some of the time seem to have the upper hand over us. We are in the place that the psalmist refers to as the depths. Quite what this means is up to our imagination. It is a low place, very far down. To me it suggests darkness and loneliness, cut off from the light and life of those people and places we love. It suggests a sense of great loss, as we might say brought low, or perhaps put down. In the Bible it usually refers to deep water or the sea. In the psalms (69:2, 14; 130:1) it is a figurative description and implies being engulfed, in a place of great danger and threat to the psalmists well-being and security. In Isaiah 51:10 and Ezekiel 27:34 it refers literally to the depths of the sea, and this also has connotations of primitive chaos and evil, symbolizing everything that is contrary to Gods goodness in the created order of things.