Like many teenagers who had a lovely upbringing in a safe suburb with kind parents and many friends,

I was often miserable. I spent many evenings with my cassette Walkman, just the two of us,

listening to do me English music like Depeche Mode and thinking that no one else understood

or could possibly understand just how deep I was.

I specifically recall one of my friend's mums looking at my miserable face and saying,

cheer up, it might never happen, to which I responded, too late, it already has.

And I was so pleased with this response that I probably would have

smiled, had smiling not already become physically impossible for me. There is a kind of sadness or

melancholy which is delicious and addictive, which can make us feel special and yes, even superior

to others, a kind of misery that if we give ourselves over to it,

tips into self-indulgence and self-pity.

But you can also fall off the horse the other way.

You can mistake being chipper for being godly.

You can start to believe that Christians have no right to be sad

about anything, because everything will be okily dokily in the end. I'm afraid this poor theology

has infected many of our churches, and it's nowhere more obvious than in the songs we often sing.

Some songs have so little gravity that NASA could use them

to train astronauts in. It's not that we shouldn't sing songs of joy. Of course we should. But where are

the songs of lament? It can sometimes seem as if Christians don't have permission to be unhappy,

to have regrets, to feel broken, to express

deep sorrow, or to lament, which would have been used to the writers of scripture, the major

giveaway being that there is literally a book of the Bible called lamentation.

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