Telling Stories in the Dark: Finding Healing and Hope in Sharing our Sadness, Grief, Trauma, and Pain

More of a recommendation than a review (it's really a good book!)

I have a book I want to recommend to you, especially if you have known sadness, grief, trauma, and pain in your life which, now that I think about it, must include nearly every one of us.

Jeffrey Munroe’s new book Telling Stories in the Dark, which was released in January, takes on a difficult subject with sensitivity and insight. He manages to write about pain in what I found to be truly compelling and helpful ways. And as the reader discovers in the opening chapters, Jeff himself is no stranger to pain. (Full disclosure: Jeff is someone I came to know soon after moving to Holland, Michigan, in retirement, and I was honored to read chapters of his book as he was writing it.)

Early on, Jeff introduces the reader to the phrase “stewardship of pain,” a phrase he discovered by reading a Frederick Buechner essay on the subject. (Jeff’s earlier book, Reading Buechner, reveals that Jeff has spent a great deal of time reading and ruminating in the Buechner canon. I have too, but Jeff is clearly an authority on the subject.)

Why should we want to do anything at all with our pain, let alone act as stewards of it? The answer is that, left alone, or buried, or whatever we try to do with painful experiences in our lives, something about pain demands that we deal with it. As the Franciscan priest and writer Richard Rohr puts it, “If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it – usually to those closest to us: our family, our neighbors, our co-workers, and, invariably, the most vulnerable, our children.”

What Jeff does – his narrative arc, I suppose – is to tell several stories of sadness, grief, trauma, and pain, beginning with his own. Each chapter begins with a new story, people in Jeff’s life who have agreed to let him tell their stories. And then, those stories are followed by thoughtful reflections about those stories. Along the way, we meet Roger Nelson, a pastor in Illinois; Daniel Rooks, a clinical psychologist; Marilyn McEntyre, a scholar and an author; Mitch Kinsinger, a pastor in Minnesota; Mary Anderson, a therapist; Suzanne McDonald and Chuck DeGroat, both professors at Western Theological Seminary; Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, a poet; Sophie-Mathonnet-VanderWell, a retired pastor; Nicholas Wolterstorff, Yale University professor emeritus; as well as Makoto Fujimura, an artist.

Last month I attended a four-session course, based on the book, which Jeff taught for a lifelong learning academy connected to Hope College here in Holland, and the packed classroom, surprisingly enough, responded to Jeff’s stories with stories of their own. The people in that classroom found themselves able to talk, some for the first time, about their own experiences of pain. I must say that I found each session wrenching, but also remarkably hopeful and healing. In hindsight, what we did was to demonstrate and practice the “stewardship of pain.”

I know many of the subscribers to Doug’s Substack personally, and I remember stories we shared in my role as pastor – stories of pain and betrayal, tragedy and loss. And so, I recommend this book to you because it has been helpful to me. And to those subscribers I have never met, I suspect that you too will find this book useful. I hope we meet some day.

(My friend Jeff is the editor of the Reformed Journal, an online publication which explores issues of faith and life from “a generously Reformed perspective.” I first became a contributor to the Journal back in the early 1980s when it was a print publication and when no one dreamed that it would one day be available only in digital form. I not only recommend to you Jeff’s book, but also the Journal.)